We Free the Stars Read online

  Seif closed his eyes and released a slow, exasperated exhale.

  “I’ve seen drawings of it in a book,” Lana hurried to explain. “It’s in Alderamin, isn’t it? You can find anything there.”

  Aya canted her head. “The House of Dreams thrives because of its exaggeration, little one. I do not think anyone there will have a vial of si’lah blood.”

  “No. Bait ul-Ahlaam is an exaggeration to those who aren’t looking for anything in particular,” Kifah said, to Lana’s relief. “My father’s made the trip from Pelusia more than once, and he always finds what he wants. Every daama time. Unfortunately.”

  “I thought your father didn’t like magic,” Zafira said.

  “He doesn’t,” Kifah said bluntly. “It’s a shop full of oddities, magical and non. Every tincture and herb once readily available in Demenhur. Soot from the volcanoes of Alderamin. Black ore. And it’s ancient. If any place would have a vial of si’lah blood, it’s one that’s been around as long as the Sisters.”

  “It is possible,” Seif ceded, and Lana couldn’t contain her wide grin. Something in his gaze said he knew the place more intimately than through hearsay. Possibly been there himself, like the Silver Witch. “The keeper is known to … bargain.”

  He spoke with the same hesitance, too. As if they had both discovered what they had needed and given far more than they had expected to.

  Still, as much as Zafira loved magic, she wasn’t certain she wanted to commit the crime of dum sihr for a short burst of it. The last time she had slit her palm, she’d bound herself to an immortal book. Seif started pacing again, and she struggled to breathe. She headed for the foyer, feeling for the Jawarat in her satchel.

  You fear, bint Iskandar.

  “Should I not?” she mumbled. Speaking to the book aloud made her feel infinitely less insane than when she spoke to it in her head and the daama thing responded.

  We are of you. We will protect you.

  As if a book could protect her from anything. According to the Silver Witch, she needed to protect it, or she’d die with it.

  Fear is but a warning to heed.

  “A book that literally spews philosophy. Yasmine would love it,” Zafira said dryly, realizing a beat too late that the others had followed her.

  “Mortals. Their lives are so short, they resort to speaking to themselves,” Seif drawled to Aya.

  Zafira nearly growled. “My name is Zafira.”

  “Don’t bother,” Kifah interrupted. “He sees our round ears, and we’re suddenly walking corpses. At least we know when it’s time to get in our graves.”

  Useless talk will take us nowhere, bint Iskandar.

  “Are we going to try the market?” Lana asked.

  Breathe.

  “Which of us will make the journey?” Kifah’s voice distorted.

  Inhale.

  “The bridge across the strait remains intact.” Aya’s words floated from far away.

  Exhale.

  “Give us the hearts and the Jawarat,” Seif said as Nasir watched her, only her. “We’ve put too much trust in mortals, and—”

  Something inside Zafira snapped. A scream raged through her veins. Her hand twitched for an arrow.

  We

  are not

  mortal.

  Everyone and everything stilled.

  She flinched at the sudden, piercing attention. Blood rushed through her ears and the fluttering curtains laughed.

  “Okhti?” Lana asked.

  Zafira blinked. Kifah made a strangled sound, but the first to take a cautious step toward her was Nasir. As though Zafira were an animal he was afraid to startle.

  “Are you certain you’re all right?” He looked at her as if not a single other soul existed on the earth.

  She could not meet his eyes. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You—” Nasir started. “You referred to yourself as we. As two people. You said you aren’t … mortal.”

  “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything.”

  There was a sinking in her stomach. The five of them stared as if she were on some sort of stage, making a fool of herself. She stepped back toward the entrance, the long handles of the double doors curving into her back.

  Nasir took a step closer. “Give me the Jawarat.”

  “I don’t have it,” she lied. It was in her satchel; they couldn’t see.

  “Zafira.” Nasir’s tone was meant for a disobedient child. “It’s in your hands.”

  She looked down. Slants of light set the lion’s mane on the Jawarat’s cover ablaze. She tightened her grip around the book that had used her mouth to speak senseless words. Sweet snow below, what was happening to her?

