If the Lion really wanted Altair dead, he needed only to flick his wrist. Wrap him in shadows and suffocate him. Confusion riddled Zafira’s aching arms.
The two ifrit gripping Altair released him to draw swords. Altair threw his arms behind him, and as he unsheathed his scimitars, the sound of steel against steel was a song to her ears. The ifrit lunged.
Altair never faltered as he fought both ifrit at once, and Zafira wondered who was the better fighter: Nasir or Altair. She wondered who had killed Deen: Nasir or Altair. The general roared and an ifrit howled.
The Lion’s fingers shifted at odd angles.
“Altair!” Nasir shouted hoarsely, coming alert when the Lion launched a volley of darkness. No, darts of darkness, spiraled and sharp, smoke trailing in their wake.
Altair ducked, and three of the shadow darts pinned an ifrit to the wall, the others embedding around the dead creature with whizzes and thuds. Altair fought the remaining ifrit, and even through her pain, Zafira could tell he was purposely delaying the creature’s death. The Lion made no move to attack again, still observing with a far-off look.
“He’s stalling,” Nasir murmured.
Two more figures darted through the dark corridor: Kifah and Benyamin, grim-faced and armed. Zafira sputtered a mix of a laugh and a cry.
Benyamin’s immaculate keffiyah was wrapped as a turban on his head. He tossed a vial into the center of the room and the glass shattered, releasing a haze of green mist that triggered rounds of coughing. She heard the safi’s voice, low and urgent, followed by the Lion’s soft laugh. Zafira’s vision blurred and her mind slowed.
The shackles holding her in place loosened. The prince’s bare fingers brushed hers as he undid the chains at her wrists.
“How—”
“Hashashin. One chain or ten, we train for this specifically,” he said quietly.
She felt his hands slide to her waist and she swallowed. The clash of Altair’s scimitars, the whistle of Kifah’s spear, the Lion’s shouts—everything drowned away at his touch. His fingers trembled as he lifted her down. She felt the warmth of his skin, the pads of his thumbs below her stomach. The thump, thump, thump of her own chest. The drop of his eyes to the birthmark on her skin, and his anguish as he struggled against a wave of pain.
He crouched to remove the circlets from her ankles.
Everything rushed back.
“Yalla, Huntress!” Kifah shouted.
; Zafira dragged her right leg toward her left, limbs stiff from the angle she had been stretched. A wave of dizziness rolled over her, and she gritted her teeth.
An ifrit approached from her left, and Nasir slashed his arm across the creature’s neck, a line of black painting its throat before it fell. He slid the blade back into his gauntlet.
“Can you walk?” he asked her, not unkindly. He sounded distant.
She started to nod, started to follow, but stumbled instead. Nasir swerved to catch her, hands sliding up her arms, ragged breath at the curve of her ear. His face was close and her brain was a blur. She didn’t know if it was the pain that caused her vision to darken.
Laa. The room was darkening, and Nasir glanced at his hands in alarm.
The Lion’s eyes fell upon her, and she thought of the poker as a very different sort of darkness folded her into its embrace.
* * *
Nasir had no black resin to heal him. He had no mother to tend to him. He was alone, but he finally understood why this curse of darkness was only now displaying itself. It had tried to, during the rare times when his control slipped, but it had never gone this far.
He had trekked across Sharr for days, and not once had his affinity slipped past his iron defenses.
Until her. This pale demon. She had done this to him.
She had cursed his life with her presence. She had whittled at his caged heart and made him remember what it was like to feel. It was how the ifrit knew to show him Kulsum. How these dark wisps knew to unveil themselves.
The darkness showed itself when he felt, perceived, listened to sentiment. Like now. Shouts clamored as everyone turned blind in the sudden black that he caused.
The familiar suffocating fear returned, pelting him as his vision and perception disappeared, because he could no longer see. Fitting that his power—kharra, his power—was associated with the thing he feared most.