We Free the Stars Read online

  Seeing its absence was different. The finality carved a hollow somewhere inside her. The knife of the Silver Witch’s words dug deeper, and she shivered at the stillness in the air. The change.

  Who am I? she asked the sea. It whispered an answer she couldn’t comprehend, and she recalled another moment like this, when she had stood on the shore, amid smooth black stones.

  She saw Yasmine in her pale blue dress, waving her off. Precious Lana, glued to her side. Misk nodding in farewell, a spy not one of them had thought to suspect and wouldn’t still, if Zafira hadn’t learned of it from Benyamin upon Sharr. The safi’s ominous words about Demenhur echoed in her thoughts. About the sultan eyeing Arawiya’s second-largest army and taking it under his control the way he had done in Sarasin.

  “We should have gone to Demenhur first,” she said for the thousandth time as Nasir followed her to the longboat with the hearts, and because she didn’t want to sound as selfish as she felt, she added, “And sought the caliph’s aid. Who knows where the Lion is?”

  She looked away from the little crate with a surge of guilt. Was it selfish to think of her family? To want to see if they were safe? Was it selfish to choose the restoration of the dying hearts over her family?

  “He who pays the coin turns the wheel,” Jinan recited, “and Effendi Haadi’s instructions were to come here.”

  He’s also dead, Zafira didn’t say. She stepped into the boat with a sigh, and every bit of her came alert when Nasir’s knee brushed hers as he settled across from her. Pull yourself together.

  They were going to Sultan’s Keep, where people would bow at his feet and a crown would sit at his brow. There was death at his hip and darkness at his command.

  Still, her breath caught when the tender sun glossed his hair, when he gripped the oar as a lost memory ticked the left of his mouth up, crinkling his skin like the wrapper of a sweet.

  And then he was looking at her and she was looking away, a flash of silver drawing her eye from the deck of Jinan’s ship as the boat began its descent into the sea. This was where they would part ways with the Silver Witch, she realized.

  Anadil inclined her head, and Zafira was surprised to find she would miss her. Only a little.

  The Silver Witch met her son’s eyes in farewell and Nasir seized, his mouth hardening. He kept every emotion on a tight leash, hidden behind the ashes of his eyes.

  The longboat touched the gentle sea in the shadow of the ship’s figurehead. It basked in the sun, the curved beak of a bird drenched in gold, feathered wings curling into flames. A phoenix. Above the sails flew a sea-green banner, marked with Zaram’s emblem of a golden ax and three drops of blood. The oars turned rhythmically in the azure waters, lulling them until Jinan started up a chatter, her crew as eager as she was to talk about everything and nothing at all.

  “How can someone so small talk so much?” Kifah finally asked with almost-comical exhaustion.

  Zafira didn’t hear Jinan’s answer. As they crept toward land, a finger trailed down her spine. There was a heaviness in the air, a warning, and a hunter—a huntress—always listened to the signs of the earth.

  “Something’s not right,” she murmured.

  Kifah drummed her spear against her thigh and shook her head. “What have we to fear? We are specters, righting wrongs. We’ll let nothing stand in our way.”

  “Fancy words never kept anyone alive,” Jinan pointed out when the boat lodged into the sand at shore.

  “It’s a shame you’ve never met Altair,” Kifah replied.

  Zafira stepped out first, but her unease only worsened with a smattering of goose bumps down her arms. She tugged her foot out of the sand with a wet pop as the crew began rowing back to the ship, their farewells loud. Jinan, as oblivious as her sailors, stretched her legs.

  “There’s nothing I love more than the sea beneath my legs, but I’d be lying if I said this isn’t nice.”

  “Akhh, little firebird. You sound like an old man,” Kifah said. There was an eagerness to her voice now that she was free of the ship’s confines. “Oi, why aren’t you going back with the rest of them?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll be seeing a great deal of my vertically challenged self until I collect my silver. In the meantime, my crew will take the witch to the Hessa Isles and circle back. Not sure if a witch’s coin can be trusted, but the offer was too good to pass up.”

  “What do you plan to do with so much silver? Buy yourself a stool?”

