A heavy cloak of gray, no, shimmering silver sat on her slender shoulders above a sweeping red gown. Her raised hood barely covered the top of her stark hair, as white as the snow. Her lips were crimson, a curve of blood.
Zafira swore the woman hadn’t been there a moment ago. A gallop began in her chest.
The Arz depraves an idle mind.
“Who knew you could kill so swiftly,” the woman said in a voice of silk.
Did the Arz conjure voices to its illusions, too?
“I am no assassin. I only evaded them,” Zafira said, realizing a beat later that she shouldn’t respond to an illusion. She hadn’t killed those men—had she?
“Clever.” The woman smiled after a pause. “You truly do emerge sane and in one piece.” A gust billowed her cloak. Her dark eyes drifted across the first line of the Arz trees with an odd mix of awe and—skies—adoration.
The woman wavered and solidified. Real and not.
“It’s a lot like Sharr, isn’t it?” Then she shook her head, every movement deliberate.
Fear simmered beneath Zafira’s skin at the mention of Sharr.
“Oh, how could I ask such a tease of a question?” she continued. “You haven’t been to the island yet.”
Are you real? Zafira wanted to ask. She demanded instead, “Who are you?”
The woman fixed her with that glittering gaze, bare hands clasped. Did she not feel the sting of the cold? Zafira tightened her fingers around Sukkar’s reins.
“Tell me, why do you hunt?”
“For my people. To feed them,” Zafira said. Her back ached and the deer was beginning to smell.
The woman clucked her tongue with a slight frown, and Sukkar trembled. “No one can be that pure.”
Zafira must have blinked, for the woman was suddenly closer. Another blink, despite her best efforts, and the woman had moved away again.
“Do you hear the roar of the lion? Do you heed its call?”
Where did this loon crawl from? “The tavern is in the sooq, if you’re looking for more arak.” But Zafira’s usual candor was hindered by the tightening in her throat.
The woman laughed, a tinkling that stilled the air. Then Zafira’s vision wavered, and the snow was suddenly clothed in shadow. Black bled into the white, tendrils reaching for Zafira’s ankles.
“Dear Huntress, a woman like me has no need for drink.”
Huntress. The reins slipped from Zafira’s hands.
“How—” The words died on her tongue.
A smile twisted the woman’s lips, and with it, Zafira’s heart. It was the type of smile that meant she knew Zafira’s secrets. The type of smile that meant no one was safe.
“You will always find your way, Zafira bint Iskandar,” the woman said. She sounded almost sad, though the glint in her eyes was anything but. “Lost you should have remained, cursed child.”
The silver of her cloak flashed when she turned, and then Zafira must have blinked again.
Because the woman had vanished.
Zafira’s heart clambered to her throat. Her name. That smile. There was no sign of the bleeding black or the silver cloak now. The snow was pristine as the claws in her brain loosened.
Then Sukkar was off before she could regain her hold on his reins.
She fumbled with a shout, sitting tall to keep from tumbling to the snow. He continued on a mad dash until they crested the slope and stumbled to a stop.