Like a veil from a crown, the sheerest silver gossamer fell over the low and ample bed, another arch at its fore, recessed and ornate. The sheets were made of starlight and dreams, darkness plentiful despite the gold of the afternoon stretching shapely rays through the decadent mashrabiya. She’d seen her fair share of the enclosed latticed balconies, but never one so intricate, many of the carvings fitted with stained glass that told a story itself.
Nasir was watching her. “He’s not here,” he said unnecessarily, in that voice that looped with the darkness and time spun once more.
She had missed this. Her fascination being a thing to witness with rapt attention.
A few steps away, he stopped again, and she knew. The ifrit who had stolen the face of Muzaffar was on the other side of this door. The newly appointed Caliph of Sarasin.
“History repeats itself,” he mused, lifting his hand to the latch.
The last time he was here, he had killed the mortal caliph. Everyone in Arawiya knew this, though Zafira couldn’t connect that faceless hashashin with the prince she knew now.
Was this time any better? Could they justify the caliph’s death simply because he bled different? Yes, she told herself. The ifrit were the reason Deen had died. The reason she had nearly died. Fury ignited her blood, sudden and bright. She would kill them all. She would end the Lion and then make the streets black with their blood.
A resounding shout reverberated in her skull.
NO!
She swayed and gripped Nasir’s arm, the taut bands of muscle flexing beneath her fingers.
Then the Jawarat stole her away.
Heady, intoxicating power crashed through her veins. Golden light shrouded her, attention scouring her exposed skin, silks against her limbs and jewels around her neck. She saw nothing. Only felt the sovereignty, the power, the superiority—something so foreign, she was lost to it.
We learned power from the women of old. A dominion so great it forged a kingdom.
The Sisters. In the Jawarat’s hazy vision, the Sister whom Zafira embodied sat upon a throne. Confidence dripped from her every shift, authority in her every word. Zafira saw, felt, heard, but she understood none of it.
The vision cut.
It was a desolate sort of darkness.
Plink, plink, plink. The metallic stench of blood flooded her senses. She was drowning, somehow, without water. Anguish and the complete loss of power. Helpless. Alone. It drained every drop of her spirit, and when she heard the cry that slipped from her mouth—Baba!—she knew in an instant where the Jawarat had taken her.
We learned vengeance from the boy of two bloods. A pain so deep it bred darkness and malice.
Haider. The boy who had become the Lion of the Night. She was a tangle of chaos and pain, clinging to the edge of a precipice, the border of sanity, until she discovered purpose, singular and bereft of morals: vengeance. It burned bright in her blood, the end slowly but surely disappearing from sight.
No sooner had she caught the pinprick of light at the end of the Lion’s memory, she was jerked into yet another vision. It was calmer, somehow. Less frantic, less disembodied, as Demenhur’s familiar cold stung her nostrils. Like a container upended by an eager child, the calm was ruined by a sense of failure. The pain that crowded her skull was edged not in darkness, but something else. It was almost as heady as the Sisters’ power. Almost as flooding as the Lion’s malice.
We learned compassion from a girl. A sentiment so profound it altered our spirit.
It was her. The Jawarat was connected to her in ways it had never been connected to the Sisters of Old or the Lion of the Night, a bond no one could understand. Zafira wasn’t powerful, she wasn’t immortal. She was just a girl trying to find her place in the world. A girl inundated with emotions she was trying to sort through. Pain, sorrow, desire—the Jawarat had been witness to it all.
“Why?” Zafira asked against the confusion caught in her throat, but she knew why.
The Jawarat had wanted a soul to shape to its will, someone to enact the chaos it had absorbed on Sharr, and who better than one pure of heart? When she had refused, it had taken to the Lion, unaware of his iron will. He eluded its control and in turn tried to control it. But hilya were like people, and his abuse did not sit well.
Something changed then, for the Jawarat had discovered it missed the one bound to it as much as she had missed it.
Then, in atonement, once they were reunited, it took her to the door of the man she hated and amplified her anger, provoking her until she cut him in two. It had expected her to be pleased, for this wasn’t senseless chaos like the vision it had shown her, it was justice.
How wrong it had been.
It had not expected to upend the girl. It did not expect to find her empty when she woke, isolation and pain stretching as barren as the Wastes, as unending.
Again, it tried to atone, this time with more hesitance and less violence, and she snuck away, intent on killing the Lion to earn back the trust of the zumra. To recover her soul, lost to time. It was along this journey that it mended the angry cuts of her heart, the pain and rage it had nestled in her veins. It found chaos without violence, in her moments with her gray-eyed prince, in her profound happiness and her desires for magic and justice and peace.
You must understand, bint Iskandar. We are of you as you are of us.
She had known that ever since the fateful moment on Sharr, when she had bound her life to it. “You used me, remember?”
For which we are sorry. We tried to atone, and still we were wrong.
That was the reason for its contemplation of late. For its contrition. For impelling her toward Nasir—because he made her happy, which in turn made it happy. It was chaos in a dose that pleased them both, and in this, it found a way to exist.
From you we have learned, and so we shall impart. Must an entire creed suffer for the sins of a few? Must the body be destroyed for the failings of an organ?
The ifrit. The Sarasins. Nasir was right: It was up to her to steer the Jawarat in a direction she chose.
She tucked the book away.
“What happened?” Nasir asked.
“Don’t kill him.”
Nasir frowned. “The plan—”
“Forget the plan, Nasir. This time, we do what’s right.”
He inhaled a careful breath, but before he could answer, the door swung open.
She froze at the sensation of eyes scouring her skin. For ifrit were not like men. They were shrewd in a way humans were not, swifter—and their foe was ready.
With a knife.
CHAPTER 87
The ifrit who had taken the form of Muzaffar moved quickly, his slender knife flashing in the light of a lantern set on the low table, but Nasir was no amateur. He swerved and parried, forcing the ifrit back into the room, and disarming him with ease. The knife clattered to the tile, the thin rug muffling nothing.
Nasir pressed his dagger to the caliph’s neck as Zafira entered and barred the door.
“The crown prince and the renowned Huntress,” the ifrit said, unperturbed by the blade. “At last.”
He was stocky and well built, an exact imitation of the dead merchant, but the differences were there for those who looked—the celerity of his movements, the intermittence of his breathing, the occasional flicker of him as a whole, as if it required effort to exhibit a human face.
“Is that you speaking,” Nasir hissed, surprised by his fluent Arawiyan, “or the Lion?”