For a stricken moment, Zafira thought the Jawarat spoke of Nasir or Altair, but when the Lion dropped his hands, she caught the sheen of sweat on his brow. The fatigue.
Steal it.
But—the heart was inside his daama body.
The Jawarat laughed. When have we steered you wrong?
Zafira froze at its tone, the terrible beauty of that laugh. The reminder of what she had done with its voice in her mind, splitting a man in two as no mortal should be capable of doing.
The Lion watched her.
“Touching of your friends to run to your aid.” His gaze was intent. “Join me, azizi.”
Zafira scoffed. “Because you can’t kill me?”
“I won’t merely kill them,” he said, and from the corner of her eye, she saw Nasir using a whip of shadow to release the vise that had been crushing Kifah’s neck. “I will cut them open and string their innards together, as I did to the safin less than a fortnight ago. I will sever their heads to adorn the palace gates.”
“And then the people will love you?” Zafira asked, bile rising to her throat.
“Create enough fear, and the people will have no choice.”
His hand cut the air, and strands of shadow rippled toward her. Zafira threw up her arms, intent on protecting the Jawarat, but the shadows stopped before they reached her.
Caught in a shield of black that dissipated as quickly as it had come.
Nasir.
He extended his gauntlet blades as Altair and Kifah came up from behind. The Lion looked among the four of them and laughed, as if their weapons were playthings, as if they were as insignificant as the ground beneath his feet.
From the corners of the palace, ifrit stalked forward. More marched from beyond the palace gates, caging them in. The crackle of their staves echoed in the air. The dagger, the dagger, the dagger—she couldn’t wrest it free now. He would rip her arm from her body the moment she did. Their weapons were playthings.
The Lion half turned to watch his encroaching horde and froze with a sharp breath.
“Baba?”
Zafira stilled. That one word teemed with an eternity of pain, and for a long, confused stretch of time, no one moved. He made a sound between a whimper and a sob.
Now, bint Iskandar.
The Lion stumbled forward. A breathless sort of pity rooted her in place. Nasir looked to Altair. Kifah narrowed her eyes. Who was it he saw? Surely an ifrit would not toy with the leader who fought for their right to live.
The heart, the Jawarat insisted, and she ducked past Nasir and Altair until she saw what the Lion was seeing.
A safi with blue eyes as bright as Altair’s stepped close. It was the man Zafira had seen in the Jawarat’s vision, only not bloody, his body unbruised. His father. He was alive.
Impossible.
And if Zafira was seeing the same face he was, this was no ifrit. It was an illusion—laa, an apparition.
A cruel twist of fate.
There was only one person the Lion had wronged so deeply, so terribly that she could fathom doing the same to him. Only one person with the power to create an illusion so real, no one could tell the difference. The Silver Witch.
The safi continued walking slowly toward him, and Zafira understood that it was more than an apparition; it was a distraction, and she was standing around like a fool.
Zafira ran, tucking the Jawarat against her chest and using both hands to shove the Lion to the dusty hard stone. He fell with an oof beneath her.
He was cold. Startled. Afraid. His eyes were crazed, barely seeing.
Pity broke Zafira’s inhale.
No. Focus.
Her hands shook as she grabbed the lapels of his robes and wrenched them apart, exposing his chest. Now the Lion struggled. He fought against her, shadows pooling in his palms and fading into nothing when she brought the black dagger to his skin.
Panic paralyzed him.
Paralyzed her.
Tell me what to do, she begged the Jawarat.
Altair shouted, “Do it!”
The Lion’s gaze cleared.
She trembled in alarm, but the Jawarat steadied her hand.
And plunged the stolen black dagger through his chest.
The Lion sputtered. Zafira cried out.
Trust us, was all the book said, and the Lion froze, as if he heard the Jawarat’s command as loudly as she did. Down her palm was a line of blood, in her skull was a song. Her fingers tightened around the hilt.
And the dagger ripped downward, carving across him.
“This doesn’t belong to you,” she said, and took the beating heart out of his chest.
CHAPTER 95
Nasir saw Zafira slump over the Lion, and the darkness faded with the suddenness of a blade. Fear cut the air from his lungs. And then she rose with a heart in her fist, blood dripping down the length of her arm. The Lion tried to stand, but collapsed, panting as he struggled without magic, without a healer.
The black dagger was in his chest.
His blood stained the courtyard stone. He was dying.
The safi he called Baba continued to approach. Dark-haired and blue-eyed, aristocratic in a way much like the Lion. And changing—features shifting, figure curving, hair fading to stark white.
Recognition lurched in Nasir’s stomach.
It was his mother. Wronged by the Lion, wronged by the world. She had done as she’d vowed, and Nasir’s pride was fierce.
The Lion rasped a laugh. “That was cruel, Anadil. Even for you.”
He sounded sad, broken.
“You wronged me,” the Silver Witch lamented, and Nasir heard every last drop of pain in her words. “Far more than anyone ever will.”
“I loved you as no one ever did.”
Her mirthless laughter cracked. “You loved my power, as you claimed my Sisters had. You ruined me. Even in death they granted me a second chance.”
Remorse reshaped the Lion’s features. “No. Some part of me loved you, as you had loved me.”
A lie, Nasir thought in his bewildered state, but he trusted his mother. The Silver Witch knew the Lion more than any of them could imagine, and when she slowly knelt beside him, Nasir tried to ignore the warning bells as they tolled.
The Lion rolled his head to face her, and Nasir wondered how different life might have been if the Sisters hadn’t locked the ifrit away. If the safin hadn’t taken to pride so violently.
Perhaps, if Nasir hadn’t given in to wishful fantasy, he would have been ready when the Lion’s amber eyes flashed, an instant before he lunged.
And the Silver Witch screamed.
Nasir’s blood turned to ice, and he acted on instinct. On rage. On memory.
His mother screamed.
CHAPTER 96
Altair loved her as he did most things: even when they did not love him in return.
He’d had years to reflect, to try to understand his mother. When he was young, he’d wished she had never existed. When he was older, he’d been angry when she’d died. When he’d learned the truth upon Sharr, that she had fabricated her death, breaking the soul of the one son she loved so deeply, he’d felt, well, sad.
Power begets pain. She wasn’t a cruel mother, or an evil one. Rather, she was ill-equipped for motherhood, too mired in her own mistakes and failings and their recompense, and both he and Nasir had paid the price.
Still, she was his mother. He was her son. There were some bonds that remained no matter how they were tested.
You’ve a heart of gold, she had once said.
Is that why it weighs so heavily? he had replied.