Zafira approached him stiltedly, for he was shameless and unclothed, his robes stretched to dry a little farther inland, where the sand was dry. The heart had darkened even more since they had begun their journey. It throbbed achingly slow, a deafening stretch of nothingness between each dying beat.
“It can’t die,” she said. Something pricked in her eyes, and Seif looked at her as if she’d lost her mind, but she shook her head. “It can’t die. Not after everything we went through to find it and the other hearts. Not when it will leave us without magic forever.”
Kifah shoved her spear into the wet sand. “Until the heart dies, it’s still alive. Now yalla, immortal. You’ve a minaret to find, and we, Huntress”—Kifah jabbed her spear in Zafira’s direction—“have some blood to hunt.”
* * *
Zafira welcomed the heat of the sun on her soaked clothes. The way it ran its fingers up her back, making her arch into its warmth. It reminded her of another touch, of another delicious heat she craved.
Was it wrong to coerce herself into believing it was him in her room? His words bold. His lips on her neck. His hand at her thigh. His, not the Lion’s. Was it wrong to remove herself from everything afterward, from the girl in the yellow shawl, from his failure to deny what looked so painfully obvious?
That moment looped back through her mind again, when the door slid open. When he was staring passively at the girl, not at all the way he looked at Zafira. With enough heat in his gray gaze to rival the sun itself.
She growled, wanting to scream. Wanting to shove him to the ground and tear him apart with her hands and her nails and her mouth and her tongue.
The ground or your bed? Yasmine taunted in her head.
“Whoa there,” Kifah clucked, casting Zafira a look.
She smoothed a hand down the horse’s neck in apology. It was her turn on Seif’s steed, and she was surprised by how composed the beast had been despite nearly being hacked to death by angry sea monsters. Seif might have had a strong dislike for mortals, but he clearly had a way with animals.
The sand had given way to stone, clattering beneath the horse’s hooves. And then, soon enough, she caught sight of the wall. It was a towering structure of white, at least four times her height. Every so often, a massive archway was cut into the wall, sharp and shapely, an entrance to the caliphate many only dreamed of seeing.
“Only the Alder,” Kifah said with a snort.
Anger shot through Zafira, hot and fierce. She’d known of the wall, expressed irritation with it once, but then she was secluded in her own little village. It was different now that she’d seen more of Arawiya, knowing the mighty Alder safin cowed behind stone while neglecting all else.
“If you, too, had lived an eternity before iridescent shores, you would have erected such a wall,” Seif said, morose. “Anything to shroud those cursed trees.”
“So you wouldn’t have to see the Arz, or our suffering?” Zafira snapped.
Seif ignored her, as he tended to do. For she was a mortal with a fleeting life, and he was an immortal, a king in his own eyes. She felt a wave of pride, sitting on the horse and forcing him to look up at her with his still-damp robes and the heart in his hands.
The barren sand gave way to dry shrubs, and then a slow trickle of greenery, trees rising with thick, healthy trunks, stretching shadows cool and large enough for children to play. Jasmine bloomed like snow. Birds called from the trees, and a camel ambled with his brothers beyond the road. And she hadn’t even broached the walls of Alderamin yet.
“The safin are blessed,” Seif said. Something in his tone kept her lips from curling in disgust at his vanity as she swapped places with Kifah, handing her the reins when she dismounted the horse. “Vigor unmatched by any other. Agility, hearing. Age. When Arawiya was cursed, each caliphate’s suffering pertained to themselves. The snow lauded once a year in Demenhur became a perpetual curse. Pelusia, whose fields could nurture any seed, suffered a loss to her fertility.”
He stared ahead, to the wall. She could see details now, glittering sand stirring against it. Life shifting beyond the wide arches.
“There is nothing unique to Alderamin save us, the eternal ones as old as the land itself. Safin, by nature, are less fertile than man.” He paused, ruminating his next words. “We began to die out. Sickness spread across the caliphate. Death, unheard of except in war and battle, became common. We chose sequestration out of necessity. We faced more than the loss of magic forever: It was the annihilation of our race.”
Zafira was stunned into silence. Kifah exhaled in disbelief, proof that the lies Zafira had been taught were not limited to her village, her city, or even her caliphate.
All of Arawiya believed that the safin had quarantined themselves within their walls out of vanity and selfish self-preservation. It was self-preservation, but not of the careless kind. Not because they were hoarding their resources.
It was because they had no choice.
They suffered alone. Quiet and brave. It was easy to believe that anyone who did not speak of suffering did not suffer.
Like Lana. Like her prince with ashes in his eyes.
“Why did you let the kingdom believe otherwise?” Kifah asked.
“And admit defeat?” Seif asked as if she had suggested murder.
Kifah, who had been concerned and awaiting a dire response, rolled her eyes. Zafira laughed, and she was surprised by the hint of a smile lifting a corner of Seif’s mouth.
CHAPTER 29
It was both a gift and a curse, to feel as deeply as she did. To see Alderamin in the lucidity of a dreamwalk was entirely different from seeing it in person. To believe that the realness would not affect her was a mistake on her part.
A sore, sore mistake.
The outskirts of the caliphate were as grand as the capital itself. It was the beauty of Sultan’s Keep tenfold. Like in the dreamwalk, she couldn’t shake off the feeling of it being more alive than anywhere else. The pulse of life was everywhere, from the spiny-tailed lizards darting up the date palms to the children shouting and laughing as they chased one another beneath an arch, circling back from the ledge of a low roof to leap into a blue-green pool of water. From the colors of the clothes on the backs of men to the medley of shawls suspended across zigzagging ropes swaying in the gentle breeze.
As much as she had scowled and groused over the safin tucked away within their walls, she had to admit the miscellany of people was greater than elsewhere. In Demenhur, the sight of anyone a shade darker than the snow-cursed made everyone stop and stare. In Sarasin, safin were rare, if not impossible, to encounter. In Alderamin, Pelusian and safin walked side by side. A Demenhune stepped through her bright green door with her Zaramese husband.
It wasn’t that safin weren’t welcome elsewhere. They simply had no reason to live anywhere but their perfect haven of Alderamin. Unlike everyone else, who believed Alderamin was where they’d find the life Arawiya had once provided freely and equitably. They believed it enough to traverse the uncultivated Wastes for a chance to live here. Deen had seen proof, when he’d visited years ago.
Here was a sea of people with different shades of skin, different lilts to their tongue, different cadences that built the wholeness that was Arawiya.
And yet, despite the way the very ground seemed to live and breathe, Zafira felt strangely lonely. For a part of her had grown accustomed, she realized with some diffidence, to observing the world in awe and being observed in turn.