“Zafira.” He cleared the roughness from his throat and tried again. “Zafira. We have to go.”
She made what she hoped was a believable act of waking slowly and turning even slower. His eyes were flint, unreadable.
At last, as if he knew, as if he needed to explain why he’d held her, he said, “You were shaking last night.”
“And then I stopped,” she said, holding his gaze to say that she knew why she had stopped and that she liked it and wished the night had never ended. What were words if not feelings?
“And then you stopped,” he replied, honing the weary cadence of his voice as if to say Me too, fair gazelle, me too.
But the night had to end. Everything had to. Cannot all three be one and the same? She’d been so deep within the turmoil of the Jawarat that she’d forgotten the weight of that question. The sweet torment it gave her.
Nasir was watching her, reading her, and his smile moments later was a spoonful of sorrow.
“Come,” he said, fitting his gauntlets and the mask of the Prince of Death back in place.
CHAPTER 84
Breakfast was tangy labneh with enough lemon to make Zafira’s mouth water, and crispy falafel. She watched Nasir break the chickpea patties in perfect halves as she obliterated her own share. They also shared sesame bread with slices of jibn, the cheese sweeter than she liked, and a dallah of mint tea.
After leaving the inn, Nasir fell silent. Zafira recollected their every conversation, assuming, in the end, that he was contemplating the question that wavered between them, an apparition neither acknowledged.
Ever since their angry lashing of teeth, tongue, and lips the day before, she had felt like herself. He had a knack for that, she realized, for grounding her. Her blood warmed at the memory. If he was the antidote to the Jawarat’s curse, it wasn’t so bad a problem to have.
The book hummed, and Zafira focused on the road. The sky was still dark as the night, the only indication of it being daytime the bright line far in the horizon that marked the edge of Sarasin.
“Do you think you can kill him?” Zafira asked after a time, aware Nasir’s mark might not be human. When he’d told her of the real Muzaffar, dead in the banquet hall of the Sultan’s Palace, a helpless cavern had opened beneath her. He hadn’t been any other merchant; he was one who had advocated for change, who had worked for the better of his people.
Now an ifrit had stolen his skin, his face, his seat.
Nasir looked delicately affronted. “Of course. After, it’s only a matter of confronting the Lion. Together.”
“Together,” she repeated with a dark laugh. “The others won’t be happy to see me, and you know it.”
“And now you’re here. The others won’t have a choice.”
She realized then what he had done.
“If I did not know any better,” she said around the fist in her throat, “I’d say you came along solely to kiss me.”
And be with me. And keep me sane. And protect me.
He laughed. “You speak as if you didn’t enjoy it.”
“Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I was only indulging you.”
“Those were not the sounds someone makes,” Nasir murmured against her ear, “when they’re merely indulging another.”
Her neck burned. The streets were empty.
“If we were in a story, what would happen?” Zafira asked before she could stop herself.
Nasir went rigid behind her. “What does that mean?”
“It’s a game Yasmine and I used to play,” she said, glanc
ing back at him. “Every day she would learn a new fact about the man she was falling for, and every day she would lengthen the list of what her imaginary husband would have and be when he swept her away. And then she married him.”
“But?”