We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

“No,” Zafira said with finality. She had lived this long without dum sihr, without doing what was forbidden. She had hunted and found and lived.

She was lying to herself.

Kifah made a strangled sort of sound. In it was her accusation: Zafira had chosen herself over Altair. Her old knife over finding the Lion and getting her daama book back.

“It’s only a dagger,” Kifah hissed, siding with reason. “I can buy you a new one that looks exactly like it.”

Zafira clenched her jaw. It wasn’t about coin, it wasn’t about how her dagger looked. She didn’t care that the shopkeeper was steps away from them, clinging to their every word. “Then why do you think the kaftar wants it?”

If Kifah understood, she didn’t care. “This is not the time to be sentimental.”

Anger reared its head at a level birthed by the Jawarat, for never before had rage twisted words together, ugly and whole.

What do you know of sentiment? it wanted her to say.

But Kifah was her friend, and Zafira didn’t have to speak. She read her well enough. Her soft breath tore with her dark gaze.

“Emotion is as potent as memory, isn’t it?” she asked the shopkeeper without a shred of feeling. “That’s why you want the dagger.”

The kaftar had no reason to be guilty.

Kifah smiled cruelly. “You can take the dagger of a peasant, or the spear of a former erudite turned Nine Elite and every emotion that led from one to the other.”

The kaftar considered her afresh. One of the lanterns sputtered noisily, angrily.

“In that case,” the kaftar mused, tipping the silver vial to and fro, “I will take both.”

Zafira swayed. Her hand twitched for an arrow, anger engulfing her desperation, but it was Kifah who spoke first, her fury focused on the vial. “Keep it. May it shatter and defile this place forever.”

Curses meant little to those versed in them. The kaftar set the vial back on the shelf, between a wicked knife and a camel-bone dallah, and turned away. With his back to her, anything was possible: her dagger in his spine, Kifah’s spear through the back of his neck. Another chance.

Kifah was already near the door.

Zafira’s pulse pounded beneath her skin, a drum born of disquiet. “Here.”

The leather hilt fit snug in her grip. She felt every fiber against her fingers, she knew every snag and every little bump. The way the leather was loose at the hilt’s curve, the blade dull from use but sharp as the cleverest of wits. Baba’s gift to her. All that was left of him.

The kaftar only looked.

“You can’t have both,” Zafira said, keeping the tremor from her voice. “Nor will anyone else want the vial. Not when magic returns.”

He took the dagger. She took the vial. The blood of the most powerful beings in Arawiya sat in her palm, and still she had lost.

CHAPTER 33

Nasir tossed the bloodied rag into the bin and swept a look across the room. Khara. He had forgotten about Zafira’s sister. A thousand scenarios flitted through his brain: She would have panicked. She would have unlocked the other door or thrown open the window and tried to escape at the first clash of weaponry. The men had only just dragged the last of the bodies away, a pair of guards leading—to Nasir’s relief—the tired sultan to his rooms. He hurried to unlock the door and paused against the doorway.

Lana lay on the bed, eyes closed, chest rising too quickly to be asleep.

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth before he folded it away with a sigh and locked the door again.

There was no chance of him sleeping. Not now, when his father was suddenly his father again, a concept he had last seen so long ago that he didn’t know when exactly Ghameq had begun to change. He recalled the Silver Witch’s words on Sharr, that she had never known true love until she met his father. The medallion had been her wedding gift to him, one of the last remaining artifacts from her life as warden of the island. She had not known it held a bit of its darkness, that it soon became a channel connecting the Lion to her beloved.

There was a time when he had been kind, when lines would crease near his eyes as he smiled, when he would hold his wife in his arms, pride and love in the timbre of his voice. Laa, the Lion’s control was a gradual thing, deepening and worsening as the years progressed.

Nasir folded his keffiyah, wound it into a turban, and eased the door closed behind him. The halls were silent save for the occasional drift of maids and servants who caught sight of him and disappeared just as quickly.

Home sweet home, he thought dryly.