We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya 1)

She didn’t like when this Nasir arrived. The one who let his mask slip, who could venture to laugh, to look at her with something other than that stoic coolness. It made her uneasy. Uncertain.

It lit her aflame.

“Get it over with,” she challenged before she could stop herself. But every part of her hoped there was another reason for him to be standing there.

He blinked. Looked to his scimitar. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t going to kill you,” he said, then grimaced, scar undulating, as if he had swallowed something bitter when he said the word “kill.”

“I was completing another drill.” He twirled his scimitar, considering it before he frowned. “It helps me think.”

Mimicking the act of killing helped him think. Zafira almost laughed.

The sleeves of his coat had been tugged up his forearms, lean muscles flexing with his movements. She glimpsed his tattoo, and when he saw that she did, he sheathed the scimitar and tugged his sleeves back down.

“It’s only a matter of when you’ll do as you promised,” she said, her voice tremoring in anger. She wanted to add like the coward that you are, but he’d had enough insults from his father to last a lifetime.

She pitied him. The silence he kept. The power at his fingertips, useless because of his tether to the sultan. She did not think he had ever gone against his father.

“The longer you delay, the harder it will be,” she said softly, surprising herself with how much she meant the words. He took a small step closer, and she wanted him to take another. And another. And another.

“In what way?” he breathed. As if, maybe, he was trying to make sense of this just as she was.

“I don’t know.”

Someone yawned, and she heard the rustle of clothes as someone else stretched. She heard the timbre of the sultan’s voice again.

“You’re not afraid of him,” she realized aloud.

He stiffened.

“You’re afraid of…” She paused, brow creased. “What did he mean when he said ‘her tongue won’t be all she loses’?”

He closed his eyes. Lines wrinkled his forehead, and she noticed that his beard had been trimmed. When did men have the time for such things?

“I am afraid,” he said simply, avoiding her question, and when he opened his eyes, the Prince of Death had come, slashed with a scar, his irises dead ashes in a grim wind. “I am the coward you wanted to call me.”

* * *

They set off early to avoid the sun Benyamin did not think would arrive. The night he had warned of was settling in, the gloom deepening despite the morning hour.

Nasir blinked away the fatigue that had taken shelter behind his eyes. He thought to the night before, when two pairs of feet dashed across the stone. The lighter pair, he knew now, was the Huntress. The heavier pair could only have belonged to one man, and Nasir hoped Altair was pleased with all the belittling he’d heard.

The Huntress led them without a word, brushing the loose strands of her dark hair back with a sweep of her fingers. When she had risen that morning, her eyes twin scythes of blue lifting to his without fear or mask, Nasir had felt oddly, inexplicably saddened.

He was always sad, he knew. But there was a difference between a perpetual state of unhappiness and a sudden gust of it, leaving him cold and helpless. Floundering with no sight of an end.

His exhale was slow.

Altair had been right. Sometime between pledging to kill the Demenhune Hunter and now, Nasir had come to feel something for her. He had grown attached. Feelings had transpired without permission, conspired without his brain, working with what was left of his heart.

It really was only a matter of when. He couldn’t go against his father, the notorious sultan of the entire kingdom.

But you are the Prince of Death.

Shut up, darkness, Nasir hissed in his head. The darkness chuckled, and Nasir paused, thinking through the idiocy of that before the Huntress collapsed.

She fell

to her