  She looked from Aya’s curiosity to Seif’s smugness, then to Kifah’s confusion and Lana’s worry, and finally to Nasir. It was the pity in those gray eyes that did it.

  Her resolve fractured. Fell.

  Leave them. Freedom rests beyond these doors.

  Zafira threw open the doors and ran, recalling this same panic from when she raced through the oasis on Sharr. Wind against her limbs. Blood loud in her ears. Fragile sanity threatening to unravel.

  She was ashamed that Lana had been there to witness it. Kifah, too.

  “This is all your fault,” she hissed.

  Stop.

  Like a fool, she listened, stopping just beyond the gates of the house, and the reminder that she was in Sultan’s Keep hit her with a force. The cobble of hewn stone was warm beneath her bare feet. Sweet snow, the western villages of Demenhur were slums compared to this. It was a masterpiece of time and diligence, from the detailing on the ground to every carved bit of the sprawling houses surrounding her. Even the sky looked richer, the blue clear and vast. There was no difference between her and an urchin hiding in the richer end of the sooq. Her blue-black qamis, shorn from a dress that had cost one too many dinars long ago in Demenhur, felt like rags.

  They—

  “Stop,” Zafira hissed. “Don’t tell me anything.”

  The sudden silence was filled with the Jawarat’s petulance and a guilt-inducing shame. Perfect. Shadows stretched, warning her that she wouldn’t be alone for long. Voices carried. Farther down the road, she could make out the stalls of a sooq tucked between buildings for shade, and the last thing she needed was for someone to demand who she was.

  She hurried in the opposite direction, finding a small alcove created in the angle of space between three of the massive houses. Sunlight slanted within the confines of tan stone just so, illuminating an arch set into one of the walls and built of dazzling glazed tiles in hues of blue and red and gold, like a doorway to a hidden world. She stepped close, only to find it wasn’t a door but a fountain, a pool of glittering green water rippling beneath it.

  It was beauty that felt delicate, a moment suspended out of time. Beauty she couldn’t appreciate.

  “I don’t know why I listen to you,” she hissed.

  The Jawarat didn’t answer, and Zafira pressed herself against the wall to collect her breath. A sand qit rose from its perch near the fountain, eyeing her with distrust.

  It is truth. We are not mortal.

  Perspiration trickled down the back of Zafira’s neck as the sun ratcheted up the heat.

  We are immortal.

  “And suddenly I am, too?” she asked angrily.

  We are bound, you and us. The span of our life is yours.

  “That … that isn’t how it works.”

  Can pith made papyrus speak to a witless girl?

  She gritted her teeth, ready to fling the Jawarat into the fountain. “What do you want from me?”

  There had to be a reason it spoke to her, goaded her. She wasn’t like the Lion or the darkness in which the Jawarat had festered. She was powerless, as Seif continuously repeated. Perhaps it was time to entrust Aya with the book and—

  A hiss reverberated in her ears, and she dropped the Jawarat in her fright. It fell open on the dusty stone. She looked about sharply, but only
the fountain gurgled softly, dust dancing in the slanting sunlight.

  Then the book slammed itself shut.

  Bint Iskandar.

  The words were a terrible moan. Fear crept into her veins.

  Let us show you what you can do.

  The alcove faded away, ebbing light giving shape to the snowy stretch of a village and a cloaked woman in its center. The sooq looked familiar, as did the scant, spindly trees. Demenhur. Yet Zafira herself wasn’t in the caliphate. It was as if she were looking through a spyglass into another world, an observer.

  The green leather of the Jawarat was clutched in the woman’s left hand, the fingers of her right twisting to the skies, and words Zafira couldn’t understand slipping from her tongue. An incantation, almost. A spell.

  Shouts rang out as people ran from the sooq in fear, fleeing from her—the woman—as she brought her fist down suddenly.

  And the ground surged upward.

  The circular jumu’a meant for gatherings erupted. Stone and debris hurtled toward the surrounding stalls and struck down screaming villagers. Several men ran toward the woman, some with tabars and swords, others hefting bricks and whatever makeshift weapons they could find.