  “Quiet,” Nasir said, and Zafira drew her bow in an instant, the taut string familiar and welcome. Kifah pivoted her spear as Nasir precariously hefted the crate under one arm and drew his scimitar with the other.

  Sunlight winked through the shifting sands and abandoned edifices. Zafira didn’t see the hooded figures until something stung her neck, and the world fell dark.

  CHAPTER 5

  The lull that followed the deafening grounding of the ship’s anchor was infinitely worse than any silence Altair had heard before. Worse than the quiet that followed the anointing of a fresh corpse. Worse than the silence after an offer was refused.

  Or maybe that was worse. How would he know? No one ever refused someone like him.

  He recognized Sarasin’s dark sands and murky skies instantly. Though brighter now and the sands less black, it was the perfect haven for ifritkind, and foreboding laced with the hunger in his stomach. How had his mother felt when she fled Sharr after the Sisters had fallen and the Lion had been trapped, a new burden swelling in her womb? How had it felt to assume a new identity, to tell her sons that they were of safin blood, a heritage leagues beneath that of the rare si’lah?

  Altair knotted the thoughts and trunked them.

  He followed the Lion down the plank, swinging his arms to and fro and rattling his chains loudly enough to wake the dead all the way down in Zaram. The picture of abandon even as he scoured the decrepit houses looming near the shore, searching for aid while isolation sank into his bones.

  Nothing. No one. They hadn’t arrived yet, or they would be here. Wouldn’t they? He knew Nasir and the others were due for Sultan’s Keep, but still. If he had lost one of his own, he would detour the world over to find them.

  “They are not here.”

  Altair started at the Lion’s voice. A portion of pita rested in his proffered hand. The second half was in his other, saved for himself. Only Nasir halved his food with such perfect symmetry. “And yet your eyes continue to stray to the horizon for those who will never come.”

  Hush, hush, went the water. It lapped at the sands, eager for secrets to carry to new shores.

  “I’m a general,” Altair replied finally. He took the food with cautious hesitance, hunger dulling his pride. “Vigilance is habit.”

  The Lion hummed. “We will find them, worry not. If they won’t come to you, we will go to them.”

  “And how do you expect to do that?” Altair asked tiredly.

  “With your blood and mine. Dum sihr. There is a spell that imitates the Huntress’s. I only need to find it.” The Lion frowned at his unintentional pun.

  Altair stepped off the plank with relief. The desert was far from solid ground, but it did not sway like the sea or lurch like the waves. It was as barren, however. Nothing spread for miles and miles. The emptiness bludgeoned his chest.

  “Why?” the Lion asked him suddenly, curiosity canting his head. The sun stretched a ray, casting the bold lines of his tattoo in iridescence. “You have no name. No throne. Arawiya has given you nothing, and you have given her everything.”

  To what end? was what he wanted to know.

  Altair had known for quite some time that he would never be king. His mother had kept him in the shadows far too long. Not once did she call the little boy at her side her son. Not once did she share her meals with him, or hold his hand.

  He was too painful to look at, too sinful.

  Decades later, Ghameq was chosen as her successor, the first mortal with claim to the throne. But Altair’s fate w
as sealed long before that, when their heir was born: dark-haired and gray-eyed. A boy full of promise and purpose, until he was shaped into a blade.

  Altair supposed he might have been jealous, had he been different and cared for the throne, had he not known that the gilded chair came with its own trials and tribulations.

  But he was perceptive.

  His mother would look to the shadows—not to see that he remained there, but to ensure he was safe. She allowed him the finest of rooms in the palace and the freedom of a prince. She assured his tutelage and training from the very best. They were scraps of love, but every morsel she fed him churned his own heart, taught him the value of the sentiment and its elusiveness.

  He loved Arawiya, and because there was no one to love him, he loved himself. Enough that he dedicated his life to earning that love, to ensuring he wasn’t the scourge she saw him as.

  “Do you think she meant to hide you from me?” the Lion asked, and the lack of scorn in his tone gave Altair pause.

