The elder shrieked, loud enough to awaken every soul in Arawiya, and took to the air. It landed in the center of the battle, crushing a hashashin beneath its claws. A horrific stench tainted the air, dank and acrid, like burnt flesh.
It lashed out, toppling people who were too slow to leap out of the way. Moonlight flashed on the black steel of its claws, and Zafira shoved Lana away. She looked back at her sister but shouldn’t have.
She should have trusted Lana to stay safe.
An ifrit flung Zafira to the ground, stave poised to impale. Lana screamed, and terror gripped Zafira in a fist. She threw off the ifrit with a kick of her legs and rolled away from the lash of a stave.
She was on her knees when a shadow slanted over her, stretched by the moonlight. It was followed by a second, a third, and a fourth. Ifrit surrounded her. She turned and rose with careful stillness. Through her peripheral vision, she saw Lana too far away. She saw Kifah racing toward her, and dared to hope before a scream made the warrior look back to the Nine Elite.
Zafira understood with a sinking, resigned certainty. This was the moment in which their allyship had come to an end. This moment, when Kifah had to choose.
We hunt the flame, Kifah had said. They had hunted the light, found the good trapped in the stars tethered to the shadows. Who was to free them if the zumra was no longer together?
We are. Together or not, they fought the same battle. For Baba, for Deen, for Benyamin, for the sultan who once was. Zafira tightened her grip and stared at her foe. She remembered her oath: to die fighting. She remembered Umm’s words. Be as victorious as the name I have given you.
“Victorious until the end,” she whispered, and unleashed her arrow, knowing it was her last.
CHAPTER 58
There were moments before moments, in which the world was framed in startling clarity, a defined before hurtling toward a horrible after. Moments in which the powerful were powerless, in which promises became failings.
This was such a moment.
Nasir did not think Zafira saw Kifah running toward her after the briefest hesitation, or she would have waited before firing her last arrow. No—she had acted in defeat. She had opened her arms to the embrace of death, armed for one last fight.
He saw the arrow impale her chest. Heard the horrible rasp of her breath.
And his
soul rent
in half.
A shattering so great, he could not breathe for an eternal moment. It was then that he knew his soul had found its match. Bright, burning, gone.
Some word tore from him, foreign in its loudness, as if sound itself could stop and reverse time. He shoved people out of his path. The massive elder ifrit readied for another attack, and someone gripped Nasir by his middle and held him back. Forcing him to watch when he should have been there. To hold her. To stop them. To save her. He would give her his lungs if it meant she would breathe for him again.
What was the point of a throne and a crown and the power it wrought, if he was powerless?
“Let me go,” he shouted as the elder impaled the ground where Nasir almost stood. The force of it made something slip from his robes and fracture, pieces scattering across the stone. He snatched up as much of it as he could. The compass, silver and crimson. That small, insignificant trinket that had led him to her time and time again, gone. Like her.
“No,” Altair growled in his ear. Would that something as impossible as a mirage had become true, and still lay out of reach. “I’m not going to lose you both.”
Fair gazelle. Please don’t go.
“Please,” he whispered and begged. His compass. His queen. His life. “Don’t go.”
But death listened to no one, not even the Amir al-Maut. And Nasir watched as her butterfly wings fluttered once, and Zafira Iskandar fell to the ground, a silver star driving the light from his world.
His yesterdays and his tomorrows, gone just like that.
CHAPTER 59
To live was to swear the oath of death.
A cup from which every soul was destined to drink. So why, then, did it feel like she had been cheated? As if she had gambled away something precious?
The stone was hard. Her lungs dragged breath after stubborn breath. The arrow shaft protruded from her chest and she laughed bitterly at the irony. Dizziness rolled through her with a flood of pain, but she felt the cold embrace of death, a stillness in the chaos.
She would never apologize to Yasmine for failing her brother. Never again kiss Lana’s cheek. Never see a world of magic. Her last moments were recorded in a series of blinks: Kifah. Her bald head shining with the moon’s glow.
Blink.
The elder. Shrieking as it tore through Arawiya’s greats.
Blink.
The sky. Its endless stars glittering with prospect.
Then a sound: the broken voice of a sad, sad prince. A king, unthroned. It filled her with an ache worse than the arrow. She should have said the words when she had the chance, because she meant them. With every last fiber of her bleeding soul.
Her world went dark.
CHAPTER 60
The world bled black and white and bereft of color, the possibility of forever halved in a single strike. The elder roared, shadowy wings rising into the night. Perhaps it was Nasir’s sudden stillness or the telltale drop of his breathing, but Altair knew to release him and take a careful step back. Pain and anguish stirred into anger. His blades thrummed at his wrists, and the sounds of the battle faded.
He pulled the Jawarat from his robes and pressed it into Altair’s hands.
“Protect it,” he rasped, and sprinted forward, snatching a broken sword as he went. His vision blurred as he arced his blade across an ifrit and shoved a hashashin out of another’s path, for in this moment, they were allies still sworn to Ghameq.
Nasir swiped the dampness from his face, and when the elder swept its talons, he leaped atop its arm, charting his upward path. It shrieked in panic, flinging its hand. Nasir launched toward its head, narrowly missing another lash of its claws before he grabbed one of its horns. The elder teetered off balance. Nasir swung toward the second horn with a grit of his teeth, wrenching himself between them.
People screamed far below as Altair unlocked the courtyard gates. The Great Library windows flashed like dandan teeth in the moonlight, glancing off Nasir’s blade as he plunged it into the elder’s skull, a spray of blood coating his clothes, his hair, his face. The beast swayed. Nasir drove the sword into it again and again, and with one last howl, the elder collapsed in a heap.
The silence made him want to weep.
Nasir stepped from the creature’s head and dropped the sword with a clatter. A score of people stared. He did not need the sun to read their faces, to understand the troubled looks and the fear widening their eyes.
He had been the Amir al-Maut until she had come and torn the monster to shreds with sharp words and coy glimpses. It was only fitting that the Prince of Death had returned, now that she had been taken from him.
He’d had enough. He would let the Lion do as he willed. He would take her, bury her, and—
Seif stopped him. “He will not cease until every last one of us is dead. We must leave.”
“And let him have the throne?” an official from one caliphate or another asked. “Your kind has always left us to suffer.”
Seif turned, his scythes quick as snake tongues as he sliced an ifrit in three.
“I’m not in the mood, mortal. Confront him yourself if you wish. Die, if you’d like.”