Baba’s jambiya: gone.
It had been the last of it. The last peg holding the mysterious Hunter upright, for her bow had snapped more than once and her arrows never lasted more than a few days. Baba’s jambiya was her constant, the reminder that she was not meant to take the lives of her kills for granted. That she was but a traveler in this world, trying to leave her mark, trying to do what was right.
A sob broke out of her.
She thought of Nasir and couldn’t seem to care about the girl in the yellow shawl anymore. Laa, she missed him. His silent contemplation. His scarce words that were always precisely what she needed.
Unraveling—that was what Zafira was doing. She was a ball of thread slowly unspooling, and she was afraid nothing but a gaping emptiness would be left at the center of it. That same clawing nothingness that had struck with full force after magic had emptied from her veins.
Her father had died, and she had persevered. Her life had hardened, and she had powered onward, for she had purpose. What was she without the hunts that shaped her mornings and gave her that purpose? She had existed to help her people. To keep them alive, to sustain them. Care for them. Who was she without the arrows on her back and the cloak on her shoulders?
Empty, in a way she had never been. Alone, in a way she had never been.
When she had asked Nasir what he wanted, she was really only asking herself.
CHAPTER 35
At first light, Nasir was in the throne room, where the Sultan of Arawiya was seated and already dismissing emir after emir, austere and stony as if nothing had changed. Nasir would have convinced himself that the events of last night had been a dream, if the space where the medallion once hung wasn’t glaringly empty and if this morning he hadn’t seized open his bedside drawer, seen the antique circle—broken, unassuming, and real—and slipped it into his pocket.
Nasir had arrived with a single purpose: start afresh. He opened his mouth, determined to be the first for once, to ask after his father and how he felt, but when they were alone, all that came out was this: “Sultani.”
Not “Father.” Not “Baba.”
Something flickered in Ghameq’s gaze. “Ibni.”
Nasir expected to be happier, freer. Instead, he felt like a cornered animal, uncertainty caging him, for his father looked exactly as he had yesterday, exactly as he had weeks ago, months ago. And that meant looking into his face and reliving years of pain.
Perhaps worse than abuse was waking up to the fact. The realization, striking and unmooring, that the norm one had lived was not at all normal.
Ghameq’s face fell at what he saw. “You are early. Have you eaten?”
Eaten. A laugh broke out of him. His surprise must have been evident on his face, because the sultan’s face softened.
“Yes.” Nasir swallowed, shaped his next question as if it were a matter of life and death. “Have you?”
His father nodded. “We will dine together from here on out.”
I would like that, Nasir thought but couldn’t say as the braziers crackled beside the dais. He closed his mouth.
Ghameq smacked his lips, then reached for one of the missives by his side, waving it in the air. “The unrest continues. Tell me. What would you have me do?”
Again, shock gripped his tongue, for it wasn’t like Ghameq to humor him in conversation. To ask his son’s opinion. To need it—or Nasir himself.
“The taxes you have levied are far too high, and protestors grow bolder,” he ventured. And what’s your solution, fool? He scoured his mind. “Sarasin. They need a caliph. We can easily appease them by appointing someone like Muzaffar.”
“Who?”
Nasir blinked at his complete ignorance. “The merchant rising up in Sarasin since I left for Sharr. People like him. He’s well connected, and was village head a decade or so ago. Appoint him, and he may turn the caliphate around on his own, with minimal work from the crown.”
“Mmm,” Ghameq said, dismissing him with a smile, and Nasir found it difficult to feign one of his own. “I was freed by your hand only a short while ago. There is much to undo of the Lion’s. Time will allow us the victory we require, Ibni. Sarasin is a pit as it is, and the Lion himself is of greater concern than any tax.”
“Sultani,” Nasir said in appeasement, lowering his head. It seemed his insight hadn’t been required at all. True to form.
“It is why I am your father, isn’t it? To guide your hand. Have you any plans on how to find him?”
A bell sounded in Nasir’s skull. “We will find him,” he said carefully. “By whatever means necessary.”
The sultan studied him.
“I should not have to tell you to avoid the use of dum sihr. It has cost our family too much.”
Nasir shook his head quickly. Too quickly. This was his father. Trust was meant to be second nature.
“The Sisters forbade such acts. If we do this, what difference is there between us and the creature we seek to defeat?” Ghameq asked.
Blood magic was forbidden. The use of it did distort the line between them and the Lion. But there were plenty of differences between them and their foe, and the use of dum sihr didn’t negate that.
Still, morality was decidedly not a topic Nasir wanted to discuss with his father.
“Even if we planned to, dum sihr requires si’lah blood. Which we do not have,” Nasir said.
Ghameq grunted his agreement. The sound echoed relentlessly in the silence.
“Perhaps,” Nasir dared again, changing the subject, “we can call off the feast. For now. Until magic is restored and the Lion is no longer a threat. Do you … remember sending out the invitations?”
Where did that line end and begin? There were questions about events where his father would blink emptily and others from long before that he could recount word for word almost immediately. It left Nasir unable to decipher just how much Ghameq remembered from when he was under the Lion’s control over the years, for his memories were clearly unaffected by time.
“Two nights prior,” Ghameq said after a thought. “It is too late to stop them, unfortunately. Besides, we have more reason to celebrate now, do we not, Ibni?”
“Yes,” he ceded softly, fighting dismay. At least the dignitaries would no longer be walking into a trap.
“What of the Huntress?” Ghameq asked, looking down at the sheaves in his hand. “She has not come.”
He knows. A curl of darkness slipped from Nasir’s fingers. For whatever reason, trust was impossible to summon. But nor could he lie.
“I’ve angered her,” he admitted.
A half-truth was enough. Three words that held a multitude would suffice. For truth held emotion, and lies held deception. It was how one knew which to believe.
I miss her, was what he wanted to say. He was alone without her, a soul-deep desolation. Drifting in a world where no one really saw him.
Ghameq laughed, proof that not even the man who fathered him could see him, understand him, know with merely a glance. Perhaps Nasir had been too young the last time he’d heard that laugh, too smitten, too innocent and unburdened by death, but it sounded different now. Harsher. Sharper. Less happy and more calculating.
But people changed, didn’t they?
* * *
“You seem troubled, Prince.”