Death before her eyes.
This, because Zafira wanted magic, because she had braved the Baransea for the hearts and brought back Arawiya’s greatest foe. Lives had been upended by the Lion’s madness. While he practiced order in Sultan’s Keep, an entire fifth of the kingdom was falling apart, the rest well on their way.
The Jawarat watched it all through her eyes.
Do you see what happens when chaos unfolds? she asked it. The aftermath of mayhem.
It was silent, but it heard her—she knew by the contemplation pressing against her conscience. It was a new emotion, one it had been stumbling toward since she’d killed the caliph and felt her soul tip empty.
As if, perhaps, it no longer wanted control and a malleable will.
We have learned from you.
“Zafira?” Nasir’s voice rumbled through her back, lighting a fire across her neck. He steered Afya away, as if turning one’s back on ruin made it less real. “You’re speaking to it.”
“Does it speak to you, too?” she asked with some hesitance.
She knew his brow furrowed at her question. His silvery lilt stretched when he was confused or uncertain. “I didn’t say that.”
“It—” She paused, and she wondered if he took her silence as reluctance to speak to him or reluctance to speak of the Jawarat. Knowing how ready he was to disparage himself, it was likely the former, but he didn’t know the whole of it. Candor was never quite as bitter with him, because he had more than enough monsters of his own to ever judge her.
Still, she hadn’t told anyone the truth of the Jawarat for a reason. She hadn’t even told the Silver Witch, who had been like Zafira before she fell for the Lion’s silver tongue. She had shrouded the truth, but it had unleashed itself anyway. She had thought to keep its chaos a secret, but it had made itself known through her hand. Through the caliph’s death.
She gripped the book tight and opened her mouth.
“The Sisters created the Jawarat from and with their memories, but it was connected to the Lion on Sharr for long enough that it took some of his memories, too. It wants things. Dangerous things sometimes.”
A cold unassociated with their surroundings chilled her spine when he finally spoke.
“It?”
He did not dig or pry, or regard her any differently. She swallowed her relief. “I thought the Jawarat spoke using the voices of the Sisters, and then I thought its voice was the Lion’s, but it’s … not.”
“It’s a hilya,” he said. “Fuse enough magic and memory into a single object, and it results in near sentience.”
She brushed her thumb down its spine. It was a comfort, even now. A part of her, as nefarious as it was.
“Are you afraid of it?” He voiced his words slowly, as if she might startle if he spoke them too quickly. As if she might shove him off the horse and take off on her own.
“Shouldn’t I be? You saw what it made me do.”
“You journeyed to Sharr. You faced Arawiya’s greatest foe alone. If I were to assume anyone to be afraid of a book, it wouldn’t be you.”
There was something more being spelled out in his words. Admiration. It warmed her to her toes, and flooded her with the feeling that she was undeserving. She had done both those things, but so had he. What made her any different?
“I didn’t fear Sharr or the Lion that way,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing. Again. The Jawarat blurs the lines between good and not.”
It was what every sane person feared, she realized, but with the Jawarat, virtue had been extricated from her, separated. An entity of its own both hers and not.
“Stealing the Lion’s memories didn’t make it inherently wicked,” Nasir observed, and perhaps it was the cadence of his words, the way he was trying to make sense of it along with her, but she was suddenly filled with such gratitude that she almost leaned into him. She held still, terrified by her heart. “It’s like anyone else now, burdened with the task of choosing between good and evil. Why allow yourself to be controlled when you can be the one in control? You can control it. Sway its intent.”
Was she already doing as much, hence the change she’d noted? The silent rumination since they’d left Demenhur? She twisted around, pain making her flinch. He was beautiful, even in darkness. Alive, when he spoke to her. “Half of what you say to me is what you need to hear yourself.”
Nasir emitted a laugh, a broken, haggard thing more contained than free, and Zafira was aware she devoured his reactions the way a rose sought out sunlight.
As they continued onward with the phantom of his laugh in her ears and Afya’s occasional snorts, she noticed his path had begun tilting east.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” he began hesitantly.
“Oh?”
“We’re going to Qasr al-Leil.”
Qasr. Sarasin for “palace.”
He paused when she stiffened like a board. “Not Sultan’s Keep.”
At first, she thought she didn’t understand, but then she did—sudden and striking.
Her fury snarled through her like an angry vine, ripping every semblance of calm. Nasir brought Afya to an abrupt halt as Zafira wrenched around to face him. Her wound wheezed a warning, and she dragged one knee up between them to ease her strain.
He had never left Demenhur for her.
He had never planned to take her to the Sultan’s Palace at all. He had—
“You mocked me. You lied to me.” Her voice was a growl. Her anger was the Jawarat’s. No—the daama book was gratingly silent, and this, this was her. Where was the outrage it once used to drive her?
His resilience broke under her accusation. “I did not lie to you. Once my work here is through, we’ll continue onward to Sultan’s Keep. To defeat the Lion and restore magic. Does that sound acceptable?”
He spoke gently, as if she were an insolent child. As if she didn’t hold power in her hands.
“What work?” she asked, her voice flat with wrath.
Regret pinched his gaze. “Killing.”
Her snort made him flinch. She wondered how the jambiya he had gifted her would look with its hilt protruding from his heart.
No, bint Iskandar.
She laughed out loud at the Jawarat’s dismay. The sound of her madness echoed in the dark desolation of Sarasin, the hungering breeze carrying it through the empty streets.
This is not you, the book said with that same hesitance after she’d killed the caliph and woken beside Lana.
Laa, this is what you wanted me to be.
“If I pushed you off this horse, would you die?”
Nasir’s face transformed with a slow, surprised laugh. “Perhaps.”
He looked at her as if she were a marvel he had yet to decipher. Laa, he was mocking her, and it made her murderous. It filled the Jawarat with foreboding that once would have been glee. What had changed? She threw herself at him, uncaring that one of them might fall and break their neck.
Nasir only gripped her, stronger than she had known him to be.
And then he kissed her.
Laa, it wasn’t a kiss, but a crash. She froze for a defining heartbeat as one vault of emotions careened to a halt and another erupted. She kissed him back. Their mouths fought for dominance. Twice they had kissed, but, skies, this was glorious. Thrilling in a way that electrified her entire body.