We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

“I’m a Sister of Old, girl. I know how magic must be restored. It is the book I know little about, for it was created in their final moments, in their last attempt to triumph over the Lion.”

And they had. They hadn’t been strong enough to destroy him, but they had trapped him upon Sharr and created the Jawarat. The way Zafira saw it, the book had been created for a single reason: to house their memories so that one day their story would be known. To say why magic had been severed from Arawiya that fateful day, why they had died, and most important, where the hearts were located.

“The removal of the hearts from the minarets left Arawiya without magic, but the spell entrapping the Lion drew upon so much that it cursed the kingdom, leaching energy from every caliphate and causing havoc. Snow in Demenhur. Darkness in Sarasin. Sharr became frozen in time,” the Silver Witch said, catching Zafira’s surprise. “Indeed, life spans stretched beyond reason. Death became an impossible wish. By freeing the Jawarat and the hearts, you freed Arawiya, including those trapped upon the island. They were at last given the peace they sought.”

“Then the kaftar…” Zafira trailed off, tugging at the fringe of the scarf around her neck. She hadn’t been fond of the way the men who could shift into hyenas had leered at her, but they’d come to the zumra’s aid. They had helped fight off the Lion’s horde of ifrit.

“Dead.”

Zafira released a breath. How long did one have to live before death became a wish?

Jinan’s shouts echoed in the silence, the crashing waves muffling the rushing of feet on deck. Her contract with Benyamin would only take them to Sultan’s Keep, but they were heading for the mainland, close enough to Demenhur to rile a restlessness in Zafira’s blood.

“If you know how to restore magic, then you won’t need me,” she said. Or the book. “I can return home.”

She had left everything she’d ever known for magic. Journeyed across the Baransea. Trekked through the villainous island of Sharr. But that was before time and distance had created an insatiable yearning that came laced with fear.

Because she would need to face Yasmine.

“To what?” the Silver Witch asked without a drop of sympathy. “The Arz is gone. Your people have no need for a hunter.”

Her words were pragmatic, rational. Cruel. They stripped Zafira bare, reducing her to an insignificant grain in the vastness of the desert. Bereft, she reached for the ring at her chest—

And dropped her hand back to the Jawarat, running her fingers down the ridges of its spine. Almost instantly, she was filled with a sense of peace. Something that lulled the disquiet.

“When I bathe, will the pages melt?” Tendrils of sorrow lingered at the edges of her mind, too distant to grasp. She couldn’t remember being sad now. Nor even the reason for it. The Jawarat purred.

The Silver Witch paused. “I sometimes forget you’re only a child.”

“The world thieves childhoods,” Zafira said, thinking of Baba’s bow in her still-soft hands. Of Lana, brushing a warm cloth across Umm’s forehead. Of Deen, a ghost after his parents became bodies in a shroud.

“That it does. The Jawarat is a magical creation, immune to the elements, or it would have crumbled to dust within its first decade upon Sharr. Its life force, however, is now tied to yours because you so foolishly bound yourself to it. Tear out a few pages, and you may well lose a limb.”

Zafira hadn’t asked to be tied to the book. The Silver Witch was the one who had asked a child to go on this journey. It was her fault that Zafira was now bound to this ancient tome, and she hadn’t even needed Zafira for this quest. Only someone strong enough to resist the Lion’s hold. Unlike the Silver Witch herself, who had fallen deeper than any of them even realized.

Zafira had be

en certain Sharr had given them enough revelations to last a lifetime, but that was before Kifah’s pointed question. Before they’d learned Altair was the Lion’s son as much as he was the Silver Witch’s. Strangely enough, learning his lineage had only made her more partial to the general.

She bit her tongue. “And there’s no way to undo the bond?”

“Death,” the Silver Witch said, as if Zafira should have known. “Drive a dagger through the tome’s center, and you’ll be free of it.”

“How kind,” Zafira ground out. “I’ll be ‘free’ of everything else, too.”

She brushed her fingers across the green leather, thumb dipping into the fiery mane of the lion embossed in its center. The Silver Witch only hummed, studying the girl who knew the Lion almost as well as she did.

She envies us.

Zafira began to agree, before she clenched her jaw against the Jawarat’s whispers. They could be far-fetched, she realized. Why ever would a Sister of Old envy a mortal girl?

We will align with time.

Whatever that meant.

She jumped when the two lanterns struck with a sudden clang. Her quiver tipped, arrows spilling and dust swirling like the sands of Sharr. The Silver Witch didn’t flinch, though Zafira noted the tight bind of her shoulders, so unlike the languid immortal, before the door swung open, revealing a silhouette in the passageway.

Zafira recognized the mussed hair, the absolute stillness she had only ever seen in deer before she loosed a fatal arrow.