  Even as they neared, the woman did not move. The biting chill stirred her cloak.

  She merely flipped to another page of the Jawarat, and after a few breathless moments, Zafira watched as she arced her hand down.

  Rending

  the men

  in half.

  Screams broke out anew, bodies fell to the ground with sickening thuds. No, Zafira tried to shout, to stop this senseless violence, but her mouth was sewn shut. She struggled to breathe, bound to this terrible vision, laa, nightmare. For that was what it was.

  A nightmare.

  The men fell, one after the other. Halved by her terrible power. By the Jawarat’s power. The grisly image seared itself into Zafira’s skin. More men dropped to their knees, their own swords through their guts. The ruined sooq turned crimson as blood flowed freely, pooling around the woman’s feet.

  Silence fell, and with a satisfied hum, she turned, knocking back her hood with a bloody hand.

  And Zafira stared at herself.

  It was her, down to the ice in her eyes and the angry set of her brows. Exactly her, except for one thing.

  Her hair was the color of splintered bone.

  A silver vial filled with something thick and crimson hung around her neck, and when the white-haired version of herself slid the Jawarat beneath her cloak, Zafira saw a fresh gash across her palm, nestled in a sea of scars, flesh knitted back. Dum sihr. She strode to a black steed, boots slicing snow before she mounted and disappeared into the streets.

  Leaving behind a tomb.

  The lavender door of Bakdash hung on its hinges. Araby’s colorful sweet shop was a pile of rubble. She saw men, boys, children—dead. All of them. Struck with stone, cut in half, innards and organs spilling out, bleeding, bleeding, bleeding.

  Because of her.

  “Please,” she begged. She didn’t know to whom she begged; she merely repeated the word until her surroundings blurred and she lost her balance.

  And then, nothing.

  Zafira dug the heels of her palms into the stone and lifted her head with a wheeze. The alcove surrounded her. The Jawarat was by her knees.

  Do you see, bint Iskandar?

  She only saw something far more sinister than the Lion of the Night. Something small and unassuming, with centuries of memories from Arawiya’s most powerful beings, and nearly another with far worse: the evil that had seeped within Sharr.

  And it had controlled her.

  “Why?” she whispered. “Why me?”

  The purest of hearts will always triumph the darkest of souls.

  Footsteps hastened just around the bend. Zafira closed her eyes and gathered both her breath and the Jawarat before rising on shaky legs. Three figures drew near, their cloaks coruscating silver. The Sultan’s Guard. Khara. She flattened herself against the wall, but they hurried past the alcove without so much as a glance, their low murmurs urgent, hands gripping the simple black hilts of their scimitars.

  “Show me something useful,” she hissed at the Jawarat. “Show me what the Lion can do with a single si’lah heart.”

  Nothing.

  Laa, peevish silence.

  With a growl, Zafira willed the Jawarat’s vision away and crept after the guards as a chanting began, snippets of shouts and demands carrying along the errant breeze. The Jawarat’s insistent voice broke through them.

  We will be seen.

  “Now you can talk?” Zafira asked. She darted from the shadows of one building to the next, but she didn’t have to live here to discern this emptiness as unusual. It was the sultan’s city. It was meant to be bustling at all times, not eerily quiet here and noisy there. Before an alley, she paused, squinting at the square up ahead.

  Dread halted her breath. Chants met her ears.

  Taxes kill. Break the till.

  Protests. People were protesting, marching—running in the direction of the palace. Toward her.

  Her heart leaped to her throat, and her fingers slickened around the Jawarat as she turned and made for Aya’s house, the heated stones scorching her bare feet. She stumbled on a pebble with a curse. Don’t fall, don’t fall. She thought of the Arz and her hunts, when not even her prey heard her agile footfalls.

  The distance between her and the crowd grew, and she allowed herself a moment to pause. A terrible mistake.

  An explosion shook the earth, and Zafira fell to her knees as a stampede of people charged toward her.

