Kifah broke the silence, shuffling forward and making him feel infinitely worse. “Zafira—”
“How?” she whispered, tugging the shawl from her neck as if it were a noose.
Her sister’s eyes widened in fear and anguish.
“Lana,” Zafira ground out, lifting her head, and Nasir was surprised by her anger. “How?”
“Okhti,” she whispered, gaze darting from Nasir to Kifah to Aya. “Not here—”
“Tell me.”
It wasn’t anger, Nasir realized. It was an attempt to hold herself together, to stop from falling apart. She held her shoulders tight, though he saw the ripple across them, the tremble that worsened as the heartbeats ticked on. He thought of closing the distance between them, reaching for her and rubbing the tension from her shoulders. That was what people did, wasn’t it?
Nasir gripped the crate tighter. He wouldn’t know—he was typically the one doling the killing strike, disappearing from the repercussions. Altair would know what to say and what to do, how to make her feel like living again.
“Do you remember when the Arz came back?” Lana asked. She shared Zafira’s delicate features, but where Zafira’s were sharpened by her colder coloring, the younger girl’s were warm, down to the bronze glint in her hair. “Right after you and Deen left.”
Nasir clenched his jaw at the mention of Deen. Zafira’s shoulders fell even lower.
“Soldiers started pouring into the streets, in black-and-silver uniforms, and … and masks. It … People stopped what they were doing. They couldn’t breathe, they collapsed in the middle of the street and choked until their lungs stopped working. I heard it. Saw it.” Her gaze flicked to Aya’s and back.
Nasir’s own lungs ceased to work as he pieced together the girl’s words.
“How is that possible?” Kifah breathed.
“It was a vapor,” Lana murmured, an edge to her voice. “It destroyed my entire village. I watched people die.”
Nasir had never detested anything as much as he detested himself in that moment. For though he had never had a hand in the vapor, in the fumes that had been harvested in Sarasin, his cowardice was to blame. His inability to stand against his father.
Kifah crouched beside Zafira. Aya strode to her, brushing a hand over Zafira’s hair. Lana held her hands.
Nasir remained where he was, the crate in his hands, the truth on his shoulders.
Because he had done it. He had killed Zafira’s mother.
CHAPTER 9
Zafira thought of her people, of the ones she had scorned for their jubilation, for their laughs and their glittering eyes when the snow hindered their lives as the Arz crept close. She thought of Bakdash’s lavender door. Of Araby’s sweet shop, and old Adib’s stall. Of the Empty Forest, where Deen chopped wood, and his little creations sprinkled throughout hers and the Ra’ads’ houses.
She thought of everything but Umm, anything to keep her alive a little while longer.
Black and silver, Lana had said. Sarasins.
Zafira remembered Benyamin’s warning, of the sultan turning to Demenhur once Sarasin was under his thumb. Arawiyans, just like everyone else, whose only crime was the soil their houses stood upon.
Ummi, Ummi, Ummi. With her cold blue eyes and her warm smile. With her strength and resilience. With Baba’s blood on her hands.
“And your mother,” Kifah prompted Lana gently from Zafira’s right. “Was she not able to escape with you?”
Lana crouched, and the wide hem of her jade abaya, one Zafira had never seen before, fanned around her. “She’s like you, Okhti. Laa, you’re like her.”
Zafira tried not to listen to the words. Tried to stop the pain.
“She went to the old schoolhouse. You know the one near our street? She took thirteen elders and six children and whatever food they could find, and helped barricade the windows and the door.” Lana dropped her gaze to her hands. “Then she went to the well for more water.”
That was the Umm Zafira remembered, with her head held high and her knife-grip sure. The Umm Lana was less acquainted with. In the pause that followed, Zafira realized she was waiting for Lana to say more. Like a child hoping the truth wasn’t so.
“Maybe she hid elsewhere.” Zafira would leave for the western villages. She was a daama da’ira, and she could find anything, anyone. “Maybe she’s still—”
Lana stopped her with a shake of her head. “Misk found her. She saved them at the cost of her life.”
Zafira caught on the word “found.” It was used in the way one spoke of a fledgling in the snow. The way one spoke of a lost purse that was discovered with all its coins spent.
“Yasmine?” she asked, something squeezing her ribs.
“Alive,” Lana said. “Safe. She’s in the Demenhune palace.”
Zafira’s relief was a heavy exhale everyone noted. The scrutiny was suddenly too much. The eyes trained on her, the sympathy clouding the room, the Jawarat’s silent regard. She shot to her feet and whirled to Aya, only to nearly crash into Nasir.
“I’m sorry.”
Confusion wrinkled her brow, more at the sorrow in his eyes than the words he spoke.
“Why?” she asked. “Did you have a hand in her death?”
He flinched.
He daama flinched. Zafira paused. If the vapors were the work of the sultan, had Nasir played a part? She halted her dark thoughts. Skies. He would have left Sultan’s Keep when she had left Demenhur. That meant he’d been preparing for his journey to Sharr, not planning the massacre of a village.
She dropped her gaze, annoyed and ashamed and hurting and everything at once.
“Come,” Aya said, knowing what she needed. “I’ll lead you to your room.”
CHAPTER 10
Nasir leaned against the smooth door of the room Aya had given him. It was ample space with rich decor, but the bed was simple and neat, lit by the moon streaming from the open window. He hadn’t realized how long he’d spent in close quarters with the others—cramped ship cabins excluded—until Aya had closed the door behind him and the air quivered with his breathing alone.
He undressed and folded his clothes before stepping into the tub with its lazy wafts of steam. As always, scrubbing himself clean reminded him of everything he hated about himself—the scars on his back, the wrongness of his life. There was another scar now, beside his collarbone, still slick from the salve Zafira had tended to him with. He leaned into the last of the bath’s warmth, remembering her fingers on his skin. The weight of her. The heat of her gaze unraveling him.
Her anguish now. The way her face fell when she understood the depths of his monstrosity, for he had done nothing to stop his father from harvesting the vapors that claimed her mother.
The clothes that had been left for him were his most garish: a deep burgundy qamis, dark robes edged in blue and silver. There was only one way these clothes could have gotten here, and he imagined Altair digging through his wardrobe, grinning like mad when he found this tucked in a corner. Nasir tugged the qamis over his head and hung his robes on the back of a chair. He straightened the books on the shelf and aligned the bowls on the table.
Standing here, so far from Sharr, so close to his father and the air still raw with Zafira’s pain, he felt lost. He didn’t know how to function without orders. How to act without being told.