  This time, his she referred to the Silver Witch, but Altair didn’t think she feared the Lion in that way. Not until he sank his claws into Ghameq.

  “Some good that did,” Altair answered, leaning back. His heels dug into the sand.

  The ghost of a smile crossed the Lion’s features. “True enough. In the end, she only abandoned you as they did. Benyamin, too, to an extent. He chose the prince when he leaped.”

  Altair was used to being second in all things. He didn’t mind, he told himself.

  Then why did it feel as if knives were tearing at his heart? Why did the veins in his arms strain against his skin with sudden fervor?

  “And you chose me?” Altair asked, mocking. “Is that what this is about? If you did, I wouldn’t be fettered like some kind of beast.”

  The Lion dropped his amber eyes to the chains, ruminating. “Perhaps it is time for a new alliance, then.”

  Altair cast him a look, ignoring the thrum in his blood, the buzz. The feeling that came with change, with being … needed.

  “Vengeance doesn’t suit me, Baba.”

  The Lion contemplated his words, considered his son as the sun rose higher and the winds streamed between them.

  Then he turned, and Altair barely heard his low order—“Stand aside”—before a volley of black rushed past him, unleashing themselves upon Sarasin. The horde in their true form. Shifting, shapeless beings of smokeless fire, some of them winged and clawed and unrestrained by human limitations.

  The Lion smiled. “Go forth, my kin,” came his soft command.

  Altair was not proud of his awe.

  “Arawiya is ours.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Death commands the tremor in the living.

  Live as if you are death himself. Command him as if you are his master. Depend on no one, for even your shadow will forsake you in the darkest hour.

  In the end, it wasn’t death that roused fear in Nasir, for his mother had taught him well. It was the darkness. The isolation it brought, reminding him that he was always alone. The way it thieved his sight, an abyss with a nightmare to tell:

  A boy, silver circling his brow, shackled by shadows.

  A sun, swallowed whole by gaping jaws.

  A girl, hair crowned as regal as a queen’s, the fire in the ice of her eyes bringing him to his knees.

  And a voice, saying: You needn’t fear the darkness when you could become it.

  Nasir came to with the evening’s light in his eyes, dust frenzying at his exhale and the dull throb of a needle prick at his neck. He dug his fingers into the rug beneath him—woven of the finest sheep’s wool—and noted the high sheen of the stone floor. None of it was familiar, but wherever he was, dinars were not in shortage.

  Neither was audacity, clearly. Kidnapping the Prince of Death was no act to be taken lightly. He hadn’t expected to be welcomed with open arms in Sultan’s Keep, but he hadn’t expected to find himself in trouble this early.

  Zafira stirred with a rustle of clothes. Her hair was coming undone upon the pale wool, and the rise and fall of her chest drove him to the brink. The rug beneath her became qutn sheets within the Sultan’s Palace. Her crowned hair became a circlet of silver and a shawl of silk. He drew a wavering breath.

  It wasn’t like him, to dream. To wish.

  It was barely a handful of heartbeats, but she stared back with fire in her hooded gaze as if she knew what plagued him. As if she had a thousand and one questions to ask, but it was his fault silence held them captive. Those three words had grown to a day, stretched to the moon’s rising, on and on, an ugly thing festering as the days wove past. This means nothing.

  He had never been good with words, but he had never expected to lament the fact.

  Kifah groaned from his other side, and Nasir looked away first as she sat up, unsure why he was so irritated. He flexed his unbound wrists. His boots were gone, as were the rest of theirs. It was customary to remove one’s shoes indoors, but less so to have them removed by someone else.

  “The hearts!” Zafira uttered suddenly, sitting up.

  Nasir jerked, jamming his elbow against a box beside him. The crate. He shoved open the lid, releasing a bated breath when he saw all four organs pulsing inside. His suspicion tripled.

  “Oi. Where’s Jinan?” Kifah asked, taking in the ample room with growing trepidation: the majlis seating flush against the floor, cushions barely worn, as if the inhabitants of this construction never sat for long. A scattering of maps and old papyrus, reed pens, an astrolabe, and unfinished notes. Shelves lined the opposite wall, sagging with books and aging artifacts that looked in danger of crumbling. A single door stood to the side, closed.

