We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

Zafira kept every movement of hers slow and careful, even her nod.

Yasmine drew her lower lip into her mouth, and Zafira wished she could hold her. She wished her friend didn’t feel the need to steel her spine before her.

“I don’t doubt that he loves me,” Yasmine continued. “He’s kind, and he’s good, and I might be overreacting—this might be the only secret he will ever have, but I’ve lost enough to lose my heart twice. What if it does happen again? What if there are more secrets and a child between us?” Her voice went quiet. “I was too young. I am too young. So eager to call myself a woman, when I’m only a child myself.”

A month. That was how long it had taken for a secret to tear the newlywed couple apart. Yasmine was too young. Zafira remembered the wedding, an ethereal moment suspended in time. The intensity in Misk’s eyes, and the words he spoke to her. Most of all, she remembered envying the man taking her friend away from her.

“Wretched” was too small a word to describe how Zafira felt.

“That’s not you talking,” she said. “You’re Yasmine Ra’ad. The girl without rue.”

The last Ra’ad left. Zafira’s fingers closed around the ring at her neck. Yasmine’s eyes, wet and still cautious, followed.

“People change when they pick themselves up and piece themselves together again. Look at you—you’ve shattered so many times, I barely recognize you anymore.”

Yasmine downed the rest of her qahwa, the thud of her cup a decree in the silence. She was still angry. Angry and in pain.

“We both agreed we need some time apart. I don’t want to say goodbye. Does that make me a bad person? For not leaving him?”

Zafira hid her relief with a shake of her head. “It means you love him enough that you’re willing to make it work.”

Yasmine held still, her gaze off to the side. What do you know of love? Zafira imagined her asking in the silence. You couldn’t even love the man who loved you. Zafira wavered. And then Yasmine crumpled, shoving a hand to her mouth.

“I miss him,” she breathed. “I’m so angry, Zafira, but I miss him. I miss you. I miss what we had, and what we could have.”

Outside, Arawiya was falling to a ruin even darker than the Arz. Zafira did not know if Nasir and Altair lived. She did not know if magic would ever return.

Still, she found the words slipping out of her mouth, chasing what they once had, trying to remind Yasmine that though she had lost her brother and maybe even her husband, she still had Zafira. She would always have her. “If we were in a story, what would happen?”

A tiny smile broke Yasmine’s resolve, breaking a wider one out of Zafira. Yasmine, who was never sad, who was always full of emotion and bursting with passion.

They had played this game time and time again. She could almost mouth the words as Yasmine spoke of the half Sarasin, half Demenhune man she had desired for months in a way Zafira had never understood.

“A bookkeeper would sweep me away with his good hair and good taste. He’d be tall, of course,” she recited, and Zafira, as always, refrained from commenting on Yasmine’s height, or the lack of it. “Skilled in matters of importance that you pretend to know nothing about.”

Zafira couldn’t tell whom the game was meant to benefit. “And? Is he?”

“In every way but the truth. I hate lies.” Yasmine picked up her cup and swished the qahwa rinds. She didn’t look up. “Your turn.”

“Mine?” Zafira asked, shrinking back. “I don’t have anyone.”

She cringed when the words left her, half expecting Yasmine to say Oh, but you could have.

“It’s theoretical. A game,” Yasmine said instead, gaze rising to the bandages wrapped around Zafira’s chest, flicking to her face, and she dared to hope: They could get through this, the two of them. They were making progress, if Yasmine could look at her now. “An escape from all this.”

Zafira was quiet for a while. Her neck burned even as her thoughts raced. “He’d know his way around a bow and a blade.”

Yasmine’s brows lifted.

“He’d be my opposite, in every way. So contrasting that if you’d look at us a certain way, you’d notice that we’re exactly alike.”

She didn’t dream. She didn’t believe in wishes. She was no romantic like Yasmine, but somewhere along the way, she’d grown partial to another soul.

They were twin flames, twined by fate.

“Heavy words,” Yasmine said softly, “from a girl with no interest in love.”

The door swung open without a knock, and a liveried guard stepped back, formal and stiff as he announced, “Crown Prince Nasir bin Ghameq.”