Zafira bit her cheek, seeing Aya’s hand in his. The look in her eyes.
“She’s gone, Lana. She joined the Lion.”
Lana made a sound, small and startled. A rabbit in a snare, hope vanishing in a strangled breath, silent and trembling for a long, long moment before angrily swiping a hand across her eyes and staring at her work, at her notes scrawled beside Aya’s neater ones.
Zafira reached for her, but Lana held stiff. The last of her blood. Zafira wouldn’t let the Lion take her away, too.
Lana shoved her little table aside, jerking to face her. “I’m a healer, Okhti. I’m—I’m—”
“You’re what?” Zafira asked softly.
“What if I become like her?” Her whisper cracked. “What if I become like her? It’s as you said, I—I want to kill people. I don’t know how, but I want them to die. I get angry.”
She stared at her hands. Zafira gripped her tight, shaking her head with vehemence.
“No,” Zafira vowed. “Emotions don’t define us. It’s what you do with them that’s important. You’re stronger than she is. Better. And you have me, do you understand? You will always have me.”
Lana said nothing, but Zafira knew her thoughts were elsewhere. Burrowing beneath her every moment with Aya, reliving them through a new light, another facet of a crystal crumbling in her hands.
Both of them looked up when a knock sounded, soft and inquisitive. Zafira’s chest became a drum, for there was only one person who knocked that way.
“Do you want to see him?” Lana whispered, swiping at her face again.
Him. As if she, too, had memorized the way he knocked.
“No.”
“Right,” Lana said with a shaky bark of a laugh. “Let me get it.”
When she opened the door, however, there wasn’t a sad prince framed in the pointed arch of the doorway, but two young women, one of them hefting a number of boxes stacked so high that Zafira could barely see her beneath them.
“What—”
The pair bustled past Lana, cheerful greetings lost in the rush, and dumped their packages on the already messy bed. The shorter of the two clapped her hands in excitement, the taller exhibiting a sterner countenance with a rosy smile that was complemented by her green shawl.
“You are to wear an abaya!” the shorter one said, her eyes streaked with kohl. The other nodded enthusiastically. The curtains stirred, the near-evening breeze joining the excitement.
“Am I?” Zafira asked dryly. “I was afraid I’d have to go naked.”
Both of them, and Lana, stopped to look at her. You’re terrible, Yasmine cackled in her head.
“Oh,” the shorter one said, her dark eyes wide. “We would never do something so—”
“It was a joke,” Zafira said.
The taller one canted her head. “You don’t look the funny type.”
Zafira gave them a tight smile.
The shorter one beamed. “I’m Sanya, by the way. You are very tall.”
“And quite broad,” the taller one said as Zafira mouthed the words with her. Some things never changed. “My name is Reem.”
They were here to get her and Lana ready for the evening’s festivities, a moment Zafira was dreading for more reasons than one. After downright commanding them to let her bathe on her own, she rushed out of the bath and they sat her down in a chair, chattering all the while. Lana knelt by her table and watched, arms tight around her legs, shaking her head with force when Zafira tried going to her. And then Zafira was lost in a whirl of brushes and ointments, her hair being tugged and her skin being rubbed while she stared at the scarring line in her palm, Lana slowly brightening as she watched the girls at work.
Zafira had never been tended to in such a way before, not even for Yasmine’s wedding, and her mind became a riot of sound and thought and memory. Altair and Aya and the Lion. Nasir, who was to choose a bride but wanted more than he could voice.
What do you want? She wanted to see Yasmine again. She wanted to relive the years in which she had pretended her mother did not exist. She wanted to taste the sweetness of Bakdash’s iced cream on her tongue.
There was more she wanted, too. Things that made her fear herself: death and vengeance and magic. Stolen kisses. The rare smile of a boy with sad eyes.
Death for the Lion. Vengeance for Baba. Magic for herself, for her people, for her kingdom. All fair desires, but it was the extent that she would go to get them that frightened her.
She was young, still. She would want for as long as she could, and then some. To want was to live, was it not?
Reem paused to tilt her head, birdlike. “You are pretty when you smile.”
She made it sound as if Zafira were a corpse otherwise. But the oddly detached observation reminded her of Aya, and her smile vanished as quickly as it had come.
The sun had begun its final descent when they slid a dress over her shoulders. The hem fell with a whisper, the fabric fine. Silky gray, edged in silver threads. She wrinkled her nose. Whose idea was it to dress her in ashes? She wouldn’t be surprised if it was the sultan’s.
When she looked up from the dress, all three girls were staring.
Lana’s eyes were wide, a slow smile transforming her face. “Not even the moon can compare.”
Sanya clapped her hands again. “You are exquisite.”
Reem nodded enthusiastically. “Come to the mirror.”
Zafira ducked her head as they dragged her to the wide glass. She started at her feet, slowly roving from the embroidered hem and up the pleated length to the intricately beaded collar, studs like pearls glistening in the sun’s fading light. Her arms were visible through the gossamer sleeves, the fabric fanning like the delicate wings of a butterfly when she moved. The neck wasn’t as plunging as she expected, thankfully. It was modest enough to keep both Deen’s ring and the vial from being too conspicuous, though low enough that the birthmark above her collarbone was in full view. She warmed, remembering the brush of a trembling mouth.
Remembering how little she saw of him now, even when they were in the same room.
Twin strokes colored her cheekbones, a metallic shimmer on her skin. Diluted carmine smeared her lips with the barest of stains, and her unbound hair was as bold as the deepest night. Reem swept kohl with a practiced hand, dark birds taking flight, and finished with a touch of perfume almost exactly like the oud-and-rose of her soap.
“The seamstress didn’t want a wide skirt,” Reem braved as Zafira adjusted the waistband of the matching, form-fitting pants. The dress had slits, invisible among the pleats, so she could run if she had to.
“Akhh, it’s incredible!” Lana looked more delighted than Zafira did.
Sanya crouched and strapped a sheath around Zafira’s leg.
She froze.
Reem looked anxious. “Sayyida?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Zafira said softly. “I don’t—”
Sanya nodded in the mirror. “The seamstress didn’t think you would want to go without it. She called you a gazelle.”
“But I don’t—”
“I see it now. Don’t you, Sanya?” Reem interrupted, canting her head in that birdlike way, oblivious to the ache of Zafira’s heart, the emptiness filling that sheath against her leg. “Innocent to the bone, even as she outruns the beast.”