She shivered.
“Now,” he said, no louder than a whisper.
She felt the word, tasted pomegranates when she drew air.
“Give me the Jawarat.”
He hadn’t looked for the hearts, or the safin he hated, or even the Silver Witch, more powerful than he could ever be. He wanted the Jawarat and its wealth of knowledge.
“And?” Her voice was all breath.
“When the Gilded Throne is mine, I will make you my queen as I forge a home for my kin. The world will be ours to shape as we will.”
The throne. For knowledge was power, and power was epitomized by the throne.
“All these years,” she said, and smoothly snatched her jambiya. She would protect that book if it was the last thing she did. “And you failed to notice I was never interested in crowns.”
She pressed the blade to his neck, devouring his flash of surprise. There and gone, trembling her resolve.
“Does the thought of my blood bring you joy?” He tipped his head back and her jambiya caught in the meager light, brilliant against his flesh.
Not joy—power. A remnant of the Jawarat’s vision, the one part of it she craved in some dark corner of her soul.
His voice was a lull in her ear. “Tear me open, azizi. Slit my throat and see if the blood I bleed is black or red.”
What mattered more was the blood he had spilled: that of Baba, Deen, Benyamin, the Sisters of Old, a thousand and one others.
“I will end you,” she whispered.
Her hand shook, succumbing to the rush of something heady and dark. His breath hitched, to her delight, and a bead of black welled from his golden skin where her blade touched him.
Ifrit blood, despite his half-safin descent.
The reason nothing pulsed against her fingers even now, why there was no beat in his chest. He was built like a man, like a safi—bones and tendons and organs—but was as heartless as an ifrit, truly so.
His soft, answering laugh was broken, a drag of cloth across thorns. The first fissure in his effortless composure.
“So you say,” he said, a lion making sense of a mouse. “Yet when I called from the darkness, you answered. Day after day, year after year, long before you ventured into my domain, you stood in the snow and spoke to me. Do you not remember, azizi?”
She had been small and alone then, when she had first stood in front of the Arz and asked what it wanted of her. She knew only that the Arz had spoken back. She simply hadn’t known that the voice belonged to the Lion of the Night, grooming her for what he needed.
“Where’s Altair?” she demanded. She wouldn’t show him a reaction to his words, to the stir of memories. “What have you done with the final heart?”
He ignored her just the same.
But she wouldn’t be brushed aside. “Why are you doing this?”
That was when he froze. The black pearl rolled down the plane of his neck, a dark, dark teardrop. She didn’t understand why he wanted magic, why he was so terribly enamored with knowledge.
“Why?” he repeated, so softly she thought it a sigh. His brow furrowed, confusion and a touch of apprehension in his amber eyes, another break in his careful composure that sent her reeling.
Almost as if … as if he couldn’t remember.
His gaze slanted to the corner of her bed.
Both of them lunged for the Jawarat at once. He knocked the dagger from her hand. She slipped beneath his arm, agile as she was, but he knew her as well as she knew herself and avoided her with a deft move.
“It won’t help you,” she gasped out, desperate. It’s mine. “It can’t be read. It imparts its knowledge to the ones it likes.”