  The Zaramese captain was nowhere to be seen.

  “This place.” Kifah’s voice dropped. Slowed. “It reminds me of home.” Her discomfort was a reminder of why the ink of the Pelusian erudites didn’t span both her arms.

  Zafira rose with the agility that always made Nasir’s throat tighten, and he noted the quickness with which she reached for her bag to ensure the Jawarat was still inside. Lucky book.

  He parted the curtains at one of the narrow windows and looked out: date palms, tended gardens, the ornate edging of a sprawling building. He couldn’t see much, but these were no slums. The palace couldn’t be far from here. His father couldn’t be far from here, controlled by a medallion and a monster.

  “Kidnapped,” Kifah said, her voice a tad high. “Of everything that could have happened in Sultan’s Keep.”

  “Do you know where we are?” Zafira asked.

  It took him a moment to realize the question was directed at him, icy eyes catching him off guard. Rimaal, he was going soft.

  “I don’t know the inside of every house in Sultan’s Keep,” he said a little too harshly.

  “If you did, I would question whether you were the prince or an ambitious housekeeper.”

  He clenched his fist around a flare of shadow. “No, I don’t know where we are.”

  “That wasn’t too hard, now, was it?” There was a satisfied smirk on her mouth and a crackling in his chest.

  “Men are like fish,” Kifah said, the break in her voice giving away her unease.

  “Shiny, and of little brain?” Zafira replied.

  Kifah hefted the crate after a beat. “I half expected a response from Altair.”

  That was his cue, his jolting reminder: They’d wasted enough time. Nasir tried the door’s bronze handle, pausing when he found it unlocked.

  “The Lion could be out there,” Zafira warned. She lifted her bow and gestured to his sword and Kifah’s spear. “Jinan’s gone. We’re unbound, unharmed, and still armed. Whoever’s out there doesn’t fear us.”

  Nasir ignored the chill of her words.

  The short hall opened to a room drenched in evening light. The aroma of herbed venison and warm bread assaulted his senses, rumbling through his stomach before the distant hum of a terribly depressing tune dampened the air. Zafira stiffened, shoulders b
unching.

  And the air shifted as someone unfamiliar drew breath. Nasir pivoted, shoving the tip of his gauntlet blade against the stranger’s throat in the span of two heartbeats.

  “Apologies for taking the liberties precautions necessitate.”

  Benyamin, said the drowsed part of his brain, conjuring umber eyes and a feline grin, but though the words were unnecessarily languorous and markedly safin, the tone wasn’t as genial.

  Nor was the stranger deterred by the blade at his throat. He didn’t seem to notice it at all, and Nasir felt a fool as the light caught the two rings glittering from the peak of one elongated ear.

  His skin was as dark as Kifah’s, a smooth brown accented by the gold tattoo curling around his left eye. Nasir relaxed slightly at the sight of it, before he made out the tattoo itself: “nuqi.” Pure. A reminder that not all safin were as amicable as Benyamin. Many valued the so-called purity of their race and their perfection, looking down upon everyone else. As if his tattoo weren’t prideful enough, the safi’s high-collared thobe boasted panels in shades of cream and gold, most of the buttons undone to expose his torso.

  “Might as well unbutton the rest of it,” Kifah murmured behind Nasir, too low to be heard. By a human.

  “I can, if you’d like,” the safi drawled, and Nasir nearly risked his dignity to see her obvious mortification. “A prince goes off to Sharr and returns a savage. I cannot say I’m surprised. Is this any way to treat your host?”

  “A host doesn’t imprison his guests,” Zafira pointed out.

  “Yet here you are, mortal. Unbound and unharmed,” he said, echoing her earlier words. He touched the back of two fingers to the cord knotting the center of his dark beard; it was the same shade as his ivory turban.

  “Then where’s the Zaramese girl who was with us?” Kifah asked.

  “Back at sea, if I am to guess. Once she pocketed the ridiculous amount of silver promised, she left without a backward glance. Did you expect any more from a Zaramese?”