A chorus rose in her veins when she gripped the knife Aya handed her, a barely contained excitement born from her bond with the Jawarat. But her hand shook with the weight of ten eyes boring into her, judging her. The tip of the knife meandered across her palm. Skies, couldn’t they leave? She opened her mouth, heat tight across her skin.
Then her insides screeched to a halt when a hand closed around the knife.
Nasir’s shadow draped over her, reassuring. He slid his palm beneath hers and brought the blade to her skin. Zafira forgot to breathe. Her heart forgot to beat.
She relaxed her hand, as every part of her longed to lift her gaze up to the gray abyss of his. To remember what it felt like to be assessed by him. Watched. Revered. Understood.
“Forgive me,” he said softly, and drew the knife across her palm with a flex of his wrist. She hissed at the sudden pain. Red swelled along the blade’s path.
She heard voices in the hall, but they were distant and muffled, dreamlike. Perhaps she was dreaming and not tearing at the seams. Seif came forward and carefully measured out three drops of si’lah blood into her palm, murmuring something she couldn’t catch, before he closed the vial and dropped it back against her chest.
The effect was instant.
Zafira swayed. A strange and sweeping cold rushed through her, a hundred things hurtling too fast and heavy to comprehend. Everything suddenly burned shinier, bolder, brighter. As if she had drunk something that had fermented too long. She was aware of every little piece of herself—the blood racing beneath her skin, pulsing at her fingers, throbbing at her neck, at her temple.
Power.
From somewhere far, far away, the Jawarat hummed in approval. She felt the cool press of it deep inside her. She felt full and free. She felt like herself. The wind from the open window tousled her hair, hurtling freely as a bird. If she closed her eyes, the looming trees of the Arz crowded around her, whispering limbs greeting her. She missed the whiz of her heart, pulling her in a direction she couldn’t see. She missed magic.
“Huntress?”
Zafira opened her eyes to startling clarity. Kifah and the others watched her warily. In her mind’s eye, she saw Altair’s grin. She saw the bloody mass of the final si’lah heart, beating faintly.
She smiled. “Follow me.”
CHAPTER 37
Nasir had devised a thousand ways to express his apology, and instead he’d held her hand in his and cut her daama open. Sultan’s teeth, he was pathetic.
Don’t steal my curses, princeling.
I’m the prince, Altair. I’ll do as I like.
Despite his preference for working alone, Nasir wasn’t fond of their plan. Particularly the portion where Zafira would be on her own as she searched for the heart while he searched for Altair and forbidden magic blasted through her veins. They didn’t know if the Lion would be there, but there was every likelihood he would be, since Zafira had confirmed both the heart and Altair were in one place.
She had only addressed his protests icily. “Do you truly believe you’re a better match for the Lion than I am?”
In one fell swoop, he had successfully ruined the fragile peace he’d nurtured between them only heartbeats ago. One day, he would learn not to voice concerns about her safety when she was adamant about getting herself killed.
“No, I … Just remain on guard.” He bit his tongue the moment the words left his mouth. Perhaps it was time to begin life as a mime.
“Yes, your highness,” Zafira had seethed as they left the palace.
Now, as dawn bled shades of blue across the sky and the remainder of the zumra traversed the streets, Nasir dropped to a flat, open rooftop and made the harrowing leap from the palace to the surrounding wall, a contingent of hashashins on his tail. If he could call anything his favorite, it was this: hurtling across air, with death mocking, taunting, reaching from all sides.
Sand stirred with the early risers, plumes of brown and gold painting the horizon. It clung to Nasir’s gloves and gritted his grip. Rooftop hatches swung wide as guards took over shifts, silver cloaks shimmering in the soft light.
He tracked Zafira and the others, once more awed by the way she moved as the Huntress. Light on her feet, fluid as the sands, alert as a gazelle. She came alive with magic. Nasir knew how much she loved it, how much she had risked for it, yet it was something else entirely to see how it transformed her. Strange, too, how the thing he hated was what she adored.
A sigh heaved out of him.
He’d thought her return from Alderamin would fill the emptiness her time away had wrought, but it was somehow worse, now, with her in reach. He felt everything more acutely—the way her gaze skimmed over him, bereft of something more. The way she deliberately chose to stand closer to Kifah, as if unsure he wanted her near. He wanted to speak to her, truly speak to her. Apologize. Force the words in his head into one straight line, unravel the knot in his tongue.
“At long last!” a man cried. “Our troubles have come to an end!”
Nasir lifted his eyebrows, peering over the side of the scalloped edging to the square.
“From deep suffering comes great triumph. The skies of Sarasin veer blue. The snows of Demenhur melt like sugar,” the man called, clad in black robes, and Nasir stared in disbelief as one uninterested listener became two enamored. A crowd filled the jumu’a, and the man stepped on a crate. “The curse the Sisters left upon us nears its end!”
Merchants set their carts down, and people gathered with baskets against their hips and basins by their feet. Did they not see the riots happening across these very streets? Did they not hear the winds whispering of the Lion?
I hope you die of thirst, Nasir thought, darting to the other end of the rooftop. The madman carried on with his drivel, echoing a nearby falcon. To his right stretched the Sultan’s Road. Below to his left, one row of cramped houses away from the gathering crowds, the zumra followed Zafira’s lead. Kifah’s spear glinted in the gloom. Seif and Aya flanked her, and Nasir wondered if they were unprepared—the five of them and a handful of hashashins against whatever stood between them and Altair.
Namely, the Lion.
“We can’t very well march against him,” Kifah had said.
“Nor are we going to tell the sultan,” Seif had commanded, leaving only this contingent of hashashins Nasir could order without his father’s knowledge.
As much as he wished he could tell his father, he saw no need. They couldn’t march against the Lion. Stealth was far more imperative, for not only were they trying to free Altair, but they needed to find the heart, too. The fifth si’lah heart. And if they had thought themselves capable of fighting the Lion on Sharr, they were still five strong now. Even if no one could replace Altair. Or Benyamin.
“How much farther?” he heard Kifah ask.
“If I knew, I’d chart a map for you,” Zafira replied.
Nasir smiled and signaled to the hashashins, the familiarity of his missions sinking into his limbs, only this time, he wasn’t following orders. He wasn’t following Zafira because he had to but because he wanted to, and that fed a different sort of power into his veins.
For Altair. He would brave the darkest of dens and the vilest of beasts if it meant hearing the fool’s laugh once more.
“Alia,” he called to one of the hashashins and signaled to the left. “Split across. The rest with me.”