She smoothed the paste onto Nasir’s skin, and he made a sound before he could stop himself.
“I should be relieved my father didn’t become a monster of his own accord. But … the villainy that took him whittled away at me, too. There’s no Lion controlling me. I became this.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a poet of the kill,” Zafira said softly, using his words. “Remain in the shadows and serve the light. Your father may never have control over his will again. You still do.”
His only response was the twist of his lips, as if what he had already said was enough to suffice a lifetime.
She changed the subject. “The others—”
“Will join us here.” He left no room for doubt.
He trusts Altair to stay alive. His brother. A safi who hid his identity. For what?
And why, when he had the chance to kill Altair, had the Lion held back?
“Why did you come to Sharr?”
She opened her mouth and he stopped her, a gleam in his eyes. “If you say ‘honor,’ I will draw my sword and you will fight me.”
Her eyes widened and something raced beneath her skin. She was fully aware of the way she was pressed against him. The way the insides of her thighs held him in place. The way his eyes roved her, as heavy as a touch. “What’s wrong with honor?”
“Nothing, except that an act done for honor is done for honor alone. Nothing else.”
“I don’t do what I do for anything else. What do you know of honor, anyway?”
The corners of his lips twitched upward. Almost sadly. “A true hashashin follows a creed. I’m nothing but a loyal lapdog. You, on the other hand, you may do what you do for the good of your people, but that’s not the only reason, is it?”
Zafira bit down on her tongue. She thought of the Arz, the moments before her hunts. When she stood in the face of death and uncertainty and rushed into it. When the darkness beckoned.
“The first time I visited the Arz, it was because we were starving,” she said. “I know I could have stolen a goat or lamb, but ‘thief’ doesn’t have the same ring as ‘hunter,’ does it?”
He shook his head quickly when he realized she was waiting for a response.
“After that, I went because I couldn’t stop. When you live a life of endless winter, where the snow drifts the same, where the trees stand the same, where your mother—where ‘methodical’ becomes a daama disease, you … gravitate. It gave me purpose. Because a life without purpose is no life at all.”
“And?” he said, leaning closer. His legs shifted beneath her.
She shook her head, stopping him. Thinking of the Lion folding his fingers as he listed his proof. She couldn’t be doing everything for the mere purpose of being loved. She couldn’t.
“I’ve never seen a face more open,” he said with a soft laugh before growing intent, stealing her breath. “You do it for them. For them to love you.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off.
“We’re so quick to dismiss the sentiment as weak, but hearts beat for love, don’t they? A life without purpose may be no life, but a life without love is nothing but an existence.”
She rubbed the backs of her knuckles across the ache in her chest. Something loosened, helping her breathe. He was right. The Lion was right, too. Nasir held her gaze, a strange look on his face.
Almost as if he had come to the same realization as she.
CHAPTER 75
Zafira smoothed the resin over his wound. It was nowhere near as potent as the black resin of Alderamin, but it would heal in its own time, without turning the skin black.
He must have sensed she was finished, because he grew still. “Huntress.”
“Back to titles, Prince?” Her whisper shook.
His voice was soft. “What are titles if not names, Zafira?”
Sweet snow, the sound of her name from his mouth. Something wicked darkened his irises, and it was so unlike the growling, grumpy, sad prince Zafira had come to know that her heart very nearly stopped.
He made a sound and lifted his palms to her thighs, and she couldn’t stop her gasp. She felt the heat of his hands so acutely that she nearly swayed. She drew her lower lip into her mouth, and something flickered in his hooded eyes as they swept her face.
“Fair gazelle,” he whispered. His touch seared her, and she relished the delicious chafe of her legs against his as she slid closer.
The imposing outcrop held its breath, the hush hush of the stream the only sound. She looked at him, oh so close. Near enough to touch. To run her finger down his scar, across the bow of his lips.
