We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

“Help me down. I’ll ask.”

He took a fortifying breath before marching back toward her, but the sudden scuffle of boots across ice made him freeze. He snatched a bundle of rope from the stable ledge and she turned in Afya’s saddle, breath clouding the air, to find a group of men meandering down the road.

They spotted Nasir immediately.

“Marhaba!” they called with typical Demenhune hospitality.

Nasir’s response was hesitant. “Peace unto you.”

His accent betrayed him.

“Come for a room, Sarasin?” one of them asked, lantern swaying.

Nasir responded too softly to hear. That, or her pulse was suddenly too loud to hear anything else as they crowded around him, scrutinizing him. A few of them even turned back to observe her.

“I know you! You’re the Prince of Death!”

She held still.

“And look,” another crowed. “The prince’s whore.”

She did not think a handful of words could strip her bare as easily as a knife. Reduce her. Defile her.

They are nothing, the Jawarat told her, but its voice was quiet, hesitant.

“There is a price on your head, Sultani,” one of them said.

Her blood burned, but she heard the unsheathing of a rough-edged blade.

“Dead or alive.”

Nasir’s voice was level. “A price set by whom?”

“The king.”

Zafira flinched. Word was traveling quickly—too quickly. This was a lowly village just beyond the mountains. It couldn’t have been possible.

“Oi, you three get his girl. The rest of you”—the leader of the group swung his dagger—“kill the Sarasin dog.”

If she hadn’t been watching Nasir, she wouldn’t have seen it: the shatter of his gaze, lit by the moonlight. The break in his composure.

The men were quick to brandish their weapons. Swords. Rods. Mostly daggers. Zafira gripped Afya’s reins with white-knuckled fingers, useless. The Jawarat whispered in her skull, too frantic to decipher.

“You know who I am. You should know you can’t kill me,” Nasir said, but there was something reluctant in his voice. The abundance of Demenhune made his silvery lilt more pronounced, more deadly, yet the men laughed. It was a drawstring being pulled tight.

The cinching of a noose.

Nasir deliberately wound the rope around his fist, giving way to an awkward silence until he looked up at them with a lift of his eyebrows as if to say This is your last chance.

Three of them turned to her, leering, their gazes as debasing as what they had called her. She counted each heartbeat as it pounded in her ears, her jambiya pulsing against her leg, Altair’s black dagger in her boot.

Zafira heard the snitch of Nasir’s gauntlets and his blades cut across the night, toppling two of the men and startling the third. Nasir’s rope-bound fist shot out next, knocking one of them out with a blow to his jaw before he whipped the tail end of the rope, tripping the other three. The last of them threw his crudely made spear, wincing when it clattered to the stone walkway.

“Hmm,” Nasir said, assessing.

He circled back, stopping only to pluck his gauntlet blades from the men’s thighs, giving the last a look that sent him scampering, his features illuminated by the moonlight. He wasn’t much older than Zafira. They were all young, but that didn’t surprise her as much as something else.

The Prince of Death hadn’t killed a single one of them.