Altair stiffened. He liked to think he was prepared for anything. This, however, was still a sorely sore spot. He loosed a laugh, one of the many at his disposal. “You want me to talk to you about feelings.”
The Lion’s eyes glowed and the ship rocked, the slow creak of swaying ropes haunting in the quiet. “If anyone can understand, it would be your father.”
“I’m flattered,” Altair drawled, rattling his chains. He had filled this place with light the first night, before he’d learned what the shackles were doing to him. “But this is no way to treat your son.”
The Lion only looked at him. “They left you, Altair.”
Altair pressed his lips together. He would not give him the satisfaction of a reply, but the Lion, like his son, was dedicated.
“Knowing I would be your only refuge.”
Altair didn’t need to close his eyes to see them running for the ship. Sand stirring behind them. Nasir. Zafira. Kifah. His mother, who had never loved him. Not once did they look for him.
Not as the distance grew between them.
Not as they lifted the anchor on Benyamin’s ship.
“They took what they needed and left the rest,” the Lion said in his voice of velvet darkness as Altair bit his tongue against a response. “Without a glance.”
Not even as he was forced to his knees, shadows knotting his throat.
“Even Benyamin’s corpse.”
Altair finally snapped. “I was there. I don’t need to relive it.”
The Lion did not smile. He did not gloat. No, he looked at Altair with sympathy, as if he understood his pain. Then he left him in the dark.
Altair dropped his feet to the floor, and his head in his hands.
CHAPTER 4
Death began with a rattle before dawn. It was soon deafening, the hold quivering so fiercely that Zafira’s teeth were in danger of falling out. The swaying lanterns showed her shadows that looked like the zumra stumbling to their deaths. The hearts, crumbling to dust.
She tossed the Jawarat into her satchel, gathered her arrows into her sling, and darted up the steps, nearly tripping on her way. It was almost as if she could think clearly only when the book wasn’t in her hands.
Zafira had spent the past three days thumbing its worn pages, struggling and failing to focus on the old Safaitic, which made her think the book didn’t want to be read. It wanted to be held, for its pages to be parted, for the swift curves and trailing i’jam dotting the letters to be seen. It was a notion she found herself able to understand, as absurd as it was for a book to want such a thing. As absurd as an object being able to speak.
And influence.
She wasn’t daft; the Jawarat’s whispers toyed with her, she knew, and the more she listened to discern what it wanted, the more dangerous her every action would become. It made her wary, for she held more than a bow in her hands now: not just the fate of an unlucky deer or a hare, but the future of Arawiya. The hearts that once belonged to the daama Sisters of Old.
The problem was, she couldn’t stop listening.
On deck, the rough Zaramese shouts weren’t heightened by chaos or fear, and when the vibrations ground to a stop, she frowned at the abundance of beaming faces and tired grins.
“What was that noise?” she asked over the wind.
“The anchor,” Nasir said distantly as she set eyes on the reason for it.
The hem of the sea wended lazily along an umber coast. Dunes billowed inland, sand painting the awakening horizon in strokes of gold that reminded her of Deen’s curls and Yasmine’s locks, ebbing and flowing with the breeze.
She swallowed a mix of fear and longing at the reminder of her friends. She wanted to see Yasmine, to tell her she was sorry she could not save her brother. To say she was sorry she didn’t love him enough. But as desperately as she wanted to see her again—and Umm and Lana—she couldn’t deny her trepidation.
“Sultan’s Keep. The city that belongs to none yet commands all,” Jinan announced.
Every Arawiyan child knew of Sultan’s Keep. They studied maps in school, history from papyrus. Before the Arz had emerged, a bustling harbor bordered the city and life unfolded from the shores—stalls topped by colorful fabrics, windows arching one after the other, minarets spearing the skies.
It was all there still, but duller and lifeless. Aside from the lazy falcon circling above, only ghosts lived here now.
“The people chose fear of the Arz over fear of the sultan,” Nasir explained.
Zafira could see it up ahead, life signified by the stir of sand far, far in the distance, where hazy minarets rose, the bustle of the day drifting on the breeze.
“It won’t be long before the population drifts back here,” Kifah said as the Silver Witch joined them. “Now that the Arz is gone.”
The Arz was indeed gone.
It had left disorder in its wake—brambles and twigs, rocks and carcasses. Barely a week had passed since Arawiya’s curse had lifted, but sand was already swallowing the remains of the forest. The dark trees were nowhere to be seen, almost as if they had retreated into the ground, Sharr’s claws—or perhaps the Lion’s—now gone.
“Not an animal in sight, Huntress,” Kifah teased. “I’m beginning to think you were a myth.”
“They would have fled inland,” said the Silver Witch.
Zafira had known the Arz was gone ever since they’d lifted the five hearts from within the great trees of Sharr. Ever since the Lion had stolen one and the zumra had fled, leaving Altair behind. Every forward surge of their ship had been a reminder that the Arz, that ever-encroaching tomb, that dark, untamable forest that had made Zafira who she was, had fallen.
Seeing its absence was different. The finality carved a hollow somewhere inside her. The knife of the Silver Witch’s words dug deeper, and she shivered at the stillness in the air. The change.
Who am I? she asked the sea. It whispered an answer she couldn’t comprehend, and she recalled another moment like this, when she had stood on the shore, amid smooth black stones.
She saw Yasmine in her pale blue dress, waving her off. Precious Lana, glued to her side. Misk nodding in farewell, a spy not one of them had thought to suspect and wouldn’t still, if Zafira hadn’t learned of it from Benyamin upon Sharr. The safi’s ominous words about Demenhur echoed in her thoughts. About the sultan eyeing Arawiya’s second-largest army and taking it under his control the way he had done in Sarasin.
“We should have gone to Demenhur first,” she said for the thousandth time as Nasir followed her to the longboat with the hearts, and because she didn’t want to sound as selfish as she felt, she added, “And sought the caliph’s aid. Who knows where the Lion is?”
She looked away from the little crate with a surge of guilt. Was it selfish to think of her family? To want to see if they were safe? Was it selfish to choose the restoration of the dying hearts over her family?
“He who pays the coin turns the wheel,” Jinan recited, “and Effendi Haadi’s instructions were to come here.”
He’s also dead, Zafira didn’t say. She stepped into the boat with a sigh, and every bit of her came alert when Nasir’s knee brushed hers as he settled across from her. Pull yourself together.
They were going to Sultan’s Keep, where people would bow at his feet and a crown would sit at his brow. There was death at his hip and darkness at his command.