He swallowed. Looked away. His body thrummed beneath hers. His throat undulated, and she wondered how it would feel to press her lips to that pulse at his neck. Her heart pounded as fiercely as if she were running for her life. As if part of her wanted to get as far away as possible, while the other wanted him closer, closer.
Skies.
He clenched his jaw with a look of anguish and murmured something that sounded like that wretched splotch before lowering his head to her right collarbone, the one marred by her birthmark. His temple brushed the crook of her shoulder. The hiss of his breath branded her neck.
She felt the feather of his lips on her skin.
His breath rasped. Hers echoed.
She was the reason the stoic prince could hardly breathe. She was the reason his gray eyes glowed liquid black. Her chest crackled with embers when he lifted his tilted head and she leaned closer, sliding her palms beneath his parted robe and—
Someone cleared their throat.
Nasir pulled back with a growl, tearing his hands from her legs, and disappointment pinched Zafira’s skin. Deen, Deen, Deen, pulsed a reminder, but the rest of her was scorched by the fire in her belly.
The others had returned.
“Thank you, dear Huntress, for ensuring my prince was well cared for,” Altair wheezed.
He leaned against the outcrop and mopped sweat from his brow. There was a bloody gash on his forehead and a limp to his step as he tossed Zafira’s bow and quiver to her. His elongated ears stood out like a blossom in snow, and Zafira was struck with just how little she knew of him.
She moved away and tucked the salves, tins, and kit back into her satchel, trying to stop the quiver in her hands. Her neck was aflame as she rose to her feet, Nasir doing the same before closing his robes.
“Perhaps a little too well cared for?” Kifah asked, holding her right arm gingerly. She gripped her spear in the other, fierce as always.
Benyamin had merely lost his perfection: turban a mess, clothes rumpled, face smudged in soot—which for vain safin, Zafira supposed, was akin to losing an eye.
“We seem to have arrived at a most inopportune time,” Benyamin mused, and the sound of his voice made something in her snap.
She pushed past Nasir and grabbed the safi’s thobe, shoving him against the outcrop with a force that jarred her own teeth. She felt a flicker of remorse at his bewilderment, but she squashed it down at the sight of his tattoo. Almost identical to the Lion’s in style, except for the word itself.
“Trust, trust, trust,” she snarled. “So much spiel about trust, and you couldn’t tell us the daama Lion of the Night was alive? That he, of all creatures, was part of your circle of friends?”
“Is that you talking, Huntress? Or the darkness?” he murmured, feline eyes assessing.
“I ran away from the darkness. Did you not see?”
“No one can escape zill and zalaam,” he said softly. “Least of all the ones he loves.”
“But she’s right, safi,” Kifah interrupted, oddly calm. “You had more than one opportunity to tell us. Why didn’t you?”
Altair grasped Zafira’s shoulders and pulled her back. “I’m sure he has a sound reason.”
“Just as you have a reason for hiding the fact that you’re safin?” Zafira snapped, rounding on him.
“What I am has no relevance to this quest.” There was
an edge to Altair’s voice. Nasir watched him closely. “What I am has never had any relevance.”
Kifah steered them back to Benyamin. “Well?”
Altair angrily dabbed at his bleeding lip, strangely bitter.
Benyamin straightened his turban and released a shaky exhale. He clenched his jaw, and Zafira saw a waver in his pride before he collected himself. “It is not only my people’s cruelty that must be blamed for the Lion’s dark rise, but my own kindness, too. After he was shunned, ridiculed, and treated like filth, I brought him into my fold. I had sway. There were no caliphs and caliphas at the time, but my family’s eminence existed then, too. I gave the Lion a place in my circle of friends, taught him Safaitic, gave him access to texts few else had. Knowledge. There is nothing he loves more.
“My kindness arrived too late, for the damage was already done. Once he received what he required of me, he left, leaving two of my closest companions dead.”
Guilt swirled in his umber gaze. This was why Benyamin was here. He, too, wanted to rectify a wrong. But Zafira couldn’t bring herself to sympathize—even if she understood, now, why he had been unwilling to trust them. His reluctance was what had led them here, to this moment in time when everything seemed to be falling apart.
