“I wanted to remind you of what happened to the last woman you loved.”
Nasir stilled, blade glinting in the firelight. “Which moment are you referring to? The time when she lost her tongue? Or when I learned it was all a lie?”
Altair’s face stretched in a wolfish smile. “Both should suffice.”
“You seem to have grown just as attached.”
“This is about you. Before this game is finished, you will need to end lives, not grow attached to them.”
Nasir rose, stone crumbling beneath his boots. He tolerated a great deal when it came to Altair, but interfering with his work wasn’t one of them.
His voice dropped. “I don’t need you to tell me what to do. Unlike you, I remember my place.”
“You couldn’t resist pulling that card, could you?” Altair asked, laughing softly. His face hardened into a cool mask before he bowed. “Forgive me, Sultani.”
Altair returned to the others. An iris unfurled in his turban while Kifah looked on with a small smile. Oblivious, he murmured something in her ear and she barked a laugh before turning the meat again. Nasir pursed his lips.
Me and the Huntress.
* * *
Here we go again, Nasir thought as he leaned against the tree.
“Murderers are murderers. I know what I saw that day,” Kifah was saying, about an incident back in Pelusia’s capital of Guljul. She glared at him, but Nasir kept his gaze pointedly elsewhere. “Hashashin or not.”
“No hashashin will kill a man in his sleep,” Benyamin insisted. “There’s nothing more cowardly.”
“How do you know it was a hashashin? Maybe it was a drunkard prancing around in that ridiculous garb. I wouldn’t know the difference,” Altair said.
The Huntress flitted her gaze to Nasir.
Benyamin sighed. “You’re all being children—”
“Compared to you, my grandmother is a child,” Kifah drawled.
Altair snorted water, choking until the Huntress thwacked him on the back.
“Enough,” Benyamin said, smoothing out his bedroll. “Kifah, you’re keeping watch.”
“Your wish is my insomnia,” the warrior said with a salute.
They took their time falling asleep. As if this were a trip of leisure, where they could rise when they desired and enjoy the world around them. But Nasir, unlike his father, was patient. Being a hashashin required it.
He waited until Kifah turned before he wove his way through the bedrolls, pausing longer than necessary in front of Altair. His eyes dropped to the general’s neck again, the exposed skin calling to his practiced ease in swiping across flesh and tendons. Altair’s every exhale beckoned.
But a hashashin never killed a prone figure. Even Benyamin knew that.
Nasir carefully stepped over him and tossed more wood into the fire, watching the light dance across the Huntress’s pale features. The widow’s peak of her dark hair dipped into her forehead like the head of an arrow. Her hair—still plaited and coiled—looked like a crown, and she a queen.
You will need to end lives. In his mind, he saw the slender column of her neck drenched in red as the light in her eyes dimmed to nothingness. He saw her skin ashen with death. His breath caught.
Her hand moved, closing around the ring at her chest, murmurs shaping her lips.
Kifah turned.
Nasir pursed his mouth and darted for the ruins, pockets leaden with misfortune.
He moved without a sound, the shadows setting his heart ablaze. It didn’t take him long to find a vestibule away from the camp, secluded with a window facing the other side. He shoved a plank of wood aside and entered. His footsteps echoed, and something skittered away.