The next thing she knew, she was propped against the carriage’s cushioned wall as Lana fussed over her bandages, something fine and sharp impaling her skin. Her body was scalding, but the cold wasn’t helping matters.
“I didn’t get to see anything,” Zafira groused groggily, awake enough to see that her words provoked a smile out of Yasmine, which she quickly masked away.
“I expected you to cry out,” Lana said tiredly, setting a bloody needle aside.
Zafira’s vision swam again. From a needle? “Do I look like a man?”
“You’re bleeding. Khara, this is why I wanted you to stay back and rest.”
“No cursing,” Zafira scolded, and then she blacked out.
* * *
A fire crackled in the hearth of the large room, white walls carved with lacework flourishes and adorned with silver, gray threading the deep blue furnishings. Arches shaped the windows, unlit sconces between them. It was nowhere near as grand as the Sultan’s Palace, but its beauty was less sinister, less cruel.
“You had a fever.”
Zafira looked at Yasmine, and Yasmine looked back.
“Even murderers get sick.”
“Serves them right,” Yasmine replied, but the words were weighted with disquiet, strangled and wrong. “Kifah. Is she … your friend?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“But not the sister of my heart,” Zafira said after a beat.
A startled, relieved laugh broke out of Yasmine, faltering between them as quickly as it had come, replaced by Deen with a bleeding chest. With a ring in his trembling hand. Acting out of love until his body released his soul.
Zafira held herself stiff, waiting for Yasmine to speak of Altair again. Or of Zafira being a murderer, Zafira not caring, Zafira dragging Deen to Sharr and burying him in its depths. She inhaled slowly, smoothing the ruptures inside her.
“I’m trying, Zafira,” Yasmine whispered.
She was, too. But it was as Nasir said: Not every grief needed conquering. Acceptance was a feat in itself.
“I’m trying to look at you and not see him. I can’t. It hurts, and I can’t.”
A knock sounded at the door, and a girl swept in with a tray. She set it on the low table and poured qahwa from a steaming dallah. Zafira refused the proffered cup with a slight shiver. She had avoided the bitter coffee and those handleless cups ever since Sharr.
“Bring her tea,” Yasmine said. “With mint, if you can.”
“Sayyida,” the servant replied with a slight dip of her head.
The girl left, and Yasmine stared down at the steam wafting from her cup. Zafira stared at her. The silence was a twisted thing between them with thorns and teeth, strange and foreign, and she wondered if they could ever return to what they once had.
She would try, though. It was what Deen would want, she told herself. It was what she wanted. She couldn’t lose them both. “How is Misk?”
The change was instant. Yasmine stiffened, a loose ribbon gone taut. Her fingers fluttered to her throat as she swallowed her qahwa.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” Zafira said slowly, less question than command.
Yasmine’s fingers curled around one another, nails digging into her unblemished skin.
“Yasmine,” she repeated, voice hard. “Where’s Misk?”
“We fought. He left.” She paused with a slant of her mouth. A snarl tangled in Zafira’s throat. He had left her—
“Or rather, I sent him away.”
Oh.
The servant returned, and Zafira gratefully gripped the warm cup of tea. Anger etched scores between Yasmine’s brows, sorrow shaped the bow of her lips. Still, Zafira waited. This was new, between them. The guard in Yasmine’s eyes. This uncertainty, this fear that a misstep would cause the silence to remain forever.
Zafira brushed her knuckles over the ache in her chest. If only wishes were things she could make real. If only pain were like lint on a shoulder, easily brushed away.
“Misk is a bookkeeper, I said. His pockets are lined with silver because the flour merchant’s men pay well.” Yasmine was trying to force anger into the words, but it had already worn away, agony in its place. “You know what I’ve always wanted.”
Zafira had known forever: a normal life. Her parents had been apothecaries in the army, her brother a soldier. The sister of her heart disappeared into the Arz every day. The same sister’s mother had murdered her own husband.
Misk promised what she had always dreamed of: simplicity.
Yasmine laughed without mirth. “It was all a lie. He came to Demenhur for you. To spy on me. To befriend me and learn about you, the Demenhune Hunter. I was supposed to be flattered that he fell in love with me along the way.”
Zafira froze, remembering what Benyamin had said on Sharr. Misk was one of his spiders—one of Altair’s spiders. Still, she held her tongue; the last thing Yasmine needed was to think Zafira had known about Misk before then.
“He could have been a murderer, a cutthroat, the worst of the worst, and I wouldn’t have cared, if only he’d give me his truths,” Yasmine murmured.
Because lies were what had thrived in the relationship between Yasmine’s parents. Zafira had seen proof of it, when Yasmine’s mother would come to their house, tears charting paths down her cheeks.
“Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe it was a secret he had to keep,” Zafira ventured. Guilt churned through her afresh. Was this, too, her fault in a way?
Yasmine stiffened, and Zafira knew it was the wrong thing to say.
“Am I incapable of keeping a secret?” Yasmine asked. “Did I not hold yours for years? Had it been mine, I would have told him long before our wedding vows.”
Zafira kept every movement of hers slow and careful, even her nod.
Yasmine drew her lower lip into her mouth, and Zafira wished she could hold her. She wished her friend didn’t feel the need to steel her spine before her.
“I don’t doubt that he loves me,” Yasmine continued. “He’s kind, and he’s good, and I might be overreacting—this might be the only secret he will ever have, but I’ve lost enough to lose my heart twice. What if it does happen again? What if there are more secrets and a child between us?” Her voice went quiet. “I was too young. I am too young. So eager to call myself a woman, when I’m only a child myself.”
A month. That was how long it had taken for a secret to tear the newlywed couple apart. Yasmine was too young. Zafira remembered the wedding, an ethereal moment suspended in time. The intensity in Misk’s eyes, and the words he spoke to her. Most of all, she remembered envying the man taking her friend away from her.
“Wretched” was too small a word to describe how Zafira felt.
“That’s not you talking,” she said. “You’re Yasmine Ra’ad. The girl without rue.”
The last Ra’ad left. Zafira’s fingers closed around the ring at her neck. Yasmine’s eyes, wet and still cautious, followed.
“People change when they pick themselves up and piece themselves together again. Look at you—you’ve shattered so many times, I barely recognize you anymore.”
Yasmine downed the rest of her qahwa, the thud of her cup a decree in the silence. She was still angry. Angry and in pain.