At least, it was what he’d believed. Now the emptiness was gnawing through him, the loneliness a ball on a string he had swung far, far away, only for it to return in full force.
His one companion scuttled from a hole in the wall, looking for the scraps Altair usually left out.
“So kind of you to visit, Nasir, but I’m all out of food, you see,” he told the little rat as it went about in circles, searching for something that wasn’t. Akhh, Nasir to the bone.
The rat bolted with a squeak, and Altair stood as footsteps approached. The misshapen clay abode stank heavily of age, the corners of the room thick with cobwebs. It was battered and bruised and glaringly unsecure, yet the zumra still hadn’t found him.
If they’re looking for me, that is.
The Lion swept through the open doorway, followed by an ifrit with two bowls of shorba and warm flatbread. The food of peasants, not a shred of mutton in sight.
“Taken to talking to yourself?” the Lion asked as he sat on the cold, hard ground. The ifrit set down the food and left.
“Keeps the vocal cords young,” said Altair with a smile. He remained standing a beat longer before he lowered himself back to the floor. “I can take to singing, if you prefer.”
These were the moments that scared him. The ones in which his father sought his company for no reason other than companionship.
Moments that scared him because he enjoyed them. They carved new lenses through which the monster, cruel in his ambitions, became a man, curious and collected.
The Lion rarely touched the food he brought with him. It had given Altair pause at first, but if he kept fearing poison, he’d starve. A body like his didn’t maintain itself.
“You have my father’s eyes,” the Lion said.
Altair stopped with a piece of flatbread halfway to his mouth.
The Lion frowned as if he’d surprised himself, too. “I sometimes forget his face. Events, too. With the odd recollection that they were … pivotal somehow. Time has stifled the memories.”
Whatever the Lion believed had stifled his memories was not time, and Altair could see it bothered him, enough to bring a haze of madness to his gaze. The same glint from when he’d spoken of vengeance, as if he wanted it with an all-encompassing need but couldn’t fathom why.
“You loved your father,” Altair observed, and lifted his arms, flashing his shackled wrists. “Mine keeps me in chains.”
The Lion smiled. “I can remove them. Take you from captive to son. Ally. We will carve our names upon history, and we, too, shall live forever.”
Heavy words to be spoken in the height of the day’s heat. How easy it would be, Altair thought, to shift the work of decades over to the side of his father. He would accomplish the same: a new Arawiya untainted by the Arz, unfettered by the curses that magic’s absence had left behind.
He finished his bowl and slid his father’s, still untouched, toward himself.
“I won’t let you go, Altair, and they will not come,” the Lion said with certainty. “If they triumph because of the road you set them upon, what makes you believe you will garner credit? I’m no seer, but even I know what will come of it.”
“Oh?” Altair said when he shouldn’t have. The walls rumbled with the thunder of passing horses somewhere out on the streets.
The Lion looked at him, strangely intent, as if his son were a puzzle he was close to solving. As if he had solved him during the handful of meals they’d shared.
“You will be forgotten.”
There were words that warped shields and slowed quick tongues. Knotted strings around fingers and made them tremble, one, two, three, ten. Twisted inhales so their exhales shook.
Words like these.
Altair set down his bowl with too sharp a thud, avoiding his father’s gaze. He smoothed his hands down his arms, bare and suddenly cold.
A question tumbled out of him: “Have you found the zumra?”
The Lion tilted his head, as he did whenever curiosity struck. “I’ve sent for a scroll in the palace. It details a spell that will emulate the Huntress’s affinity. Why?”
We, too, shall live forever.
Altair dropped his fists on the table between them. Dust sprang from the little crevices. He latched his eyes onto the Lion’s amber ones, curious and staid.
No, Baba. He would not be forgotten. Not so long as his lungs moiled away. He had spent far too much of his life working for exactly the opposite.
“Unshackle me,” he said with careful reflection, “and I’ll tell you where they are.”
CHAPTER 17
When Zafira was young, her fingers just long enough to wrap fully around the hilt of Baba’s jambiya, she had scrunched her nose and asked him why it was so plain and so old. She had walked with him and Umm to the sooq, where the men wore their jambiyas with pride. Hilts of polished stone or wood, studded with jewels, carved with care, each curved dagger fancier than the last.
“A blade is born to murder and to maim,” he had told her. “It reminds me of all I’ve done. Each deer I have gutted, each rabbit I have ended. Lives are not meant for thieving, my abal.”
“Will you give me my own blade?”
Umm had smiled. “Girls are not meant to wield the toys of men.”
Baba had disagreed. “My girl will wield weapons, and she will wield them well, for it takes a special kind of courage to hold power and know when not to use it.”
He had given her his dagger then, the leather hilt tattered from use. The blade, however, was still sharp. Enough to prick her finger when she drew it from its sheath.
To this day, she remembered Baba’s laugh. As if he were surprised to have made such a sound, as if all were right in the world.
“It likes you,” he had said afterward, and she remembered that, too. For she liked it back. Enough that she carried it with her everywhere. When she showered. When she helped Umm knead bread in the kitchen. When she began to hunt and feed her people.
When Baba had returned from the Arz.
She carried the Jawarat now as she used to carry that dagger, as she still carried that dagger, only it didn’t make her feel good, or brave, or right. It was a part of her. Being away from it troubled her as much as removing her cloak once did.
“Pure hearts aren’t meant to go on killing sprees,” Zafira said to it, and the reminder of Nasir refusing to give her the hearts stung afresh.
You reject us, bint Iskandar.
“No,” she said, pointedly. The Jawarat might have gleaned a near century of malevolence on Sharr, but those years had to be insignificant compared to the Sisters’ memories. “I will never hurt my people. I’m rejecting this chaos you crave. We’re bound to each other—what about what I want?”
Dusk was bleeding into the sky, the sun exhaling its final rays of warmth. Lana had returned, and despite the relief that heaved a trembling exhale out of her, Zafira refused to see her, petulance and anger demanding that her sister come to her first. The Jawarat only hummed that damning hum as it did whenever her emotions ran rampant and tempestuous.
She flipped Baba’s jambiya over in her hands. Could she really go so far as to forget her own people? To harm them? She thought of the gassing. Perhaps it was a small mercy, her village being gone, her people dead so they wouldn’t have to fear being split in half by the girl who once provided for them.