“Had you known your foe was the Lion of the Night, where would you have summoned the courage to go on?”
Kifah’s look of disgust mimicked how Zafira felt. She jabbed her spear into the sand. “Did you really have so little faith in us, Benyamin? You’re no better than he is.”
Benyamin looked away.
Altair drew his scimitars with a sigh. “There are better uses for our energy than fighting amongst ourselves. We need to rest and decide on our next course of action. We know the Lion won’t kill the Huntress, but he won’t be so discreet in his intent anymore.”
After Kifah murmured her agreement, Nasir led them to a gathering of trees farther ahead, where the stream continued. Altair brushed past him. Neither Sarasin acknowledged their newfound relationship. Zafira couldn’t blame them—she certainly didn’t want to acknowledge the way her blood raced beneath the prince’s touch. He’s a prince, she reminded herself. You’re nothing but a peasant with a bow.
The trees cast eerie shadows, and Zafira glimpsed amber eyes in every slant of the golden sunset. She still had no sense of direction, she realized. Her trip to the Lion’s lair had shaken her as much as Nasir’s lips at her collarbone, and the compass of her heart whizzed without end.
Benyamin was right. Her courage waned with the dim sunlight. If not even the Silver Witch could be free of the Lion, what chance did the zumra have in stopping him?
CHAPTER 76
Nasir was in no mood for resting, and it seemed no one else was, either. How could he, when he still felt the weight of her limbs and the buzz of her skin? The featherlight brush of her hair. It felt as though every emotion he had ever quelled over the years had decided now was the time to explode. Or implode.
First it was the black that bled from his fingers. Then the Lion of the Night. The poker. Altair.
And then it was her. That pale demon. His fair gazelle. His?
“You knew.”
The venom was so unlike Altair, Nasir looked at the general sharply.
“It was not my secret to tell,” Benyamin said carefully.
“Ah, yes,” Altair spat. “We certainly had a heart-to-heart before you arrived, safi.”
They stared at each other, Altair exhaling in angry huffs before he softened at the remorse on Benyamin’s face. Nasir did not understand a word they shared, but he was too tired to ask. He’d had enough revelations for one day—rimaal, enough for a lifetime.
When silence fell, he looked up again. Benyamin stared into the trees in contrition. Kifah massaged a balm onto her arm, foot tapping a beat against the stone. Zafira had folded into herself, knees to her chest, and all he could think of was her touch as she tended to his burn.
This was the zumra. The zumra he belonged to.
He was no longer here to kill the Huntress and take back that old tome. He was here to help her and the others. It was no longer about the book and magic—they needed to vanquish those amber eyes for good.
Free magic. Free Arawiya. Free his father.
A pained hiss broke him out of his thoughts. He turned to see Altair had rolled up the fabric of his pant leg, blood streaking his shin from a wound inflicted by the Lion’s ifrit. The general was struggling for his bag, opening his goatskin with bloody fingers.
His elongated ears stood foreign against his dark hair.
Nasir drew in a breath and cautiously made his way closer. He clenched his jaw and crouched beside Altair, the black of his coat settling behind him.
A monster couldn’t be free of his master if he never tried.
Altair choked and coughed at the same time. “I’m shocked, princeling.”
Nasir was, too.
“I was about to ask the Huntress for help. She seems to know her stuff.” Altair waggled his eyebrows, anger forgotten. Nasir glared and wordlessly took the goatskin from his bloody hands to refill by the stream.
Altair gritted his teeth as Nasir cleaned the wound and carefully wound the bandage around his leg, reciting three words to himself over and over again: He’s my brother.
Altair tilted his head as he regarded him, and it was the most insulting thing the man had ever done: dismantling the apathetic mask Nasir had taken years to perfect.
“You’re my brother,” Nasir said suddenly, and as Benyamin shifted his focus to them, he realized he was beyond phrasing his questions as assertions. “All this time and you didn’t think to say anything?”
