Nasir limped down the steps. Three days was still three days too long. Now that the Lion was no longer shackled to the island, he had no reason to remain there, particularly when the Jawarat—the key to what he wanted most—was getting farther and farther away from him. The zumra needed to reach shore before the Lion did, or their troubles would be infinitely worse, and if there was anyone who could quicken their journey, it was no mortal girl from Zaram.
The must of burning oil clung to the salty air within the ship. Lanterns flickered as Nasir made his way past cabins cramped one against the other like a mouthful of teeth, bolted beds and other sparse furnishings dark in the dim, reminiscent of the palace.
His exhale broke and suddenly he was standing in front of Ghameq, telling him of
the mission. How he’d failed to kill the sultan’s general. Failed to kill the Hunter. Failed to bring back the Jawarat.
Failed, failed, failed.
He shook his thoughts free. It was different now, he reminded himself. The leash between him and his father had gnarled, tangled in the lives of many more. Zafira, Altair, Kifah, his mother, and most important, the Lion of the Night, who had sunk his claws into Ghameq, controlling his every move.
His gaze flicked to the farthest end, where Zafira’s cabin stood like a ledge just out of reach.
During her rare emergences on deck, the Jawarat was always clasped to her chest, her gaze distant and detached. It worried him, seeing the ice in her eyes fading as something else took its place, but coward that he was, he couldn’t approach her, and as the insanity of their final moments on Sharr continued to recede, Nasir didn’t know how to halt the rapidly swelling distance between them.
He paused to rest his leg, leaning against a splintering beam. The Silver Witch—his mother, rimaal—had chosen a cabin just as far as Zafira’s, and when he finally reached her door, a dark gleam on the floorboard made him pause.
Blood?
He tugged his glove free and touched two fingers to the splotch, bringing them to his nose. Sharp and metallic—most certainly blood. He wiped his fingers on his robes and lifted his gaze, following the haphazard trail.
To where it disappeared behind the door to the last cabin: Zafira’s.
CHAPTER 2
Power bled from her bones. It leached from her soul, dregs draining into some unseen abyss. Emptying her. Zafira Iskandar had ventured into the cursed forest known as the Arz for as long as she could remember, magic gradually sinking beneath her skin, always there, within reach.
And now it was gone.
Stuffed into a crate, shoved beneath a rotting nook beside a too-sure Zaramese. The Jawarat echoed her angry thoughts.
“I planned to destroy that book after magic was retrieved.” Anadil, the Silver Witch, Sultana of Arawiya, and Sister of Old pursed her lips at the green tome in Zafira’s lap. The lantern cast the angles of her face in shadow, white hair shimmering gold. Zafira’s cabin paled in her splendor.
She does not like us, the Jawarat reminded.
Zafira no longer flinched at its voice. It was nothing like that soothing whisper that once caressed her from the shadows near the Arz. The one she had thought belonged to a friend, before she learned it belonged to the Lion of the Night.
No, this voice was assertive and demanding, yet it was filling the void that magic had left behind, and she couldn’t complain.
No, she does not.
Instead, she had begun speaking back to it.
After all the trouble Zafira had gone through to retrieve the forsaken thing, she wasn’t going to let a scornful witch destroy it. Skies, was this why the woman had come to her cabin? “You’re afraid of it.”
“The Jawarat is my Sisters’ memories incarnate,” the Silver Witch said with a withering stare from the cot. Now that Zafira knew the woman was Nasir’s mother, she could see the resemblance in that look. “What have I to fear?”
She does not know. She is oblivious to what we gleaned upon Sharr.
The reverberation in her lungs was an order of silence as much as a reminder: Zafira didn’t even know the extent of what she had gleaned on Sharr, in accidentally slitting her palm and binding herself to this book. For the Jawarat was more than the Sisters’ memories.
It had steeped on Sharr for ninety years with the Lion of the Night. It held some of his memories, too, and the Silver Witch hadn’t the faintest clue. No one did.
Tell them. Her conscience was barely a whisper beneath the Jawarat’s weighted presence, but that was not the reason why she didn’t heed it. She simply couldn’t. She could not tell them of the Jawarat any more than she could tell them of the darkness that once spoke to her. Fear mangled whatever words she summoned. She was afraid of them. Afraid of how the others would see her.
She had been judged long enough simply for being born a woman.
“But we need it,” Zafira said at last, smoothing her features. The trunk beneath her had been bolted to the ship, but her stomach lurched with the waves. “To restore magic.”