“Surely she can go a little farther,” Zafira said, aware she whined like a child. “We left before noon.”
His gaze flicked to her and back to the road. “The later it gets, the less likely we are to find rooms.”
“I can sleep outside.”
“I thought you wanted to kill the Lion, not deliver him your corpse,” said Nasir, as apathetic as he had been on Sharr. “We need to change your bandages and find you a bed.”
She shrank back. “I can change them myself.”
“I’ve no doubt,” he murmured absently, slowing near a dilapidated inn. “I’ll see if they have any vacancies.” He dropped Afya’s reins and started down the path. There was a matching building to its left, brighter and more alluring, filling her with unease.
Here we leave him. Make for the stables.
The Jawarat’s urging shot her with fear. She called him back. “You can’t go in there looking like that.”
He looked down at his clothes with a frown. How was it they had been on a soggy trail all day and he still looked perfect?
“Like … what?”
“Yourself,” she explained, holding back a laugh at his perplexed state. “We—Demenhune don’t like Sarasins.”
His brows lifted at that. “So I should—”
“Help me down. I’ll ask.”
He took a fortifying breath before marching back toward her, but the sudden scuffle of boots across ice made him freeze. He snatched a bundle of rope from the stable ledge and she turned in Afya’s saddle, breath clouding the air, to find a group of men meandering down the road.
They spotted Nasir immediately.
“Marhaba!” they called with typical Demenhune hospitality.
Nasir’s response was hesitant. “Peace unto you.”
His accent betrayed him.
“Come for a room, Sarasin?” one of them asked, lantern swaying.
Nasir responded too softly to hear. That, or her pulse was suddenly too loud to hear anything else as they crowded around him, scrutinizing him. A few of them even turned back to observe her.
“I know you! You’re the Prince of Death!”
She held still.
“And look,” another crowed. “The prince’s whore.”
She did not think a handful of words could strip her bare as easily as a knife. Reduce her. Defile her.
They are nothing, the Jawarat told her, but its voice was quiet, hesitant.
“There is a price on your head, Sultani,” one of them said.
Her blood burned, but she heard the unsheathing of a rough-edged blade.
“Dead or alive.”
Nasir’s voice was level. “A price set by whom?”
“The king.”
Zafira flinched. Word was traveling quickly—too quickly. This was a lowly village just beyond the mountains. It couldn’t have been possible.
“Oi, you three get his girl. The rest of you”—the leader of the group swung his dagger—“kill the Sarasin dog.”
If she hadn’t been watching Nasir, she wouldn’t have seen it: the shatter of his gaze, lit by the moonlight. The break in his composure.
The men were quick to brandish their weapons. Swords. Rods. Mostly daggers. Zafira gripped Afya’s reins with white-knuckled fingers, useless. The Jawarat whispered in her skull, too frantic to decipher.
“You know who I am. You should know you can’t kill me,” Nasir said, but there was something reluctant in his voice. The abundance of Demenhune made his silvery lilt more pronounced, more deadly, yet the men laughed. It was a drawstring being pulled tight.
The cinching of a noose.
Nasir deliberately wound the rope around his fist, giving way to an awkward silence until he looked up at them with a lift of his eyebrows as if to say This is your last chance.
Three of them turned to her, leering, their gazes as debasing as what they had called her. She counted each heartbeat as it pounded in her ears, her jambiya pulsing against her leg, Altair’s black dagger in her boot.
Zafira heard the snitch of Nasir’s gauntlets and his blades cut across the night, toppling two of the men and startling the third. Nasir’s rope-bound fist shot out next, knocking one of them out with a blow to his jaw before he whipped the tail end of the rope, tripping the other three. The last of them threw his crudely made spear, wincing when it clattered to the stone walkway.
“Hmm,” Nasir said, assessing.
He circled back, stopping only to pluck his gauntlet blades from the men’s thighs, giving the last a look that sent him scampering, his features illuminated by the moonlight. He wasn’t much older than Zafira. They were all young, but that didn’t surprise her as much as something else.
The Prince of Death hadn’t killed a single one of them.
He hadn’t even drawn his scimitar. He’d come far from that moment on Sharr, when he’d looked at her without a shred of life in his eyes and told her it was kill or be killed.
Guilt made her wrap her arms around herself. She felt apart from the world, apart from him. Empty in a way that came with an act as irreversible as butchery.
Do not be empty. We will fix this.
She ignored the Jawarat as the men groaned on the cold ground and Nasir remounted Afya, turning them back to the main road without a word.
* * *
Nasir should have listened to the warnings in his limbs when he’d first turned down the road to this village. Once a threat, the Prince of Death now held out to common people the promise of treasure. A price on his head. A target on his back.
Worse, there was an hourglass already running its course, for Altair would have left Thalj, his plans now set in motion.
Nasir wasn’t meant to leave Demenhur and cross into Sarasin until dawn, when at least a sliver of light would grant them an equal sliver of safety, but now they’d have to plow through the Tenama Pass and spend their first night there. He couldn’t risk staying here another moment. Not with her.
The snow was bathed in weeping moonlight, houses and buildings passing in a blur of intermittent lantern light. He saw those seven men—boys with mouths too big for their years—lying on the ground. The prince’s whore.
Even when he was trying to do good, even when he wasn’t the one drawing a blade and stealing a soul, he was hurting people. Hurting her. Darkness slipped from him, streamed behind them.
“Speak to me,” he rasped into her hair.
Her hand fell to his wrist. “The moon likes you. See how she shines for you.”
Something lodged in his throat, drawn by the sorrow in her lilting voice.
“You’re not that,” she said after a moment, so softly he almost missed it beneath Afya’s hooves.
“Not what?”
“What they called you.”
He stiffened. “I know,” he said finally.
She only hmmed, acknowledging his lie.
Afya never complained, though it wasn’t long before Nasir felt the strain in her muscles. By then, they were deep into the Tenama Pass. The night had thickened, howls from hungry beasts winding from the rugged peaks of the Dancali Mountains.
The pass was a narrow length of darkness, a harrowing tunnel lit only by a shrouded moon. Uninhabited, apart from the sporadic tent erected in the shadows, fires lit and sheltered from the mischievous breeze.