“She’s a seer, and she knows Altair killed him. We can’t—we can’t let them meet. Not now.”
This, he didn’t know, and so he was silent. Zafira dropped her gaze to her hands. Every sound was amplified and thunderous. His sigh. The whisper of his limbs as he moved closer.
“Why didn’t you do it?” she asked finally. The fire in the hearth did nothing to warm the cold, cold hole in her heart.
His fingers flexed in his lap. “Do what?”
“Use your scimitar.”
She had mutilated three men and still had the impudence to be hurt by the sight of him armed against her.
“You were supposed to be with Lana. I didn’t expect it to be you.”
There was a pause before it, as if that small thoughtless space encapsulated what she had done.
She laughed. “You didn’t expect me to be a monster.”
Laa, that was too tame a word for what she was. Butcher. Monsters could be misunderstood. Butchers did one thing alone. Nasir said nothing.
“We can’t lie to people,” Zafira said, grappling for what little virtue she had left. “I have to answer for what I’ve done.”
“You will be stoned,” he said without preamble. “You will die.”
Outside, the sky was the darkest hue of periwinkle as the sun roused, pressing through the glass of her window. A limb for a limb, an eye for an eye.
“Tell me how it happened,” he said.
She lifted her head, surprised to see him so close, so intent. She’d told no one of the Jawarat’s vision. Of the fact that it had collected more than the Sisters’ memories on Sharr. What was one more secret in a sea of them? But this was Nasir, and she could not refuse him. Laa, she found it easy to remain true, to bare even the darkest parts of herself. He never judged her, he never pitied her. He understood.
He mistook her silence, or thought to console her as he breathed a whisper of a laugh. “There’s nothing wrong with a little bloodlust.”
She shook her head. If only.
“Your mother called me pure of heart,” she said softly. “The Sisters, when I stepped into the glade where I found the Jawarat, called me pure of heart, too.”
And more—their voices rose to her ears even now. Pure of heart. Dark of intent.
Had they known, in their infinite wisdom, that she would come to this?
“But when I fed my people, not once wishing for repayment, I was angry. I would look at someone and hate them for being happy. I would think of the caliph, and wish him dead so that women and girls wouldn’t have to suffer his bias. I would hunt in the Arz and crave its darkness, desire it because I thought it understood me. After it fell, despite knowing it would have killed us by the year’s end, I missed it.”
“Why?”
“Why what?” Hysteria crept into her voice. Skies, look at you. Sitting and discussing her internal state with Arawiya’s sultan as if he had nothing better to do.
“Why do you miss it?” he asked. “Because it shaped you in ways you never imagined? That does not make you a monster.”
“You don’t—”
“I know what it’s like to be a monster, fair gazelle,” he said tiredly. “And you are not one.”
“Is that what the others said when they saw me?” she asked, a wild strain to her voice.
“No, the others didn’t say that.”
No, but they would have thought it. She would have thought it, if she’d seen someone splitting a man in two in his own bedroom.
“The others are concerned,” he said, emphasizing the word to include himself. “That was not you, Zafira. This has nothing to do with wishing a man dead, because plenty of people do as much.”
His eyes fell to the little bedside table, and her own gaze followed, pulse quickening. On it, beside a tin of wrapped malban, was the Jawarat. The sight of it brought on a wave of guilt, strangely detached and not entirely hers—as if it belonged to the Jawarat. What reason would the book have to feel guilty? She had done what it wanted. It had fulfilled its chaotic desires.
If anything, it should be gleeful.
“It’s been speaking to me since I bound myself to it,” she said finally.
He was silent until she dared to look at him. “I assumed as much.”
“I thought—I thought I’d gained control of it. I thought we’d reached an understanding.”
An understanding. As if it were a person. Not a master playing her like a puppet.
“But I clearly hadn’t,” she finished lamely.
He nodded slowly. “Altair has finalized a plan, and we’ll be leaving soon. One of us can keep it with us.”
Yes. Keep it. She needed the freedom to regain her sanity, to remember who she was.
“You mean to take it away from me,” she whispered instead. Pressure was building in her chest, fear and loss overpowering. What is happening to me?
He paused at the stillness of her tone, gaze flicking to Lana and back to hers. “No one is going to take it—”
She cut him off with a vehement no.
It was hers. She wouldn’t give her clothes to someone else to wear. She couldn’t have had Lana wear her cloak while she went out on her hunts. She wouldn’t let Yasmine wear the ring Deen had given her. There was a difference. He didn’t understand. None of them did.
“No. And neither do you.”
Ever so slowly, Nasir leaned back, rose to his feet, and left—and it was only then that she realized she had said all of it aloud. Every last senseless ramble.
In the silence, Zafira dropped her face to her hands and muffled a scream.
“You’re awake,” Lana said sleepily as she sat up, clutching the blanket.
Zafira clenched her teeth. She wasn’t ready for yet another confrontation.
“They wouldn’t let me study the caliph,” her sister complained. “Isn’t it fascinating how bodies are filled to the brim with blood, yet our bones are pure and white?”
Oh.
“It wasn’t fair,” Lana continued as she slid off the bed and came to kneel by Zafira’s side. “After what he did to us—”
Laa, laa, laa. Lana wasn’t supposed to be fine with this.
“What, Lana?” Zafira demanded. “What did he do to deserve being murdered?”
“You’re the one who cut him in half,” Lana reminded her with a scrunch of her nose. “I’m helping you justify it. But look at it this way: He was going to die anyway. Now … he’ll be written into history with quite the creative death.”
Zafira lifted an eyebrow and regarded her tiny, murderous sister.
The gleam in Lana’s eyes faded to a look of contemplation. “He stunted the lives and futures of thousands of women, Okhti. You and Qismah found ways to endure, but the others? Anytime I was with Ammah Aya before—before everything happened, when she commanded men in the infirmaries and waited for no one, it was a reminder of how differently we’re raised here in Demenhur. And that’s the caliph’s fault.”
That didn’t make what Zafira had done any more right.
Lana helped her stand. “Yalla.”
“Lana,” Zafira whined as her sister dragged her to the antechamber.
“He’s dead. You’re still you. The rest is up to you to fix.”