The door swung open.
She shoved her tingling hand beneath her thigh. Nasir pressed a hand to his lips and stared at his fingers.
“Why am I never invited to such things?” a boisterous voice asked, and Zafira’s disappointment at the interruption was replaced with a different kind of elation.
Altair swept inside, carrying a bundle wrapped in an ivory cloth. He was clean now, scrubbed free of the terrible bloody tears that had streaked his face. A neat patch of deep crimson threaded with gold covered his eye, matching the turban carefully styled around his head. Only he could procure something so extravagant so quickly.
She thought of him turning away, standing at the Lion’s side. How well he’d looked then, only a day before he had lost his eye. What had changed within so short a time?
“Why is it you can never knock?” Nasir asked, clearing a rasp from his throat.
Altair peered at him. “Why? Were you busy? You don’t look like you were busy.”
The insinuation rang clear in his voice, and the feathering in Nasir’s turned neck made her pulse quicken. Touch me, that vein whispered.
She swallowed thickly as Altair crouched and frowned at her empty cup. “Nice of you to join us in the world of the living, Huntress.”
“I could say the same of you,” she replied. Questions rose to her tongue. Why did you leave us? What happened?
His eye was bright as it swept her face, his smile warm, and Zafira wondered if he had gotten that dimple from his mother or father. “I knew you’d miss me.”
And she had, so very much. She’d thought it odd, at first, that she could miss them when she had finally reunited with Yasmine, but it seemed that delicate, mortal hearts were strange and vast.
Riddled with guilt, too. Within the very walls of this palace, Yasmine nurtured hatred for her brother’s killer, yet here Zafira was, filled to the brim with relief that he was safe.
Skies, Yasmine. Altair.
How was it that they had lived leagues apart for decades and now, when anger and pain and vengeance burned in the sister of her heart’s veins, the object of that vehemence was only a hall away? As if she didn’t have enough to do, now Zafira needed to ensure the two of them did not meet. That their paths remained uncrossed.
She could imagine Yasmine in all her tiny glory scrambling atop him with murder and rage while Altair went slack-jawed at her beauty. He would apologize, she knew, but it wouldn’t be enough. No amount of apologizing could bring back Deen and mend the hole in Yasmine’s heart.
Only time could do that.
“I’m sorry about Aya,” Zafira said softly. Altair’s face fell, his eye ghosted by weariness. He and Benyamin had been close; it only made sense that Aya had been his friend, too.
If Zafira had been willing to live the rest of her life with Aya’s blood on her hands, would any of this have happened?
Kifah stepped inside and slammed the door closed, looking among them. “Oi, is there a reason we’re all loitering in something we probably don’t need to be loitering in?”
All three of them looked up. Kifah repeated her question with a silent lift of her brows. Her head was freshly shaved, scalp bright.
“We’re a zumra. We hunted the flame together, found the light in the darkness, but we were far from done, laa? Now we unleash it. We free the stars, shatter the darkness holding us captive, and return the world to the splendor it once was.”
Zafira breathed deep, as if she could somehow ingest the hope of her words. Had Kifah decided not to leave with her calipha?
“With a side of revenge, of course.”
Altair dipped his head. “Spoken like a true qa’id.”
Kifah cast him a sidelong glance. “Did you just put me in a position above yours? You do know a qa’id commands a general, yes?”
Altair grinned, and Kifah groaned before he even opened his mouth.
“I have no qualms about putting women above me.”
Him and his strange double-edged sayings that she wished she could ask Yasmine about.
He turned to Zafira with a stern look and held out the bundle in his hands. “I thought you might want this back.”
He peeled off the ivory cloth, unveiling a tome bound in green leather. The Jawarat.
Her breath hitched. A wave of emotion rolled over her when she curled her fingers around it, remembering what it had last wanted of her. To kill the Lion. To rend him in two. She closed her eyes against the senseless savagery it had roused. Kifah looked displeased but said nothing. Nasir watched her.
They knew that the book had used her to speak, but how differently would they react if they knew the extent of its influence? Only Altair was blissfully unaware.
She set it in her lap as if she weren’t itching to hold it in her hands.
“I felt his pulse,” Zafira said in an effort to shift their attention. “The Lion’s.”
She thought of telling them about his memory, the stones striking his father to death, but couldn’t summon the words. It didn’t feel right. Laa, like her strange connection with the Jawarat, it made her fear how they would view her. More fearfully. As if she couldn’t be trusted.
And sweet snow, there was enough of that with Yasmine.
A thousand questions rose with Altair’s eyebrow in the silence. “You, dear Huntress, have come a long way from the innocent lamb I met on Sharr.”
The Jawarat hummed with the same thought. Skies, how empty she had been without it. She had missed it deeply, and she knew without a doubt that the Lion, with his newfound throne and newfound power, missed it, too.
For he would forever be a slave to that which he didn’t know.
We missed you, too.
“Even with everything he has now, he’ll still want it,” she said, running her fingers over the fiery mane. “The Jawarat’s knowledge is endless, and the Lion couldn’t possibly have gleaned even a fraction of it.”
We do not want him.
If a book could pout, the Jawarat did just that.
You were quite eager to leave, she thought in her head, not at all unsmugly.
For which we are sorry. We were wrong to have left you. To have forced you to an unwanted fate.
Zafira paused at its apology. It was bowing its head, yielding to her. And she, jaded as she was, was instantly wary.
The Jawarat sighed.
“He may seek it out at some point, but he’ll make use of the Great Library in the meantime,” Altair said.
Zafira had seen much of Arawiya due to this mission, but not the inside of the library her father once lauded. Alabaster floors, gleaming shelves stocked with scrolls upon scrolls arranged in a code only few knew. Librarians, those few were called. The scrolls had interested Baba less than the books, rare and treasured, for the process of binding them was no simple task.
He would have loved the Jawarat.
“Knowledge is his neighbor now that he’s king, but we might have something bigger to worry about. Baba dearest believes that magic must remain in the hands of the powerful. And by that, he means himself. He will destroy the hearts.”
The Lion was many things, but never wasteful. He would go for them nonetheless.
“He won’t prioritize them. They’re useless to us, and safe in the minarets,” Zafira contended. “There’s no reason to choose them over establishing the throne as word of his coronation spreads. He’ll want to be loved.” As his father once loved him. “And there’s no better time than now. Demenhur’s snows are melting, Pelusia’s soil is returning. The kingdom is returning to what it was, because of us, and he’s going to use that to his advantage. And then, with the people appeased and tolerant, he’ll make room for ifrit.”