We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

On this very bed, in a bout of sorrow, his mother had mended the burns on his back. On this very bed, in a bout of hunger, Kulsum had slid the linen from his shoulders and he from hers. On this very bed, in a bout of companionship, Altair had propped up his sandals and teased him without mercy.

Were all monsters lonely, he wondered, pretending to be aloof and unafraid? Was it that falsity that nurtured them, cultivating them with careful precision, unique and unmatched?

He missed him. In the way it felt to lose feeling when a limb went numb.

He missed her. In the way it felt to stop breathing. Like he was losing himself.

And it was because of this loneliness that he knew with sudden awareness that he was not alone.

CHAPTER 31

The rope came for his neck. It was rough and frayed, meant for a bucket in a well, not the refined throat of a prince.

Seven. In the stillness before he moved, he counted them. Seven daama men to murder someone in his own bed.

He yanked the rope, bracing for his attacker’s forward stumble. The man’s face crashed against the back of his skull, nose crunching. Nasir flipped him over his shoulder, and he truly did want to stop and politely ask who had sent him and what for, but the fool was fumbling for his jammed gauntlet blade, so Nasir speared him through the throat. Fitted robes and an angular hood. Hashashin.

And he was bleeding on Nasir’s bed.

“There’s a reason I limit the company in my bedroom,” he said quietly. “And now all of you are going to die for ruining my perfectly good sheets.”

Two lanterns flickered to life, illuminating a man on the majlis at the far end of the room. It took everything in Nasir’s power to keep the surprise from his face. His father. The medallion hung from his neck, glinting like vicious teeth.

“Must have been difficult,” Nasir said, a bit of Altair slipping into his tone as he rose, “having to refrain from killing me in the throne room.”

The sultan leaned back without a word, the shift barely visible in the soft light, but Nasir saw it clearly enough. He swerved as a hooked blade came for his neck, catching his arm instead. The trap was being sprung. He shoved his attacker away and wrenched the blade free with a hiss, plucking two throwing knives from his belt slung on the wall.

There were hashashins, and then there was Nasir: trained by the best masters the art could offer, honed into a weapon by a Sister of Old.

Nasir unleashed the blades, starting a tally in his head when a choked wheeze announced one true strike. It was the song of death. The hiss of a blade and the final, sputtering beseeching of a breath that could not be followed. A song Nasir knew as well as his own name.

His arm bled and his neck throbbed, yet his limbs were filled with a type of zeal he had been missing in the past few days.

A weight slammed into his back, and he fell with a wheeze, toppling the other man by digging his fingers into the back of his leg. Still on his knees, Nasir snapped the hashashin’s arm before impaling him with his gauntlet blade, barely rolling out of the way as another sword sailed for his neck.

Aiming to kill.

He doesn’t need me anymore.

Pain knifed through his side. Focus. But Nasir was numbed by a sudden realization: His mother may have made him into the weapon that he was, but it was the Lion who had used him to do his bidding—kill people, venture to Sharr. And now that the Lion was free of the island’s shackles, magic nearly in his grasp, he didn’t need Nasir anymore.

He swung his legs around another hashashin’s shoulders, dragging the man down with a twist of his knees and kicking the dead body in the path of another.

Then he turned to his father.

The sultan began to rise, but Nasir was quicker. It was knowing the Lion controlled him that made it easy. That made him bold. Still, his hands shook. His mind was strangely focused and untethered at once, for all his life he had wondered what it would be like to go against the one who had used and abused him relentlessly.

He faltered at the whisper of a blade. He could repeat the words over and over, and yet such an act—his father drawing a weapon against his own son—still had the power to penetrate. To paralyze.

The same part of him roared its doubt. Years of corruption could not be undone with a single act, within a fraction of a night. But he would be damned if he didn’t try.

Nasir ducked beneath the arc of his father’s dagger. He seized Ghameq’s arm with one hand, reaching for his chest with the other. For the medallion glinting, taunting, controlling. His fingers hooked around the thin chain, and Ghameq’s breath hitched. Stars flashed in his vision, the force of his father’s fist tearing the air from his lungs. He blinked back into focus, gripping the chain and digging his elbow into the crook of his father’s arm. But Ghameq had always been the bigger man, the stronger of them, and three of the hashashin were still alive.

They converged at once, and Nasir paused. One. Two. He dropped his hold and ducked. Ghameq’s dagger drove into a hashashin’s heart. Nasir shoved his gauntlet blade into the other hashashin’s knee, wasting no time to kill him and rise behind Ghameq and drag the chain over his head.

The whispers were instant, throwing Nasir off balance. They slithered, dark and rough and snakelike. Begging and moaning and full of want. Want. Want.

Drop it, she said in his head, lilting and fierce.