  CHAPTER 14

  Underground. That was where Nasir was now, in a room barricaded and reinforced to muffle all else. After he’d dragged his gaze from the double doors for the umpteenth time, shadows wreathing from his hands like an oil lamp just snuffed, Aya had suggested they train.

  It would have been a suggestion, if she’d accepted Nasir’s refusal.

  “We need to decide if we’re going to Alderamin,” Kifah groused.

  Nasir didn’t understand why. “Detouring so far for something that may not exist is a risk when we could easily gather forces and prepare for the Lion’s arrival here.”

  She cast him a look. “You never struck me as the type to wait around.”

  He wasn’t. He preferred having a mission to complete, a task to keep him focused. But without the Lion wearing his father’s skin and threatening him with innocent lives, he had no reason to seek out magic. Particularly when it was a plan as volatile as the alternative.

  “Regardless of our decision,” Aya said, gripping a staff, “we will not leave without Zafira, laa? Come.”

  Nasir stood his ground at the entrance of the wide room, the crate gripped against his side, the array of weaponry along the walls glinting in the light of the sconces. He looked Seif in the eye, daring him to comment on the wisps of black curling from his hands. He almost laughed at the irony: Magic lived in his bones, the very thing that had ruined his life. His blood was too mortal to use for dum sihr, and yet his si’lah descent denoted he would forever have magic, regardless of the minarets.

  “If Zafira returns and none of us are there to receive her, she’ll think we’ve left,” he said.

  “Breathe, Prince,” Kifah said. “If she could hunt in the Arz and return to her own bed every night, she can handle the sultan’s city.”

  “She sometimes needs time to think alone,” Lana said calmly.

  “She referred to herself as two people,” Nasir said flatly, pressing his lips closed when a tendril of black slipped free. “Did none of you hear?”

  “It was not she who spoke,” Aya said, “but the Jawarat. It is a hilya, an artifact created of and imbued with immense power. Few hilya exist, as the Sisters forbade their creation after a tyrant beyond Arawiya’s shores harvested one for its magic and reduced an entire civilization to ashes.”

  “That was back when safin thought it was smart to tr
ade hilya out of Arawiya,” Kifah said with feigned sweetness. “Yet, knowing what hilya are capable of, the Sisters created one themselves.”

  “They had no choice,” Seif said harshly.

  Kifah sat back, pointedly looking down the length of his unbuttoned robes as she tossed a sugar-coated almond into her mouth and passed the pouch to Lana. “There’s always a choice.”

  “Oh, there’s more than just Arawiya?” Lana asked, eyes bright.

  “Always has been. Arawiya is a tiny piece of the world. Magic wasn’t the only thing that disappeared ninety years ago. Our world shrank when the Arz popped up, because it covered the outer regions of the kingdom, caging us in. There’s a khara-ton of land out there, and people. An isle where greenery isn’t limited to oases, where leaves are bigger than grown men, and where beasts have tubes for noses. Another kingdom farther north where the people are paler than even the Demenhune and their snow, and just as relentless.”

  Nasir was content with the size of his world, shukrun. “Is what Zafira said true?” he asked tersely, steering them back to the matter at hand.

  “In a way,” Aya said, dipping her head. “The Jawarat is immortal. The Huntress is mortal. Hilya are made of power and memories, sentient beings in their own right. To willingly bind themselves to a mortal, or even an immortal for that matter, is rare. The darkest of them wish for bodily vessels; others merely seek companionship. It is odd that the Jawarat would choose her, but what she—they—said holds truth. Mortal bodies were not created to sustain souls for an eternity, however. Thus, the Jawarat’s immortality will grant her a life span longer than most mortals will ever see.”

  “Khara,” Lana breathed.

  “Oi!” Kifah snapped.

  “Language,” Nasir warned, and Lana looked at him like his hair had turned gray.

  “It is twofold,” Aya said, studiously ignoring them. “Safin understand immortality. Our hearts slow at maturity, our bodies remain unaffected by mortal ailments, but immortality is not the immunity of death, and the risk of her mortality itself has increased. Living forever does not equate to having an indestructible life, and it is far easier to destroy a book than a human. Destroy the book, and she will die.”