We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

The last time he had seen Zafira—as she stood on the ship departing for Sharr and revealed her identity to all—rage had burned in his gaze. Now, the wrinkles on his face were more pronounced and the light in his brown eyes had dulled. The regard he had once shown when he’d thought her a boy was gone.

She didn’t care. Laa, she pitied him and his too-small mind.

“I retrieved the Jawarat, and this is how you look at me?” she demanded. “Did you not hear of the Arz falling? Of the sands of Sarasin turning gold again? Of the snow in Demenhur fading?”

“And?” he asked.

That tiny word drowned in a lifetime of prejudice.

“And what? Did you stop believing in Arawiya’s restoration the moment you learned I was a woman?”

The caliph didn’t move. “Destruction befell the western villages not long after your departure, Hunter. Not long after you dropped your hood.”

Why was she trying to speak to him? Why did she think she could make him understand?

Because that is who you are.

Zafira froze, sharp pain splitting her skull. That voice wasn’t the Jawarat’s. It was Yasmine’s and Lana’s. It was Umm’s.

No, bint Iskandar. There are those for whom reason does not exist. Do you weep the loss of virtue when we have given you power?

The Jawarat was right.

“Speak my name,” she said quietly, in a voice not entirely hers.

He took a careful step back. “How did you get past the guards—”

Zafira laughed. “Look at you. Pathetic. Afraid of a woman.”

His fear was so tangible that she wanted to gather it in a bottle and relish later—laa. She was no monster. She didn’t toy with her prey the way a lion did with a mouse.

“You took the future of a girl and did with it as you willed,” she said. Or perhaps it was the Jawarat that spoke. Her vision blurred.

“Whom do you speak of?”

“Your daughter. All of Demenhur’s daughters.”

The caliph swallowed audibly. “Guards!”

Zafira started to laugh before a pair of guards rushed inside.

“Sayyidi?” they asked.

Both of them stopped short when they saw her. Their swords flashed in the moonlight, uncertainty at the sight of an unarmed girl halting their blows. Perhaps she would have left. Perhaps she would have been sated by the scare she had made, if not for the satisfaction on the caliph’s face.

The complacency of knowing she, a young woman, had lost.

You wish to give a girl her throne, the Jawarat told her. Circumstance favors us.

Pain seared her palm. Something bold and angry crowded her gaze, as if leniency were a concept she knew nothing about. She lifted her hand.

With nothing but the moon as her witness, Zafira brought down her fist. Agony split the room, the throes a song in her skull. The night bled crimson, echoing with screams.

This is man, bare to the world. Halved of his whole.

She was the bladed compass, honed by the Lion and wielded by the Jawarat.

She was ruin, she was havoc, and she reveled in it.