Aya dropped the hatch and joined him on the rooftop. She had come from the infirmary, and blood stained her roughspun abaya, the pale brown ashen compared to her normal attire. He watched a falcon sweep behind a date palm and saw the gathering in the distance, where a man clad in black cried of the Arz’s disappearance with foreboding.
The hours were waning. He hadn’t realized bringing his father up to speed would require so much time, though it was likely because words were slow to find. There was much the sultan already knew, for he had been alert throughout the Lion’s control, and so Nasir filled him in on the events of Sharr and everything since, skirting the whereabouts of Zafira and Kifah, and the High Circle traversing Arawiya to restore the hearts.
“Where’s Lana?” Nasir asked.
“Still helping at the infirmary. I left to come see you, but she is safer there than here.”
Nasir snorted a breath, wondering how dangerous Aya thought the palace was if she left a young girl amid angry strangers who rioted on the streets.
When the riots broke out again today, a score of the Sultan’s Guard had run from the palace, and Nasir had frozen, half expecting an order from his father. Go. End this.
They had merely exchanged a glance.
If only the people knew rioting did nothing to the sultan. He had barely blinked. He had barely considered Nasir’s proposal to appoint that merchant in Sarasin, Muzaffar.
He pressed his eyes closed for a beat. Aya’s dubiety was bleeding into him, making him suspect his father’s every gesture. Making him wonder if the Lion was still there, mocking Nasir at a level more cruel than ever.
Because that was what the Lion had always done—mocked him out of hatred. Ridiculed him out of loathing. When he branded Nasir with the poker. When he carved out Kulsum’s tongue.
When he stole into Zafira’s rooms.
Aya drew closer. “Tell me what troubles you.”
He let the silence stretch until he couldn’t hold it anymore.
“I was the one she saw.” He paused. He didn’t say her name. Slants of light and shadow bled through the latticed screens, eight-pointed stars painting his skin. When he blinked, he saw her at the door to his room, mouth swollen, hair coming undone. He wondered if she had enjoyed it. Whatever it was. “When the Lion came for the Jawarat.”
“She told you this?”
He pursed his lips. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? She could barely look at me.”
And she had always looked at him. Even when she had called him a murderer. Even when he had pressed her against the column on Sharr and captured her mouth in his.
“From what I understand, that should be somewhat flattering, laa?”
Nasir scowled, ready to fling himself off the rooftop. “What are you getting at?”
“Why does it upset you?”
Aya touched a hand to his shoulder, and Nasir stiffened, feeling the thrum of his blade against the inside of his wrist.
“Because,” he said after a steadying breath. “She already sees me as a monster.”
Now she would see the Lion.
Aya considered him. “She does not see you as such. Nor does she see a boy to love her. You are her prince. It will not be long before your father’s reign falls, and you must pick up the shards of Arawiya as sultan.”
Her words settled on his shoulders. “I can make her my sultana.”
Aya’s laugh was like chimes in the gentlest wind. “Quite a heavy sacrifice to ask.”
That isn’t a sacrifice, he was about to say, but wasn’t he the one who had likened the palace to a cage? Laa, a tomb. It would be different with her in it.
“She can command,” he countered. She commanded him well enough. “She would live a life of luxury. Want for nothing.”
The words rang hollow, even to him.
“Spoken like a true royal,” Aya said with a detached smile. Then something caught her eye and she dashed to the left ledge, shawl fluttering. “Aha! They return! Oh, I must change.”
Nasir swallowed as she disappeared down the hatch. Three travelers waded through the crowds on the Sultan’s Road. Seif held the note Aya had left for them back at her house. Kifah sported the crooked half smile she usually did when she was thinking anything mildly humorous.
And there she was, the light in the darkness. Something bubbled up his chest and throat, squeezing the crevice that held his heart, thrumming faster. Her gaze drifted to the palace, and rose up, and up, and up. Crashed into his.
Empty. Her eyes were windows, and in them he saw loss.
CHAPTER 36
Zafira wanted to believe he had been waiting for her, but delusions were for dreamers. She’d gotten quite friendly with the wide mirror in their room in Alderamin, and equally annoyed with herself for even caring about how she looked, but being back in Sultan’s Keep meant she’d see Nasir, and seeing Nasir reminded her of the girl in the yellow shawl.
When he leaped his way down from the palace wall, dropping in a crouch and a stirring of sand, it was delusional to believe he made his way to them without once looking away from her, dressed in luxury only a prince could afford with an onyx-hilted dagger against his thigh and a scimitar sheathed at his hip. Armed, always armed. Inside and out. It was delusional to think he would let himself be seen without his mask, his gray eyes apologetic and rimmed in sleeplessness.
Because when he spoke, he didn’t look at her, he didn’t direct words at her, and it certainly felt like he spoke at her.
Still. Sweet snow below, the ache in her chest. The fervor in her blood.
She couldn’t care less that she was here, standing before the Sultan’s Palace, a place she had seen through Baba’s tales and never expected to witness herself.
The ornate gates swung inward, granting them entrance. Each of the guards swept a bow as Nasir passed. Zafira tried to ignore their scrutiny, at once insignificant and powerful. The path to the palace was set with interlacing stones that swelled and tapered like the scales on a marid’s tail, umber glittering gold. Under the watchful gaze of the stone lion fountain in the center, Nasir told them he had broken the sultan’s medallion.
“And you presumed it something to boast about?” Seif dismissed with no shortage of scorn. “Merely removing a chain while we were out there neck to neck with death?”
Zafira knew no one else understood Nasir’s pride. It wasn’t for what he’d done, but that he’d done it at all: Taken control. Acted of his own accord.
She opened her mouth, blood burning, but Kifah beat her to it, spear flashing in the early light.
“Enough,” Kifah snapped. “Did it work?” she asked Nasir, ever practical.
“I tho—I think—” Nasir stopped.
Seif scoffed. “You think.”
Zafira knew no one saw his bare flinch either. The world could be remade, but abuse could never be undone.
“He suspects we’ll use dum sihr to find the Lion, and he was not pleased. He’s forbidden it. The man I killed—”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
Nasir didn’t respond, and Zafira saw the exact moment when his mask fitted back into place. His back steeled, his jaw hardened. The Prince of Death.
“I’m hungry,” she said suddenly.
The tension snapped like a bowstring. Kifah snorted. The palace doors groaned open beyond the arched entrances.