“The one thing certain in life is death, isn’t it?” she asked, echoing his cruelty on Sharr. “I was stupid for thinking I could confront the Lion alone, but … if I’m going to die, I might as well die fighting for what I believe in. Our cause is just. We’re not fighting for land or governance. We’re ensuring a future for the people. Magic and a world worth living in.”
He marveled at her strength, at how she could open her mouth and give him direction, a compass leading his path.
“It’s … what I’ve been doing since the day I first held a bow in my hands.”
“You won’t die,” he said after a silence.
“Why not?” She didn’t know that he wasn’t teasing, not then.
Because he was aware of every rise and fall of her chest, of her even exhales feathering the air, and the vast distance between them. She was a beacon in the darkness. A wild rose that bloomed over death.
Laa, she was the reason death had become significant to him.
And he would not let it take her.
“All those women,” she said, abruptly changing the subject. “You had to have some semblance of confidence.”
Her tone was inquisitive, curious, daama clueless. Fair gazelle, the things I could teach you. The sheets rustled as she turned to look at his back, and he screwed his jaw tight. Despite his shirt, he felt the presence of each scar as if it were being carved afresh.
She continued, oblivious. “Where did it all go?”
Please. Go. To. Sleep.
“I don’t know,” he lied, because she wasn’t another woman. She was Zafira, legendary and ethereal, pure-hearted and guileless. Lost and tethered to a book. “Where did you find the sudden confidence?”
Like a fool, Nasir wished this night could go on forever. The Lion, the darkness, Altair’s plans—he wished all of it could disappear, only for a moment.
“I stole yours.”
He heard the smirk in her voice, and it took every last drop of his resolve not to turn around and pull her into his arms.
CHAPTER 83
Zafira’s dreams were usually as straightforward as an arrow, but not this night. One moment, she saw the Jawarat’s vision, only instead of crimson flooding the streets of her village, the blood ran black while the book crowed of redemption, and as she tried to grasp its meaning, to continue onward and see what happened next, the white village darkened and narrowed to a room.
A veiled bed, silks sliding along her bare skin, lips feathering the slopes of her breasts. Her name a whispered prayer in her ear.
She woke with a start. An odd, aching need tightened her skin. The Jawarat purred.
The hour wanes.
But night still clung to the sky. Khara—of course it was still dark out; they were in Sarasin. She made to move from her warm cocoon of blankets and froze.
Her cocoon was not a blanket, but a body, solid and lithe. Nasir. She was nestled against him, wrapped in his arms as if she would disappear if he let go. At some point in the night, he had discarded his gloves. Her dream rose vividly, heat breaking out across her body.
His exhales were steady and measured on her shoulder, and she carefully twisted her neck to face him. He was even more beautiful asleep. The harsh lines of his brow were smooth, long lashes fanning like scimitars against his copper skin. Her fingers itched to brush away the wayward locks that had fallen across his brow.
One of his hands was splayed across her stomach. The other, the one connected to the arm beneath her, rested palm up beside her face. Ever so slowly, she lifted her hand, marveling at the quake in her fingers. As if she had never once achieved perfect stillness when drawing back an arrow. As if she had never stood unmoving before a deer in the darkness of the Arz.
When she was near him, the very rhythm of the world became something else. A wild, terrifying, incomprehensible thing.
She held her hand over his, two contrasts of color, two differences of size, two palms made for each other.
His hand tightened on her stomach, and his breath hitched. Slowed. Zafira bit back a gasp as something roused low in her belly, embers stirring to a flame.
Turn to him, they seemed to say. Act, they goaded. Or perhaps it was the Jawarat and the mayhem it desired. It was one of the rare moments when she didn’t care if it was, because skies, she wanted it, too.
She closed her eyes and didn’t dare move.
He was adept as she was, the assassin to her hunter. He only needed a heartbeat to read the shift of her breathing. Yet Zafira had noted the way his senses were hindered when it came to her. As if he were suddenly so tangled in his own emotions that he was blinded to all else.
She cracked her eyes open a sliver and relaxed her breathing—as much as she could, considering the pounding beneath her skin. The pillow shifted, and he muttered a curse. One by one, the pads of his fingers lifted.
Silence.
And then, a tumultuous sigh.
“Zafira.” He cleared the roughness from his throat and tried again. “Zafira. We have to go.”
She made what she hoped was a believable act of waking slowly and turning even slower. His eyes were flint, unreadable.
At last, as if he knew, as if he needed to explain why he’d held her, he said, “You were shaking last night.”
“And then I stopped,” she said, holding his gaze to say that she knew why she had stopped and that she liked it and wished the night had never ended. What were words if not feelings?
“And then you stopped,” he replied, honing the weary cadence of his voice as if to say Me too, fair gazelle, me too.
But the night had to end. Everything had to. Cannot all three be one and the same? She’d been so deep within the turmoil of the Jawarat that she’d forgotten the weight of that question. The sweet torment it gave her.
Nasir was watching her, reading her, and his smile moments later was a spoonful of sorrow.
“Come,” he said, fitting his gauntlets and the mask of the Prince of Death back in place.
CHAPTER 84
Breakfast was tangy labneh with enough lemon to make Zafira’s mouth water, and crispy falafel. She watched Nasir break the chickpea patties in perfect halves as she obliterated her own share. They also shared sesame bread with slices of jibn, the cheese sweeter than she liked, and a dallah of mint tea.
After leaving the inn, Nasir fell silent. Zafira recollected their every conversation, assuming, in the end, that he was contemplating the question that wavered between them, an apparition neither acknowledged.
Ever since their angry lashing of teeth, tongue, and lips the day before, she had felt like herself. He had a knack for that, she realized, for grounding her. Her blood warmed at the memory. If he was the antidote to the Jawarat’s curse, it wasn’t so bad a problem to have.
The book hummed, and Zafira focused on the road. The sky was still dark as the night, the only indication of it being daytime the bright line far in the horizon that marked the edge of Sarasin.
“Do you think you can kill him?” Zafira asked after a time, aware Nasir’s mark might not be human. When he’d told her of the real Muzaffar, dead in the banquet hall of the Sultan’s Palace, a helpless cavern had opened beneath her. He hadn’t been any other merchant; he was one who had advocated for change, who had worked for the better of his people.
Now an ifrit had stolen his skin, his face, his seat.