“Can I help you?”
“I’d like to join the quest,” Deen said, lifting his head.
His voice. His words. Every nerve ending that had frayed when Zafira nodded finally exploded.
“Why would a deserter want to go?” a nearby soldier shouted. It seemed they knew about the quest, too. Murmurs rose through the crowd, polluting the air with wrongful thoughts. “He’d sooner abandon his caliphate than—”
“Enough! He was discharged from our ranks with honor!” Haytham shouted.
Deen nearly had been a deserter after his parents’ deaths, but he was saved the dishonor when the caliph gave him a discharge that some felt he had taken too readily.
Haytham said, not unkindly, “Only the Hunter was invited.”
She could hear Deen’s inhale. That shuddering draw she knew so well. The same draw before he had proposed. He was close enough to touch, to beg in a whisper, but the caliph stood before them, and every movement of hers as the Hunter took the strength of a thousand.
“Do you intend to send him alone?” Deen asked evenly.
It was clear Haytham hadn’t considered that. “There are many qualified men still in our service.”
Deen inclined his head. “They may be superior in strength, but their loyalties lie with Demenhur, with Arawiya.”
He spoke loudly, clearly, but Zafira knew that tone, the fear humming beneath the surface. “You need someone like me.”
“I don’t follow,” Haytham said slowly.
“Just as there is no man more likely to succeed than the Hunter”—he stopped, and there was another shuddering draw—“there is no man in Arawiya more loyal to the Hunter than I.”
In the silence, the shards of Zafira’s heart crumbled.
Fell.
Wept.
Drowned.
She watched as the wheels spun in Haytham’s head and the logic of Deen’s words struck. People murmured, their whispers buzzing in the air. She wanted to fall to her knees and scream.
Haytham inhaled. He opened his mouth, damning her. Damning him, the man who wanted to marry her.
“Very well,” he said. He sounded far off. The pound of Sharr, Sharr, Sharr in her pulse turned to Deen, Deen, Deen. “You may join the Hunter. Sayyidi Ayman, cast your eyes upon the two who will restore glory to Arawiya.”
The caliph smiled. Haytham beamed. Neither realized what had just been done.
Zafira felt the heavy silence of a tomb.
She turned away abruptly. Deen trailed her like a child’s rag doll, but she was afraid that if she started stringing letters together, she would end with her nails on his beautiful face, so she kept her mouth pressed closed. For here, where she was supposed to be a man, she could not afford mistakes. She stared at Yasmine’s tear-stained face and turned, heading to where the Arz had just recently stood on spindly trunks.
It was familiar. It was grounding. It terrified her.
A good distance away, the waves lapped lazily against the black stones, reaching and retreating. The ship tilted and righted.
She knew, then, why the Silver Witch had chosen that moment to arrive in the stable, when Deen and Zafira were together, secluded, thoughts and feelings raw. Pliable. She had sent only one invitation, but she had always intended for Deen to be a part of the journey.
She had promised that the sultan wouldn’t know, but there was no doubt he would learn an entire segment of the Arz had disappeared and that the notable Hunter had boarded a ship on the Baransea itself.
What other plans did she spin in her web of silver, deceiving without lying?
“Quite a sight, isn’t it?” someone asked, stepping to her side. Haytham. A wicked sword hung from his side, the white hilt carved with words from the old tongue.