Zafira lurched back into the present, gasping for air, teeth clattering from the force of her trembling. The turmoil continued around them, the same spear she had seen at mid-impact only now impaling an ifrit. An arrow in the air only now landed true. As if barely heartbeats had passed.
The Lion was on his knees before the throne, his cloak sliding back from his shoulders. The high collar of his thobe was drenched in sweat.
Discarded to his side, like an unwanted pamphlet, was the Jawarat.
She froze when he lifted his head, but his gaze was dull. She’d seen it in the mirror: the look of a person who had shattered so many times that the pieces no longer fit together. All bruised edges and angles.
No child should have to watch their father die. No child should have to stomach the smell of their own father’s blood.
What did it mean when a monster became human? Because it wasn’t the Lion with his palms on the cold, hard stone. It was Haider, a boy who had witnessed the world’s cruelty firsthand. A boy who had once been like her.
She carefully picked up the Jawarat.
We promised you protection, bint Iskandar. Look at him. Pathetic. Weak.
Rushing, roiling anger flooded her. Like when she realized Nasir still had his magic—anger that wasn’t her own but felt every bit as if it were.
He is not pure. His will is too heavy, too fixed. He tried to control us, and now we will end him.
She picked up Nasir’s jambiya—her jambiya—from beside Ghameq’s lifeless form. The blade sang to her, coaxed her even as some distant part of her fought against it.
No, you fool. Steel is powerless. Use us.
She loosened her hold, remembering her failed arrow at the Lion’s hideout. Remembering the Jawarat’s vision, slicing men in two.
No. She fought back, sheathing her dagger. That was not her. Not like this.
Perhaps they were all monsters, masquerading in costumes of innocence.
For the first time since binding herself to the Jawarat, she finally understood what it had done. It had festered on Sharr long enough to sift through the Lion’s memories, to record the ones it had deemed most important and poignant. Most raw. Only, it hadn’t just recorded them.
It had stolen them.
It knew flesh and blood, sorrow and power. Somewhere on Sharr, it had become a being of its own.
Yes. We are of the hilya.
The Lion had wanted vengeance for centuries, but because of the Jawarat, he didn’t remember why. He had no recollection of why he hated the safin. He didn’t know why he wanted a home for his mother’s kind. She was struck by the way he had frozen in her room when she had asked. He truly hadn’t remembered.
Until now, now of all times. Now, with the inexorable power of the si’lah heart surging in his veins.
Her mind reeled with the fragments of his past, connecting one to another despite the chaos around her. His will is too heavy, the Jawarat had said. And by stealing his memory and stripping away the driving force of his vengeance, it had hoped he would lose his single-minded purpose, making him malleable, controllable.
It had not worked.
She shot down the stairs, belatedly thanking the seamstress for the slit down her dress, and crashed into a blood-streaked Kifah.
“Yalla, Huntress,” she said, brisk as ever. “I thought we’d lost you.”
“I have it,” she said breathlessly, a chill on her skin despite the heat. “He—he has it.”
Kifah eyed her. “Slow down.”
“I have the Jawarat.” Zafira held up the book with one hand. “He has the heart. Where’s Lana?”
Kifah cleared three ifrit from their path as Zafira shoved the book between her thighs so she could knot her hair. “With Ghada and the Nine. They’re fighting, but she’ll be safest with them. What do you mean he has the heart? He’s always had it.”
“No.” Zafira helped a man with a tasseled turban right himself, sucking in a breath at the wicked gashes across the back of his hand. “Nasir was right. The Lion—he found a way. He’s taken control of the heart. It’s in him.”
Kifah fell when a guard knocked into her. She stood slowly, almost sluggish. “What?”
“The heart is inside him,” Zafira stressed. His pulse echoed in her ears, her palm, her very soul. “He can use it the way the Sisters of Old could. The way the Silver Witch can.”
“Bleeding Guljul,” Kifah breathed. “That’s—bleeding Guljul. Aya.”
Zafira nodded, unable to form words. She remembered Lana describing the boy Aya had brought back to life. She didn’t think any other healer would have been capable of implanting a beating heart into someone without one.
“Now we know why he never came for the other four.” Kifah looked at her spear, as if suddenly deeming it useless. “We need to get out of here. I only know Ghada and her daughter are alive. I haven’t seen the other leaders.”
“Nasir?” Zafira asked. “Seif?”
“Haven’t seen them. Hopefully protecting someone I’m not,” she said, and turned back to the fray.
An arrow whistled past Zafira’s ear, and then she was running toward the fool who had fired it. She ducked past an ifrit fighting an armed wazir, then a girl swinging a jambiya as if she had never held one before in her life.
The silver-cloaked guard nocked another arrow, his grip horribly wrong.
Zafira stopped him. “I need that.”
He looked her up and down, sweat beading down his brow. “Move aside, woman.”
She tossed him a fallen sword, and he dropped everything to grab it before it could nick his shoulder. Dastard. He started to protest, but Zafira snatched his bow and arrow and used her dagger to cut off his quiver’s strap before ducking back into the crowd, heart pounding.
Well. Now she couldn’t wear the quiver, either. Nor could she continue carrying the Jawarat around. She sorely needed more hands.
Crimson splattered at her feet, a reminder that there was more to worry about. Clamping the quiver between her legs and the Jawarat with it, she nocked an arrow and turned a careful circle, firing at an ifrit attacking a woman in an iridescent gown streaked in blood. Not a woman—a safi. Benyamin’s sister, Leila.
Zafira slung her bow and slashed out with her dagger, gutting the ifrit the way she gutted her hunting kills. When she threw another glance at Leila, she was relieved to see Seif with his scythes by her side. The Alder calipha herself was nowhere to be seen. Zafira fired another arrow, and another, saving a silver-cloaked guard only for him to fall with a stave to his back a moment later. She never thought death to be so mundane. So normal.
There was always a chance the fruit one picked could be sour. The chance that the gift one gave might not fit. She had never thought the same applied to feasts and that she might die in one.
They needed to get the doors opened, or the Lion wouldn’t only be king, he would rule supreme.
She fired her way to the doors, unflinching as blood drenched her clothes and her quiver ran low. Her gossamer sleeves like butterfly wings hung tattered. She spotted Ghada and several of the Nine Elite, Lana between them. Near the throne, the rest of the Nine and the Sultan’s Guard kept the Lion’s attention away from the vulnerable crowd. He was still dazed, she noticed, still lost in the memory of his father’s death.
She drew back at a sudden hiss before a stave came hurtling for her neck. Like a fool, she lifted her hand to defend herself, dropping the Jawarat in the process, but the blow never came. The ifrit fell, and a hand extended toward her, a moonstone pommel catching in the light.
“Haytham,” she sputtered before remembering her manners when she saw the wazir. She snatched up the book. “Sayyidi.”
A gash across his brow oozed blood. His sword was coated in black, the hilt out of place amid the dead and dying. She swallowed a crazed laugh.
How much worse could this night become?
You just had to ask, said Yasmine in her head as death gripped the chamber.