We Free the Stars Page 11

  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.”

  Help, she begged the Jawarat, but when the Lion of the Night closed his fingers around it, slowly morphing into Nasir once more, it did nothing. It was quiet.

  Laa, it was exuberant. She felt it buzzing in her own veins, chilling her to the bone. Because she had rejected its chaos and violence. She had rejected it.

  She lifted her eyes to the Lion’s, unwilling to let him see her horror.

  “I won’t fall for your lies again,” she vowed with halfhearted pride.

  The Lion only smiled.

  “You will fall, azizi. Mark my words, for it will be my greatest one yet.”

  His eyes swept the room, searching for what she blearily realized were the hearts, before he disappeared with what he had coveted, leaving her paralyzed by the emotions he had stirred with a smile and a kiss.

  CHAPTER 20

  “It’s what?”

  Seif’s pale eyes were livid, his rage sending the last of Zafira’s tenacity crumbling. The small room narrowed with each pound of her pulse, shelves along the walls flipping to prison bars, trapping her.

  “How could such a thing occur? How did he enter the house?” Aya looked stricken, her yellow abaya appearing colorless in the dim light.

  Lana was rooted at Aya’s side, and Zafira felt the distance between them as brutally as an ax.

  “Answer the question, Huntress,” Seif seethed.

  “How would I know?” she snarled. “I was in my room. It could have been you who let him in for all I know.”

  “Watch your tongue,” he hissed, and she felt like a child. “The dum sihr protecting the house might have run out, but you handed him the hilya tied up with a silver bow.” He rounded on Aya. “I knew we should not have trusted her to keep it safe. A mortal. A child. This is precisely what we feared.”

  Aya paled, and the fight drained from Zafira as quickly as it had come. Nasir was not here. Which was for the best, as she would not have been able to look at him, not without seeing him in her room, his scar in the light, his hand at her thigh. The Lion’s hand.

  “I didn’t know it was him,” she whispered.

  “How—”

  “Bleeding Guljul, for immortal safin, you’re all so dense,” Kifah snapped. “He’s half ifrit. Did you not think he could possibly shift like full-blooded ifrit can?”

  “Whose countenance did he resemble?” Aya asked.

  It was becoming increasingly harder to breathe. To think past the press of him, the amber in his false gray eyes.

  Zafira’s exhale broke.

  “Why does that matter?” Lana asked, coming to Zafira’s side and holding her hand. It was a blanket over her pulse, an instant quiet. “We can try to get it back without standing around talking. No. Okhti, what if he destroys it? You—”

  Zafira shook her head. “He won’t. If there is anything sacred to him, it’s knowledge.” Of that, she was certain, and if she had learned anything about the elusive Jawarat, it was that its knowledge was endless. “But he’s going to take the throne.”

  She didn’t speak of how he had vowed to make her his queen and how she had trembled from more than disgust and anger.

  Shame held her tongue, stopped her from telling them he promised something far worse than anything any of them could imagine. Laa, it wasn’t shame but fear. How would they regard her if they knew she had not only given him the Jawarat but conversed with him? Kissed him?

  It was the exact reason she couldn’t speak of the Jawarat’s malevolence. Of its vision and its whispers. To them, she was the girl who was pure of heart. Perfect in her desires.

  Fear. Shame. They were needles stitching thread between her lips.

  “As is expected.” Seif dismissed her words with irritation. “It was what he wanted a century ago. Did you assume he had changed? That his wants would end with the Jawarat and a single heart? Laa.”

  “Then we should go to the palace. Where the throne is,” Lana said, and no one commented on her use of the word “we.” As if she were a part of this. As if she had found a limb on the tree of the zumra and perched upon it, joining them in her own way.

  “But he can’t take the throne,” Kifah said, furrows lining her brow. “Every kid knows that. The Gilded Throne allows only the blood of the Sisters or the ones they’ve appointed.”

  Seif and Aya exchanged a look.

  “Perhaps,” said Seif. “Yet we’ve no knowledge of what the Jawarat will impart to him, what loophole the Sisters knew of that he will now know of. Regardless, he would be a fool to breach the palace before he understands the Jawarat. I’ve had safin scouring the city to no avail.” He worked his jaw. “I will send for more men.”

  The wariness in his tone rang like a bell. The noose was tightening around them, and it was her fault.

  “I’ll go.” The words spilled from her. She cleared her throat and lifted her chin, but found herself unable to meet anyone’s eyes. “I’ll go to Alderamin. To Bait ul-Ahlaam. I’ll find the vial of si’lah blood, and I’ll use it to find Altair, the heart, the Jawarat, and the Lion before he moves for the palace. Before he can do anything. I’ll fix this.”

