We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya 1)

Or maybe it was magic. Zafira didn’t know. The island was rife with magic and darkness, entwined.

Skies, Zafira had met one of the Six Sisters of Old.

Somehow, the revelation allowed her to breathe a little easier. She had more questions, and she still didn’t know how or why Benyamin had come, but she felt her purpose had been reinstated somehow. That the Jawarat had been made more real.

The others dispersed into their own corners of the ruins. Altair hummed some ridiculous ballad, and Kifah dusted off her bedroll. Zafira remained by the fire, breathing in the soft rustles of the night and something else … water? The faint trickle of it sang in her ears, but because no one else pointed it out, she judged it to be farther away. She had been eating with hands smudged in dirt for days now. Getting clean would be nice.

A shadow slanted over her, obscuring the moonlight. Kifah. Her turban had been tied around her neck, and the solemn plains of her face glowed in the embers. She carried three velvet bags that Zafira had seen Altair eating from earlier: one full of dates, another of dried goat meat, and the third with candy-coated almonds in pastel hues that didn’t belong in Sharr.

The Pelusian asked something around a mouthful of food, and Zafira raised her eyebrows, mindlessly tossing grains of sand into the fire, irritating it. Benyamin and Altair discussed something tiredly.

Kifah swallowed and held out her velvet bags. “Would you like some?”

Zafira eyed the pouches. One blue, one red, one green. Deep, dark colors, probably made with cloth spun in Demenhur. Every caliphate needed the other, yet they still wielded their differences like swords, their bitterness like walls.

“Why?” Zafira asked.

Kifah blinked. “Why what?”

“Why are you offering me your food?”

She shrugged. “You look like you could use some.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Zafira said, and Kifah knew it. She had been the one eager to spear Zafira to the ground.

The flames reached fists of fury to the sky, trapped as they were on an island they couldn’t comprehend. Zafira could tell Kifah was carefully stringing words together in the silence.

“I always thought the Demenhune Hunter was a fabrication. Not because I doubted you could venture and return, but because you had no name. You claimed no glory, no fame. People aren’t like that anymore,” Kifah said. “Then you saved my life. Honor meant something in this world once.” The fire drew her attention for a long moment, and Zafira had the sense that Kifah was elsewhere.

“Is that why you came with Benyamin?” Zafira asked. “For honor?”

“The Darwishes are born to be erudites. To sit with folds of papyrus and dole out brilliant ideas as cows dole out milk. I like words all right, but I prefer the power of the blade. Even when they shoved a reed pen into my fist, I wanted that pen to be a spear. I wanted the power that came with knowing I stand between someone and death.

“My father’s a high inventor, and he hates nothing more than he hates magic. But I’m a close second, because he wanted all his children to be little copies of himself, and I refused. He made my siblings loathe me the way he did, but Tamim was different.” The warrior’s voice cracked at the name. “Had my brother not saved me from my own father in my own bleeding bedroom, I would have ended my life. My father punished him. He sent my beloved brother to the Arz. I followed, thinking I could save him, but they knew I’d come. They’d slit his throat first, the cowards.”

Kifah laughed. A soft, bitter laugh. “My scholarly brother bled out in my arms, and I screamed. And in answer to my anger, the trees disappeared, if only for a little bit.”

Zafira looked at her sharply.

“Tamim called it love, just before he died. Its own form of magic. Now I know it was the Arz, letting me change those trees to leaves because I’m a bleeding miragi.”

A miragi. An illusionist who could take one thing and make it something else entirely. That was how Kifah had hunted the cape hares. She didn’t need to outrun them; she only needed to illusion a trap.

Kifah shook her head. “His body wasn’t even cold before I took a razor to my hair and used his cuff to fashion the head of my spear. They say no one joins the school of the Nine Elite so late in her years. Yet here I am, wicked world.”

The fire curled and the moon held still as Kifah spoke her bladed words.

“I buried myself with Tamim that day. There is freedom in knowing you’re dead. When you’re a specter no one can touch.” Her smile was a knife. “The calipha refused Benyamin’s call for aid, because ‘Sharr is a gamble.’ But the dead are bound to no one, laa? I took my leave and joined the prattling safi. Not for honor, but because there’s no revenge sweeter than bringing back what my father loathes most: magic.” Kifah met Zafira’s eyes. “Do you see now, why I believed honor to be dead? When a woman who founded our kingdom cannot be trusted? When a father can’t even be trusted with his own daughter?”

Zafira didn’t know what to say. She knew the world was cruel, but she had never tried to perceive the limits of its cruelty.

“Did he— Did your father—” She couldn’t finish her question.

Kifah’s answer was a break in her stare, a parting of her mouth before she clenched her jaw and steeled her gaze once more.

It was answer enough.

“You and I are strangers, Huntress. Allies by circumstance. We may leave Sharr and never think of each other again. But in this moment, we are two souls, marooned beneath the moon, hungry and alone, adrift in the current of what we do not understand. We hunt the flame, the light in the darkness, the good this world deserves. You are like Tamim. You remind me that hope is not lost.”