We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya 1)

She could feel the heat of his skin this close, and she blamed the quiver in her fingers upon the fatigue in her bones as she reached for the folds of his robes. She pulled the cloth aside, casting the wound in Sharr’s wan light. Her knuckles swept his collarbone and she heard the hitch in his breath, felt the quicken of her own.

What was she doing so close? Sweet snow below, she should have asked him to lie down. Then she wouldn’t have had to climb all over him. Yasmine waggled her eyebrows in her head.

“I wasn’t going to come after you,” he said as she soaked the cloth in cool water. “The last person I tried to save lasted two days before I buried her with my own hands. Before I learned killing was easier.”

“But you did come,” she said, wanting to ask who. She pressed the cloth to his skin. He flinched, and she gripped his shoulder to hold him in place.

Something had changed when he was shackled beside her. Something had broken after the poker touched his flesh and the shadows erupted from his fingertips. He wielded the darkness as if it were his.

“I didn’t want to lose my compass.”

There was something about his voice that stopped her from snarling. He stared at her, his eyes tracing her face with a look she couldn’t decipher. She didn’t realize she was starting to fold into herself until he spoke.

“I couldn’t find your cloak,” he said softly.

Her gaze crashed into his, expecting to find something mocking in the gray, for no one mourned the loss of fabric. But he was solemn.

“I don’t need it anymore, I suppose,” she conceded. It had been her companion as much as the darkness had. But she had wandered Sharr without her cloak, slowly becoming one from it. She picked up the honey salve.

“No, I suppose you don’t,” he agreed with something akin to a smile. She wanted to pause this moment and capture his smile, however faint.

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She kept one hand on his shoulder and brought the other to his skin.

“Don’t move,” she whispered. He froze at her words, at her touch. He didn’t even breathe, though she could feel his thunderous pulse beneath her fingers as she rubbed the ointment across the ruined flesh. The distance made her drunk and she swayed closer, pulling back with a clench of her jaw. Distract yourself. “My mother was a healer.”

“Was?” he breathed. She tasted sukkary dates in his exhale.

“She’s sick now,” she said shortly with a sad laugh. “The irony is not lost on me. She and Deen’s mother were two of the best healers in western Demenhur. Now one is dead; the other is very near it herself.”

She swallowed the sudden swell in her throat. Blinked away the burn in her eyes.

“Who killed Deen?” she asked softly, and leaned back to look at him. She needed to know. To expose that wound to the air before it festered even further.

He drew a sharp breath, and a window closed behind his eyes. “Why do you keep asking that? It doesn’t matter which of us killed him; the other had every intention to.”

“If he were here now, would you kill him?”

A piece of her fractured when he lowered his head, a fraction that would have been insignificant on anyone else but was an earth-shattering display of defeat for him. For unlike that moment with the poker, he was now in full control of his emotions.

“A monster will always be enslaved to a master. Even if that master has a master of its own,” he said.

“But a monster has power,” she insisted. Anguish drew lines on his face. “The power to break free of his bonds. You are not your father, nor are you the Lion that took his soul. You are not the sum of his disparagement.”

He stilled at her words, and all she wanted was for this broken boy to understand.

His slow, weighted words were a harsh whisper. “Then who am I?”

Zafira knew of his scars. His fear. He was just like anyone else: flesh that could be flayed. A human who could be punished and beaten. Used and discarded.

“Nasir bin Ghameq bin Talib min Sarasin,” she said instead. “Crown prince to a kingdom begging for someone to stand up to a tyrannical ruler.”

An empty laugh escaped him, and Zafira’s heart cleaved in two.

A dark tendril unfurled from his fingers and he clenched his fist, killing the dark flame. “I stood up once.”

Zafira didn’t breathe. He watched her hands as she uncapped another tin.