We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

After avoiding the patrons and the woman playing the ney as he downed a bowl of shakriyeh—the yogurt warm but the lamb sparse—Nasir returned to the corridor as Rameela was leaving.

She regarded him differently, wiping her hands on her abaya. “It is a horrible wound.”

“An arrow.” He saw no reason to shirk the truth.

“It was mended well,” Rameela said, “but it has torn again.” She eyed him as if that were somehow his fault, and looked back to the closed door. “She speaks strangely at times, to herself, laa? Fatigue won her over, Sultani.”

Nasir held still.

“You hold yourself too proud,” Rameela said, as if that explained it. “But it was the scar that gave you away.”

He stared her down in the cramped hall, aware that any of the surrounding rooms could hold a mercenary out for silver. Aware that Zafira could be lying in a pool of her own blood because he was a fool to have left her.

Rameela wagged her finger at him. “Any boy beneath this roof is to be treated as my son, prince or not,” she said with mock sternness.

Nasir exhaled in relief. Had she heard his father was dead? That he was no longer a prince, but a displaced sultan himself?

“The bed’s a narrow fit, but there’s space in the room for a bedroll, should you like one.”

He thought of what the men in the small Demenhune town had called Zafira, and declined.

“The hall is fine,” he said, not bothering to elaborate in Rameela’s expectant silence.

“Right, then,” she said. “There is one detail I wish to know, if you are to stay the night. You are the prince, but who is she?”

Zafira had shared nothing at all, it seemed.

“Demenhur’s legendary Hunter.”

She laughed softly. “I should not be surprised the Hunter was a girl all along.”

CHAPTER 80

In the end, Rameela pitied Nasir and, after assuring him that she would keep watch over Zafira through the night, showed him to a small room used to store spare covers and other odds and ends. It was cramped, but the door had a lock and her son left him a bedroll before the tiny fireplace, so it served its purpose.

He was dreading the moment when he’d tell Zafira that he had orders to stop in Leil. That he didn’t, in fact, leave Thalj solely for her and would not be taking her to Sultan’s Keep. Khara, he should have been a little more up front about that bit. He had finally convinced himself to close his eyes—the word “dog” pounding in his skull in time with his breathing, Zafira straight-backed and unflinching atop Afya as the men sneered at her—when a flash of silver knifed the dark room.

And materialized into a woman.

Nasir sat up. “Doors were made for knocking.”

The Silver Witch’s lips twitched into a faint smile. “And yet a locked door never stopped you.”

The edges of his mouth ticked upward, briefly, as the fire rioted in the quiet. He looked to her hands, but they were empty, no papyrus in sight. Why was she here, if not for Altair’s missive?

“Did you find the people you needed on the Hessa Isles?” Nasir asked. How else could she have materialized in this room, idiot? But he’d spoken the words as an apology, the closest he would go to atone for his coldness on board Jinan’s ship, and he wondered if she would understand. If she would accept it.

She bobbed a nod, for that was how mothers were. “My immortality is no longer at risk. I have regained my powers.” She paused. “I heard the Lion has taken the throne. So I came to … to…”

Nasir saw the mother he knew in the uncertainty crowding her mouth and the concern mellowing her harsh gaze. He heard the question she asked in the silence. The reason she had come to him, and not Altair, as planned.

“He died,” he said.

With his eyes closed, her broken exhale was infinitely worse. With his eyes closed, he could dare to imagine both his parents were here in this room in this moment.

“He said—” Nasir stopped. What were these feelings so taut in his throat? When had he begun to suffer so much? “He thinks of you when the moon fills the sky.”

Nasir slipped the pie