Nasir didn’t stop at any of them, even the one where a woman waved and offered food for the remainder of their journey.
And then he came to a wrenching halt at the mouth of the pass. Afya was breathing hard, her sides heaving beneath them.
Nasir dismounted and stared.
“Sarasin,” Zafira whispered with a shiver.
The darkness was absolute. The moon had tucked herself away, ashamed of those below. Pockets of light flickered here and there, too faint to be seen as anything but eyes glowing in a graveyard, and with the dark came the cold, a chill beyond even that of Demenhur.
“There are ifrit here,” Zafira said, and Nasir remembered how well she saw in the dark. How well he could see now because of the newfound power in his blood, after years of enduring the fear that lived within him.
He began leading Afya on foot, a hand on his scimitar, his eyes on their surroundings.
They stopped in a village just small enough that they were unlikely to be recognized. The caravanserai was a low construction that sprawled beneath the moonless sky, horses idling in the courtyard along with a single caravan, the camels slumbering. It was solemn and silent, as forlorn as the rest of the terrain they’d passed, but it was open, and that was what mattered.
“Wait here,” Nasir said, knocking back his hood.
“Marhaba,” a short, plump woman in a roughspun abaya said when he stepped through the door and its curtains to a warm room full of patrons. “I am Rameela.”
“Business seems good,” he observed.
The seated crowd was subdued but boisterous enough, the food abundant. Another woman sat on a stool, the gold-dusted length of her brown legs on display. She played a ney, fingers sliding down the flute sensuously.
The caravanserai owner eyed him, her face kind as she regarded his attire. “The sun never shows, but it’s nothing new, eh? People still need a warm bed.”
“Are there ifrit?”
“None around here. How may I help you, sayyidi?”
“Have you any rooms?”
“Aywa,” Rameela affirmed, smiling. “The moon ensured your luck—I’ve one left.”
“Just one?”
She nodded. “Have you a party?”
“I’ll take the room. I’ll also need a woman—”
Her smile flattened with disappointment. “We do not cater to such needs, sayyidi.” She gestured behind him. “Rana sometimes does, if you’re to her liking.”
Nasir turned to the woman playing the ney, realization striking him far too slowly when she smiled coyly at him.
“I—that’s—I’m not—” He cleared his throat. “I mean, I need a healer.”
Rameela leaned back and laughed. “Don’t look so frightened, sayyidi. You should have said so! I will see to your injury.” She looked him over. “My husband is more skilled. Shall I fetch him?”
“No, you’ll do. Only to change bandages.” Exhaustion tugged at his eyelids like they were stubborn curtains.
The vacant room was down a dimly lit hall. It was a small space with a narrow bed and an even narrower adjoined bath. Cramped, but warm and free from mold and filth, and nearest the back exit.
“Passable, sayyidi?” Rameela ventured.
“It’ll do,” Nasir said, because he apparently didn’t know any other words. Rimaal, why was it so hard to carry on a conversation with anyone amiable?
Outside, a few spindly trees scratched against the caravanserai’s roof like knives across bone. He led Afya to a low ledge so that Zafira could dismount more easily.
“No killers in this one?” she teased lightly.
“I’m still here,” Nasir replied wryly as he handed the reins to the stable boy, whom he assumed was the owner’s son.
Zafira laughed, but stopped just as quickly with a wince and a low moan. Her hand closed around Deen’s ring at her chest, and Nasir found himself relieved at the sight. It meant she was thinking of something other than the book, other than death. Other than those boys.
“You truly loved him,” Nasir said like a fool.
She paused to look at him. “I will always love him, though never in the way he wished.”
He didn’t know what to say next, so he said nothing.
Inside, they found the caravanserai owner lighting a few suspended lanterns in the room.
She smiled when she saw Zafira. “Yaa, so this is why you asked for a woman. Come, child. Rest, so I can see to your wound.”
“Do you need help?” Nasir asked like an idiot from the corridor.
Rameela tsked. “If you could help her yourself, you wouldn’t have asked me, eh? There is food in the front. Yalla. Go eat, boy.”
After avoiding the patrons and the woman playing the ney as he downed a bowl of shakriyeh—the yogurt warm but the lamb sparse—Nasir returned to the corridor as Rameela was leaving.
She regarded him differently, wiping her hands on her abaya. “It is a horrible wound.”
“An arrow.” He saw no reason to shirk the truth.
“It was mended well,” Rameela said, “but it has torn again.” She eyed him as if that were somehow his fault, and looked back to the closed door. “She speaks strangely at times, to herself, laa? Fatigue won her over, Sultani.”
Nasir held still.
“You hold yourself too proud,” Rameela said, as if that explained it. “But it was the scar that gave you away.”
He stared her down in the cramped hall, aware that any of the surrounding rooms could hold a mercenary out for silver. Aware that Zafira could be lying in a pool of her own blood because he was a fool to have left her.
Rameela wagged her finger at him. “Any boy beneath this roof is to be treated as my son, prince or not,” she said with mock sternness.
Nasir exhaled in relief. Had she heard his father was dead? That he was no longer a prince, but a displaced sultan himself?
“The bed’s a narrow fit, but there’s space in the room for a bedroll, should you like one.”
He thought of what the men in the small Demenhune town had called Zafira, and declined.
“The hall is fine,” he said, not bothering to elaborate in Rameela’s expectant silence.
“Right, then,” she said. “There is one detail I wish to know, if you are to stay the night. You are the prince, but who is she?”
Zafira had shared nothing at all, it seemed.
“Demenhur’s legendary Hunter.”
She laughed softly. “I should not be surprised the Hunter was a girl all along.”
CHAPTER 80
In the end, Rameela pitied Nasir and, after assuring him that she would keep watch over Zafira through the night, showed him to a small room used to store spare covers and other odds and ends. It was cramped, but the door had a lock and her son left him a bedroll before the tiny fireplace, so it served its purpose.
He was dreading the moment when he’d tell Zafira that he had orders to stop in Leil. That he didn’t, in fact, leave Thalj solely for her and would not be taking her to Sultan’s Keep. Khara, he should have been a little more up front about that bit. He had finally convinced himself to close his eyes—the word “dog” pounding in his skull in time with his breathing, Zafira straight-backed and unflinching atop Afya as the men sneered at her—when a flash of silver knifed the dark room.