  Impossible. The echoes of the Jawarat’s voice clung to her, even now.

  She shook its derision away. It might have been a lengthy list, but all four would be together. Of that, she was sure.

  “Okhti, no,” Lana whispered.

  But what did she understand? She could walk into a riot and heal a man, but she could not understand what the long burden of responsibility was truly like. Zafira had spent years caring for her people, doing right by them, always and always.

  Until today. When the Jawarat had spoken using her voice. When she had, as Seif said, given the Lion the Jawarat with a silver bow. She stared at her hands, remembering what they had done in that ghastly nightmare. Suddenly the Jawarat’s vision was no longer
so implausible.

  She would leave at dawn. Laa, she would leave now.

  “There’s more,” Kifah said, turning to Zafira. “I was about to come find you—look.”

  She lifted the crate from the low table and opened it. The hearts gleamed darkly in the slanting light of the lanterns. No. It wasn’t the light that made them appear darker, they were darker.

  “They’re dying.” Lana peered inside, voice small.

  Zafira’s own heart stuttered, her breath almost painful. Magic was why she’d set off on this course, why she’d left her home, her life, her family.

  It was dying before her eyes.

  That was when they came in, nine in all, dressed in rich hues and styles straight from a tailor’s fantasy. Benyamin’s High Circle. Beautiful and merciless, armed and cruel. Tattoos curled around their left eyes, marking them with the values they upheld over all else. She thought she’d heard others roaming about the house when she’d first arrived, but assumed she was hearing things when no one joined their meals. Pride. Not even Seif ate with them. Zafira contained herself, masking the awe that threatened to take over her features.

  Kifah’s voice was soft. “They’re going to take the hearts.”

  Zafira blinked at her. The word “take” rattled in her skull.

  Her first thought was of Deen and Yasmine’s parents, of how they had clutched their only son when the Demenhune army had come to take him away, months before they were drafted as apothecaries themselves.

  Skies, calm down. The hearts were not her children. They were simply the insignificant pieces of cargo she had risked her daama life upon a nightmarish island to attain. Nothing more.

  “Shouldn’t that be us?” she asked stupidly.

  Kifah looked at her. “We can’t be everywhere at once. Besides, we’re giving them the easy task. Ride a horse, climb some steps, insert a heart into the empty rib cage of a minaret. Khalas.”

  Her smirk widened when several of the safin shot her dirty glares.

  Lana, who had forgotten to keep her mouth closed when the safin stepped in, finally unearthed her decency. “Will it stop the hearts from…” She trailed off, unable to finish her question.

  Seif carefully wrapped three of the hearts in silk and passed them to the safin, who stood in ternary groups. “No one knows if restoring the four hearts will put a stop to their rapid deterioration, not without the fifth to set the Sisters’ magic in motion. What’s certain is that they are no longer safe here. The High Circle will restore each heart and remain on guard until we prevail.”

  The Lion swept his gaze around Zafira’s room again, searching for them, molding into Nasir once more.

  With a shiver, Zafira watched as the safin took the hearts and boxed them with delicate hands, held them with care. She bit her tongue against words of caution. How could she demand they be careful when she’d all but gifted the Jawarat to the Lion?

  Seif kept the fourth heart for himself.

  Have them, Zafira thought. She would let Seif and the High Circle have this small triumph. Laa, it didn’t belong to them; she would let them do this for her, and when she had the fifth heart and all the victory that came with stealing from the Lion of the Night, she would restore it herself.

  She would be the reason magic returned.

  Seif turned to her, his cruel gaze deflating her moment. “Well? Are we to leave for Alderamin?”

  We? Ah—that was why he had kept a heart for himself. He was going to restore it to Alderamin’s royal minaret.

  When she didn’t answer, Seif added, “Or was that proclamation yet another undertaking too heavy for you to handle?”

  Zafira dropped her head, her failure still too fresh and too raw to allow a retort. Several of the safin tittered, and she wondered how they could want the best for Arawiya and still be so infuriatingly ill-mannered.

  One by one, the trios of the High Circle took their leave, and one by one, the three hearts destined for Pelusia, Zaram, and Demenhur disappeared into the night.

  Breathe, she told herself. Kifah stared after them, her face frozen before she caught herself and looked to Zafira with the edge of a smile. It warmed her, somehow, knowing she wasn’t alone in the feeling of loss. In missing the hearts the moment they left the threshold of the house.

  “Don’t leave,” Lana said. Aya’s kit was in her hands.

  “Come with me, then,” Zafira said, “and we’ll never have to be separated again.”

  The moment Lana bit her lip, Zafira knew it was a wish too far-fetched. They had always been on different paths, she with her arrows and her sister with her tinctures.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Zafira asked, uncaring of the frenzy bleeding into her voice. Uncaring of Seif’s impatience and Kifah’s pity.