“Half brother,” Altair said with a groan. “So half the time, I did think of saying something. The other half”—he seemed to ponder his next words—“I very much wanted to kill you. You are the reason our mother is gone.”
The words were a knife to Nasir’s stomach. A noose of letters around his throat. His pulse fluttered when a wisp of black unfurled from his fingers, and he bit his tongue, reining it in. Every day he breathed was a reminder of his mother’s death, but hearing the words from Altair was different. Worse.
He recalled Altair’s hands around his neck after Deen had died. “You had your chance to kill me.”
“I made an oath, or I would have killed you years ago,” Altair murmured, and Nasir did not doubt it.
“An oath,” Nasir repeated. He tightened the bandage, and Altair hissed again.
“Allegiance is my undoing, it seems. If Ghameq could keep an oath to her, I figured I could, too. He was a good man. Treated me like his own and never went back on his promise. Not once was I harmed. Until he sent me here with his son, who had orders to kill me. That, princeling, was the moment I knew Ghameq no longer lived inside the body of Arawiya’s sultan.”
Until the Lion. But Ghameq did live. Nasir had seen hints of the man he once was, even if fewer and fewer as the days progressed. When he had mentioned the sultana that day. When the palace cook made her favorite mahshi with an extra squeeze of lemon over the stuffed squash, just as she liked it. “What of your own fathe—”
“You’re my brother,” Altair said calmly, flexing his leg, “not my secret diary.”
Kifah looked between them, spear in hand. “I’m going to find us something to eat.”
Altair nodded at Nasir’s wound when she left. His voice was kinder than Nasir had ever heard. “Does it hurt?”
“Any more than the rest of them? No,” Nasir said, looking away. His gaze strayed to Zafira, lost in thought, ring clutched in her fist. “Do I need your secret diary to learn why you killed the Demenhune?”
Altair clenched his jaw and looked away.
“You didn’t mean to kill him, did you?” Nasir cast him a pitying look. Altair remained silent, and Nasir scoffed softly. “You weren’t even trying to kill Zafira.”
Altair’s lips twitched at the sound of Nasir saying her name before they dipped into a frown, his eye
s downcast. “There was a second ifrit that day, during our little skirmish. The one you killed to save me? It had been trailing us since we set foot on Sharr. The second one was trailing the Demenhune. It was … near her then, when I shot that arrow.”
Nasir never thought a ruthless general could be so pained over a single death.
“Then Deen leaped,” Altair continued, “and it was too late. He was a friend. His brother-in-law was, too.”
“So you decided that was the right moment to attack the ifrit?” Benyamin asked, finally asserting himself.
Altair slanted his mouth. “I was hoping to save them both. Kill two birds with one stone—get rid of the ifrit and, in the process, create enough chaos so that both of the Demenhune could escape, saving you, little brother, from another deathmark on your soul.” His tone softened. “Instead, I killed one and broke the other.”
A sob followed his words, and Nasir looked up sharply.
Zafira. He would have slain a thousand men to remove the raw anguish weeping in her eyes.
“He died because you can’t command an arrow,” she whispered to Altair. “Because you—” She bit her knuckles against another sob. “He died because of an accident.”
Her labored breathing was a boulder on Nasir’s shoulders. Altair couldn’t hide his own shattered face.
“If I could go back and put myself in his place, Huntress, I would,” Altair said finally. “If I could sell my arm to make him breathe again, I would. He did not deserve such a death.”
Nasir waited for her response. For her angry lash. The bite of her words. Anything beyond silence and the burn in her eyes as she looked between them.
She only turned away.
* * *
She needed time, Benyamin had said, and neither Nasir nor Altair went close. Selfish as he was, Nasir wondered what Deen had done to be loved so much.
Kifah returned and Altair, despite his wounded leg, leaped to help, grateful when the Pelusian didn’t ask what had transpired in her absence. Benyamin retreated into his book, guilt weighing his features.
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