We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya #1)(121)

“Oi, the kaftar,” Altair reminded them.

Nasir was about to say they could handle the few ifrit themselves when the ground trembled.

A horde of shadow crested the horizon, where the glistening marble met the dark night, slowly giving shape to countless ifrit. Benyamin wasted no time whistling, and Nasir hoped the kaftar wouldn’t be one more foe for them to fight.

His heart seized. One more foe, indeed.

At the front of the horde was the Lion of the Night, astride a stallion of shadows, silver armor glinting against the shrouded moon.



* * *



Chaos surrounded Zafira, the kind the darkness thrived upon. Elation built in her chest and spilt from her in the curve of a smile.

Stone hands atop a pedestal reached upward as if in everlasting prayer. The palms of mottled gray clasped a journal with pages of yellowed papyrus, bound in green calfskin and wrapped in a cord of braided black silk.

The lost Jawarat.

All of this for a book withering in the shadows. She reached for it with careful fingers.

“Huntress.”

Benyamin stood at the edge of the stone, weariness weighing down his features. Benyamin, who kept secrets from her. Benyamin, who cried over the small coffin of his son. Ifrit spilled into their surroundings, shrieking and writhing with the shadows. Shouts rang out. The kaftar arrived, summoned by someone’s whistle.

“The Lion is near,” he implored, “and that stone is your only protection.”

She felt detached from herself. Distant to everything but focused on this. This book. The darkness continued to ravage her mind as the whispers swarmed around the tome.

Benyamin’s next words were cut off by a shout. He fell to his knees, and Zafira blinked as the always poised safi fought for his life.

“Fate brings us together once more, Haadi,” said a voice of velvet. The Lion. He sighed boredly. “There is nothing I loathe more than safin. If it were up to them, you would be their slaves. I disrupted their balance, showed them their place. And Arawiya repaid me by trapping me on this island.”

Benyamin choked against the vise of shadow coiling around his neck. “Whatever … you do … Huntress … do not … step … from that stone.”

The Lion turned to her with a mocking laugh. His trim robes were deep mauve. Silver armor adorned his shoulders, filigreed at his cuffs. “A heart so pure, zill and zalaam never before had a vessel so eager to plenish. Impart it to me, azizi.”

Look to us, bint Iskandar, came another voice.

The Jawarat.

Zafira stepped closer to the book, last touched by the Sisters of Old. There was a silhouette of a lion imprinted upon the pebbled leather, its mane a blaze of fire.

She felt no fear as she closed her hands around the tome.

And the world came undone.

Arawiya unfolded in her mind. As it once was, a beacon of light flourishing beneath a golden reign. She saw six women, rare si’lah who loved one another fiercely, appointing their strongest, Anadil, as the warden of the most impenetrable metropolis of a prison. Zafira saw wars that were waged. Darkness rushing toward gilded palaces and screaming Arawiyans. Caused by a man with amber eyes and ebony hair, vengeance in his blood.

The Sisters locked him within the hold of Sharr’s prison after his dark attempts failed. The warden was a miragi, like Kifah, except the limits of her illusions, her power, did not exist. She reigned with an iron fist, swayed by nothing, until he seduced her with fabricated love, slowly but surely loosening her hold on good.

As the Lion had said: A heart so pure of intent, zill and zalaam never before had a vessel so eager to plenish.

She was Zafira, once.

Anadil, lost to herself, summoned her Sisters to Sharr and drained them of their magic upon the Lion’s urging. By the time she realized the truth of what she had done, it was too late: the Sisters had fallen upon marble and stone. With the last of their power and the dregs of their lives, they trapped the Lion on the island with them and created the Jawarat, sealing the truth of that fateful day within its pages.

It was not magic incarnate. It was a book of memories. Their memories. And as the Jawarat lay lost upon Sharr, it became a being of its own, gleaning more memories, knowledge, and words: the Lion’s.

It was the last remnant of the Sisters, but it had become something darker during its time on Sharr. Every fragment of knowledge the Lion held, every piece of history the Sisters knew—it was the Jawarat’s. It was hers.

The Silver Witch and the Lion were wrong. They had never needed a da’ira to find the book. Zafira had merely needed to pass its tests, to defeat the ifrit, to escape the Lion in mind and body. And then it showed itself to her. Pure of heart. Dark of intent.

A searing exploded in her chest, her lungs, her heart. Distantly, she heard the shatter of glass, Benyamin going free. The howl of the wind. The roar of a creature that had lived far too long. A reign of darkness.

The Jawarat fell from her hands with a muted thud and a plume of dust. She collapsed to her knees, the stone cruel beneath her bones. She could only stare at the smear of red across the green leather with the knowledge that she had done something very, very wrong.

She had forgotten about the gash in her palm.

The Lion growled. “What have you done?”

Benyamin rose on shaky legs. “Her blood. The book bound itself to her.”

I am you, and you are me. The words were a whisper in her heart.