We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

Like Lana. Like her prince with ashes in his eyes.

“Why did you let the kingdom believe otherwise?” Kifah asked.

“And admit defeat?” Seif asked as if she had suggested murder.

Kifah, who had been concerned and awaiting a dire response, rolled her eyes. Zafira laughed, and she was surprised by the hint of a smile lifting a corner of Seif’s mouth.

CHAPTER 29

It was both a gift and a curse, to feel as deeply as she did. To see Alderamin in the lucidity of a dreamwalk was entirely different from seeing it in person. To believe that the realness would not affect her was a mistake on her part.

A sore, sore mistake.

The outskirts of the caliphate were as grand as the capital itself. It was the beauty of Sultan’s Keep tenfold. Like in the dreamwalk, she couldn’t shake off the feeling of it being more alive than anywhere else. The pulse of life was everywhere, from the spiny-tailed lizards darting up the date palms to the children shouting and laughing as they chased one another beneath an arch, circling back from the ledge of a low roof to leap into a blue-green pool of water. From the colors of the clothes on the backs of men to the medley of shawls suspended across zigzagging ropes swaying in the gentle breeze.

As much as she had scowled and groused over the safin tucked away within their walls, she had to admit the miscellany of people was greater than elsewhere. In Demenhur, the sight of anyone a shade darker than the snow-cursed made everyone stop and stare. In Sarasin, safin were rare, if not impossible, to encounter. In Alderamin, Pelusian and safin walked side by side. A Demenhune stepped through her bright green door with her Zaramese husband.

It wasn’t that safin weren’t welcome elsewhere. They simply had no reason to live anywhere but their perfect haven of Alderamin. Unlike everyone else, who believed Alderamin was where they’d find the life Arawiya had once provided freely and equitably. They believed it enough to traverse the uncultivated Wastes for a chance to live here. Deen had seen proof, when he’d visited years ago.

Here

was a sea of people with different shades of skin, different lilts to their tongue, different cadences that built the wholeness that was Arawiya.

And yet, despite the way the very ground seemed to live and breathe, Zafira felt strangely lonely. For a part of her had grown accustomed, she realized with some diffidence, to observing the world in awe and being observed in turn.

As if he could glean the same wonder just by looking at her.

Her fingers fluttered at her side. Skies, she missed him.

“This is where we part ways,” Seif said, holding the heart with care. “See that caravanserai with the stained-glass window? We’ll meet there at sundown.”

The window was impossible to miss: it was massive, more akin to an entrance for a giant, florals made of stone holding the arching glass within interlacing clutches. Kifah brought the horse to a stop. “Is that all the time it’ll take for you to restore the heart in Almas and return?”

“Safin,” was all Seif said as he mounted the horse and turned in the direction of Alderamin’s capital. He had recovered every last drop of his vanity now that his robes were dried, and he eyed the road ahead with such indifference, it felt offensive. Safin were quick, but that quick?

“And Bait ul-Ahlaam?” Zafira asked as the locals began to take interest. The people here might hail from around the kingdom, but they lived here. She knew the ferocity with which a village looked after their own. She respected it.

Seif pursed his lips. “It must find you.”

And then the bastard left them.

“Oi! What does that mean? Come back!” Kifah snarled. More people had wandered out of their houses to watch them, curiosity torching the air. They had lived near the border, near the encroaching Arz. Visitors were rare, if any. Kifah noticed them and turned a slow circle, baring her teeth. “What?”

Mothers tucked children into their skirts. Fathers eyed the spear in Kifah’s hand and the arrows slung on Zafira’s back, Baba’s jambiya with its worn hilt at her waist.

“Maybe we should start moving,” Zafira said gently.

Kifah glared at her. “Oh? Where?”

Zafira looked about, as if the elusive shop would wave a hand and beckon her over. Wherever it was, they’d have to find it on foot, since their horses had been devoured by the marids. Skies, couldn’t Lana have told them more? Even a descriptor from the book she had found it in would have helped.

“The sooq,” a man said, stepping forward and gesturing up the road. He was human, his wide-knuckled hands gripping a bucket of water from the well the houses were clustered around. The woman with him, shrewd-eyed with a basket of wrung-out clothes clutched to her side, glared at him, as if there were ill to be had in aiding two weary travelers. Her eyes narrowed on Zafira, straying to her jambiya and then, strangely, to Deen’s ring.

“It calls to those who need it,” the man said, setting his bucket on a ledge.

“To those willing to pay the price,” the woman added sharply.

Several others clucked their tongues and murmured, whether in agreement to her words or in protest of her hostility, Zafira did not know.