“It’s beautiful,” she murmured, and standing here beside her, he agreed. The moon crowned her in starlight and cloaked her in magic. The stars faded in envy of her radiance. There truly was nothing—no one—more beautiful.
So why, then, was he filled with a sudden and harrowing sorrow?
“I’m sorry,” he said again, “about your mother.”
The words fell from him without warning, guilt gnawing at his caged heart.
She quirked her lips. “I thought of going back to look for her, but it’s obvious—”
“You can’t,” he said before she could finish. She grew still, a hunter in the wild, and his heart took command of itself, pounding between his ribs as if he were racing across rooftops. “You can’t leave.”
“Why not?” she asked carefully, and he dully realized what she’d been saying: But it’s obvious she’s dead. She had thought of going back. She wasn’t actually going to. Rimaal, and now her question hung between them, demanding an answer.
There were a thousand and one ways to answer, and so he chose the words he favored least. “We need to restore the hearts.”
She scoffed, because that was not the answer she wanted, either. The breeze toyed with her hair, and he wanted to tuck the wayward strands behind her ear. His fingers closed into a fist.
“I’m not going to leave. Not until we find Altair. Not until magic returns and the Lion is dead,” she said. “My sister is here, and my friend is safe. I’ve got no one else.”
You have me, he wanted to say.
She turned her head, as if she heard his unspoken words. The moonlight gave him glimpses of the emotions shifting in her eyes. Anger. Sorrow. Pain. It was the yearning that gave him hope. The obstinance that filled him with dread.
“My village is gone, my life upended.” She barked a laugh. “My mother’s dead, and I didn’t shed a single tear. That’s how heartless I’ve become.”
No. Nasir knew what it was like to be heartless, to steal souls and leave behind orphans and widows and demolished futures. Yet he had cried when his mother died her ruse of a death. He’d felt so much pain that he was surprised at the silence it had left behind, a deafening quiet that broke only when Zafira was near.
“Five years,” she said softly. “She hadn’t left our house in five years, but she suddenly found the strength to venture outside when death was certain.”
When one killed as much as he did, no single mission stood out among the rest. Nasir didn’t have the capacity to feel guilt or remorse for the killing of that woman or that son or that lover. It was a collective reminder marked by his every inhale: He breathed while someone else did not. He exhaled while another never would.
Until this.
This one death that he did not have a hand in, only that he didn’t stop it.
Why? she asked in the silence.
“Because she is your mother,” he said softly, and if she caught the strain of emotion in his tone, she did not speak of it.
She didn’t blame him for the vapors, and he would be a fool to convince her otherwise. She knew he was a killer, a murderer, the worst there was, and still she had chosen to see him as human. He would not test those limits. He closed his mouth, took a poker to his heart, and seared away the truth. The world wavered in his vision.
Zafira took one careful breath, two. “Was.”
“Tears aren’t a measure of heart. We grieve in different ways.” He looked to the palace and its grand lights. Being unable to cry didn’t make her heartless. “Family is hard not to care for, I’ve learned.”
He waited for the wave of self-loathing that followed his voice, but the silence was strangely comforting.
“Do you want to see him?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, knowing full well of whom she spoke. “Even—even if he never returns to the man he used to be.” Nasir had thoughts and theories about his father, but he voiced none. “But Altair first.”
If only Altair knew Nasir would do anything to get him back. If only he could tell Zafira he would do anything to right the crimes he had lived his life committing.
There was more he wanted to do, too. Now that he knew the truth, that the Lion of the Night had been slowly sinking his claws into the Sultan of Arawiya’s mind and soul for years, he had a burning, roiling need to put an end to it.
“And magic,” Zafira said.
“And magic,” he agreed, but only because of her. Because he knew, now, the price of magic and what it had done to his father, and his mother, and he didn’t care for the sorcery that had ruined his family.
But for her and for the wrongs he had done, he would see this mission to its end.
CHAPTER 13
Light through the almost-closed curtains striped the dining room like the bars of a prison cell as the desert heat stirred from its slumber. No one was happy to shun the early sun, but the High Circle’s secrecy wasn’t fueled by paranoia—when Zafira had peeked through the window of her room, she’d caught flashes of silver at every shadowed street and rooftop.
Zafira had never thought she’d see the Sultan’s Guard in person, their shiny cloaks like beacons in the browns and golds of the desert. She never thought she’d be the object of their pursuit, either. They were vigilant, Aya had warned, searching for the zumra and their quarry.
A ruckus echoed from outside as a street vendor bargained with a woman over fruits from his rolling cart. It was how Deen would argue, slipping the merchant extra coins afterward anyway. You have to pay them for the hassle.
“Eat,” Lana said from Zafira’s left on the fringed cloth spread out for the meal, pushing a plate of buttery harsha her way.
Kifah nodded beside her, the crate with the hearts between them. “You’ve got to keep your strength up.”
Aya watched the exchange with that strange dreamy smile of hers. “All of us do. In sustenance and unity, for we are stronger together. That was the basis of the High Circle. First, when it was a council of safin affairs under Benyamin and, later, when it was the smallest of armies under Altair.”
She looked away, jaw tightening with a memory.
Zafira didn’t know what compelled Lana to reach for Aya’s hand, but when she did, Aya turned her palm and laced their fingers. It was different, hearing about their bond through Lana’s lips and seeing it with her own eyes.
“Forgive me, my loves,” Aya said. Her eyes were wet, even as she gave Lana a tender smile. “Of all the losses I have endured, this … this is one I do not yet know how to conquer.”
“Perhaps it’s meant to be accepted,” Nasir reflected quietly. “Not everything requires a battle, least of all grief.”
Aya considered him. “Spoken as one who has endured.”
Roohi. That was what she had said last night.
Baba used to say it, too, and Umm would give him that one, fond smile she devoted to him.
Habibi. Hayati. Roohi.
My love, my life, my soul, the words meant, but their meanings went deeper than that.
Habibi was for friends and love that was real enough.
Hayati was when love became an all-encompassing thing. Deeper and deeper, until one became the other’s life.
Roohi was when a soul twined with its match and loved with the force of a thousand suns. When it slipped beneath the heart and tangled in the very fibers of an existence.