  Lana only shook her head, sliding a glance at Aya.

  It was one more shovel digging into her already hollowing heart.

  * * *

  Even the touch of the poker was less painful than this hollow in Nasir’s heart. All he wanted was for the emptiness to come to an end. It was all he had ever wanted, he realized. To be seen. Understood.

  Needed and wanted.

  He began the lengthy task of undressing, beginning with his weapons before he loosened the sash of his robes, then straightened the folds of his shirt and hung it behind the chair. The breeze from the open window counted the endless scars on his back with a curious touch.

  The soft scuff of bare feet broke the silence, and he froze with his hand at the band of his pants. He didn’t bother reaching for his sword. His bare hands would suffice.

  “Hiding will do you no favors,” he said, voice deathly low, and almost instantly a figure emerged from the shadows near the latticed screen, illuminated by the multiple lanterns.

  He would know that slender build anywhere.

  “Kulsum.”

  She lowered the ochre shawl from her head, dark hair glossy in the light.

  For a moment, he could only stare. His heart was a ruin scrubbed raw, his mind a scramble of pain and memory. This was the girl he had loved, whose body he knew as well as his own. Whose voice was the most melodic he had ever heard, until his father learned his son had found an escape. Laa, it was the Lion who had found him, the Lion who had controlled Ghameq’s hand, carving her tongue from her mouth.

  As if Nasir had not abhorred himself enough before, the butchery had drowned him in a deep pit of self-loathing. He had kept his distance, blamed himself and vowed useless vows until that moment on Sharr, when he had learned Kulsum was a spy. What he didn’t yet know was how long she had been in Altair’s employ—long before the moment they’d first met? After his mother’s death? Since she’d lost her tongue?

  “You came for Altair,” Nasir said.

  She nodded slowly, yes and no, a painful reminder of what she would never again have. How had she entered the house—by writing Aya a letter?

  “Then you would know he’s not here,” he said. Aya would have told her as much. Accusation flared in her dark eyes, and he gave a mirthless laugh. “Don’t worry, I didn’t kill him, but as you’re aware, there are fates worse than death. He’s with the Lion of the Night.” And then, because he was cruel and horrible and hurting, he said, “I would worry about telling you too much, for servants like to gossip, don’t they?” The monster inside him stretched a smile. “But we both know you can’t tell them anything.”

  Not a single emotion flashed across her face.

  She was better at this than he could ever have imagined. She glided closer, and he marveled at how much hatred he could summon for someone so beautiful, but was it hatred for her or himself—or for them both?

  Her gaze dropped to his chest, to the fresh burn near his collarbone. He should have reached for his shirt, but what was the point? She had seen him this way countless times. She had seen more than this.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked softly.

  She didn’t answer. She would never answer in a thousand years.<
br />
  “What could compel you to feign love for a monster?”

  He studied the way she stood, straight-backed. The way she walked, head high, dress free about her legs.

  She was not lowborn, a thing he should have realized years ago. And if befriending Kifah had taught him anything, it was the lengths a person would go for vengeance.

  “You weren’t always Altair’s spy. He saw an opportunity and took it, but you…,” he said slowly, and faint lines of shadow painted his arms. He heard Zafira’s soft laugh in his ears. Breathe. “You had plans of your own.”

  The glitter in her eyes was confirmation enough.

  “I killed someone,” he reasoned. What else could he have done? He had never plotted or connived or brought anyone down. He killed them, simple as that. “Your father.”

  She shook her head.

  “Mother?”

  Another shake. No—she had forsaken a good life for the purpose of growing close to him. To make him love her with the intention of breaking his heart.

  “A lover,” he realized with a hollow, contrite laugh. “I killed the one you loved, and so you forsook your life for a path of vengeance. Admirable. Was it worth it, love? Did you laugh as my father branded me? Did you gloat as I came back from my missions bereft of another piece of my soul? Did my sorrow bring you pleasure, Kulsum?”

  She reached for him, and Nasir stepped back.

  “I would choose death over your touch.”

  He was no saint. He was well aware of the irony in his disgust.

  “You should have thought it through. You should have realized the sultan hated me more than you ever could. You might have kept your tongue, then.” He shook his head in the silence. “None of it hurt more than that, did you know?”

  None of it had hurt more than the belief that she had lost her tongue because she had dared to love a monster, when in reality, it had been the price of her revenge. The curtains fluttered, eager for more, and the breeze tugged on the door he had been too scattered to shut.

  “But if you were willing to sacrifice so much to bring me the level of pain you suffered, then mabrook. Your vengeance is complete.”