We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

The curtains rippled at the sight of him, stilling when he slipped the window closed. He was in an antechamber, neat and unlit. Dresses were piled atop a low table to the side, where they would remain untouched by the safi who had overseen their production. She was dead, Nasir knew.

He peered past the arched doorway and into a larger room, lit with faceted light from the narrow stretches of cutwork framing the large window against the back wall. And it was daama open. That would have been an easier entrance. A staircase wound down from the far end, but just before he could make his way toward it, movement halted him in his tracks.

A platformed majlis stretched against the wall beside the window, obscured at first by the curtains fluttering from a sudden gust of wind. It was occupied by a man, reclined and at ease, unchained and free to move about. His dark hair gleamed gold without his turban, his pointed ears proud. He looked different this way. Younger. Vulnerable. And not a single part of him appeared to belong to one who was imprisoned.

Laa, he was reading a daama book.

Nasir took a hesitant step toward him. “Altair?”

His half brother looked up. Surprise flickered across his face. Then his eyes narrowed with frantic urgency, there and gone before Nasir could comprehend it.

“Nasir,” he said. “Took you long enough.” He dropped his blue eyes to the sword in Nasir’s hand with a feeble smile. “Always so eager to kill me.”

“Now is not the time,” Nasir said around the rock swelling in his throat. Some weak part of him wanted to embrace the oaf.

“Oh, I see. I missed you, too,” Altair said, an ireful hollow in his voice as he rose. “You know, after you left me on Sharr, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

Nasir refused to wallow in guilt, not when the Lion or his ifrit could return at any moment. He glanced to the stairs. “I’m here now. Yalla. We need to leave.”

Altair didn’t move. “Do you remember when you walked into my rooms and I wasn’t alone?”

Nasir’s ears heated.

“They weren’t just any women. One was the daughter of a Zaramese merchant. The other a Pelusian wazir.”

“Good to know you’ve acquired a specific taste,” Nasir said as a sound cracked across the lower floor. He gripped the winding rail of the stairwell and gestured for Altair to follow, but the fool moved slower than a dying man crawling.

“When you have a reputation,” Altair said calmly, as if they were drinking qahwa on a majlis, “it’s easy to go unquestioned. Every Arawiyan I took to my room was an envoy.”

Nasir remembered the letters he had found sewn into the rug. How much Altair had done for the kingdom that had done nothing for him. “So you didn’t—”

“I’m many things, princeling, but a bore like you?”

Nasir heard the grin in his half brother’s voice, and, rimaal, he had missed it. “Right. Is there a reason this can’t wait until we’re back at the palace?”

Altair continued as if Nasir hadn’t spoken. “The Arz was destined to fall at some point, and I wasn’t going to stand by as it happened. I secured trade routes, forged alliances. As our mother struggled to hold the reins of our crumbling kingdom, I did my part in secret. She saw me as a failure—the culmination of he

r failures. I wasn’t going to be one, too.”

There it was again, the strange hollow that didn’t belong to Altair. He was trailing behind Nasir leisurely, despite the battle raging outside, and suspicion threaded Nasir’s veins. He had expected chains. Captivity and suffering. Ifrit keeping watch. Not Altair idling unattended with a book. Almost content. Almost annoyed to have been disturbed.

“To what end, Nasir? What was the point of all I’d done. Hmm?”

The anger in his tone gave Nasir pause, but he said nothing.

He left the stairs and crept to the door he had seen directly beneath the upper-story balcony. It had been almost too easy, this rescue, this escape. Though there were sounds of life inside the house, he hadn’t come across a single person, or otherwise, besides Altair. He eased the door open and stepped outside to a flood of shadow and turmoil, stopping in his tracks when he remembered something.

The heart.

Zafira couldn’t slip into the house to search for it now, not with the Lion’s attention undoubtedly attuned to her, and as much as he wanted to hurry to her aid, he couldn’t waste this chance.

“Where are you going?” Altair asked when Nasir turned back.

“To look for the heart, and—”

“The Jawarat?” Altair scoffed.

Nasir pressed his lips thin, holding still when the general leaned close.