We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

He hadn’t even drawn his scimitar. He’d come far from that moment on Sharr, when he’d looked at her without a shred of life in his eyes and told her it was kill or be killed.

Guilt made her wrap her arms around herself. She felt apart from the world, apart from him. Empty in a way that came with an act as irreversible as butchery.

Do not be empty. We will fix this.

She ignored the Jawarat as the men groaned on the cold ground and Nasir remounted Afya, turning them back to the main road without a word.

* * *

Nasir should have listened to the warnings in his limbs when he’d first turned down the road to this village. Once a threat, the Prince of Death now held out to common people the promise of treasure. A price on his head. A target on his back.

Worse, there was an hourglass already running its course, for Altair would have left Thalj, his plans now set in motion.

Nasir wasn’t meant to leave Demenhur and cross into Sarasin until dawn, when at least a sliver of light would grant them an equal sliver of safety, but now they’d have to plow through the Tenama Pass and spend their first night there. He couldn’t risk staying here another moment. Not with her.

The snow was bathed in weeping moonlight, houses and buildings passing in a blur of intermittent lantern light. He saw those seven men—boys with mouths too big for their years—lying on the ground. The prince’s whore.

Even when he was trying to do good, even when he wasn’t the one drawing a blade and stealing a soul, he was hurting people. Hurting her. Darkness slipped from him, streamed behind them.

“Speak to me,” he rasped into her hair.

Her hand fell to his wrist. “The moon likes you. See how she shines for you.”

Something lodged in his throat, drawn by the sorrow in her lilting voice.

“You’re not that,” she said after a moment, so softly he almost missed it beneath Afya’s hooves.

“Not what?”

“What they called you.”

He stiffened. “I know,” he said finally.

She only hmmed, acknowledging his lie.

Afya never complained, though it wasn’t long before Nasir felt the strain in her muscles. By then, they were deep into the Tenama Pass. The night had thickened, howls from hungry beasts winding from the rugged peaks of the Dancali Mountains.

The pass was a narrow length of darkness, a harrowing tunnel lit only by a shrouded moon. Uninhabited, apart from the sporadic tent erected in the shadows, fires lit and sheltered from the mischievous breeze.

Nasir didn’t stop at any of them, even the one where a woman waved and offered food for the remainder of their journey.

And then he came to a wrenching halt at the mouth of the pass. Afya was breathing hard, her sides heaving beneath them.

Nasir dismounted and stared.

“Sarasin,” Zafira whispered with a shiver.

The darkness was absolute. The moon had tucked herself away, ashamed of those below. Pockets of light flickered here and there, too faint to be seen as anything but eyes glowing in a graveyard, and with the dark came the cold, a chill beyond even that of Demenhur.

“There are ifrit here,” Zafira said, and Nasir remembered how well she saw in the dark. How well he could see now because of the newfound power in his blood, after years of enduring the fear that lived with

in him.

He began leading Afya on foot, a hand on his scimitar, his eyes on their surroundings.

They stopped in a village just small enough that they were unlikely to be recognized. The caravanserai was a low construction that sprawled beneath the moonless sky, horses idling in the courtyard along with a single caravan, the camels slumbering. It was solemn and silent, as forlorn as the rest of the terrain they’d passed, but it was open, and that was what mattered.

“Wait here,” Nasir said, knocking back his hood.