We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya #1)(126)

Zafira understood that. It was how she feared the defeat of the Arz. The loss of her cloak. A life where she wasn’t the Hunter.

They joined Nasir, who limped as he slashed at the ifrit brazen enough to step into Altair’s fading light. Slowly, they battled their way out of the confines of the towering palace of marble and stone with the help of the Silver Witch. As Zafira, biting her tongue against the pain in her hand, nocked arrow after arrow, she guiltily recalled how she had lashed out at Benyamin for trusting the witch.

Without the sorcery of Sharr, the shore was not so far from them now. Dawn returned to the island, a beatific sight after the depthless dark skies they had been cursed with these past days. They were soon rushing past the island’s gates, prim between the towering hewn stones of the wall. Benyamin and Kifah had come in from that front entrance, the one Deen had wanted to find.

Loyal, softhearted Deen. There is no man in Arawiya more loyal to the Hunter than I.

He had believed in her until his very last breath, and now he was all but a ghost in her thoughts, a fragment of her past. What would she tell Yasmine?

Yasmine. Oh, Yasmine.

They hurried through the gates, steadily nearing the ship. An arrow whizzed past Zafira’s ear, and everyone froze. It had come from the ship. Another volley headed for them, and Zafira ducked. The Silver Witch hissed as an arrow struck her.

Kifah sighed and shouted, “Oi, Jinan! Quit firing at us.”

“Cease!” someone yelled, and the arrows stopped. A waif of a girl stepped to the rail, a checkered turban on her head, an ochre sash at her waist. “About time. Wait—where’s Effendi Haadi?”

“Dead,” Nasir said in the silence.

Something cracked on the girl’s face before she nodded and ordered for the plank.

The ship was as extravagant as expected, with gleaming golden rails and sails of cream emblazoned with the tiny diamonds of Alderamin. It reminded Zafira of Benyamin, and a wave of grief crashed in her chest.

Even in death, the safi was assisting them. They would have been stranded without him.

Kifah pivoted her spear. “Yalla, zumra. Let’s get off this damned island and start making sense of all this.”

Even the Prince of Death smiled at her words.



* * *



Nasir surveyed Benyamin’s ragtag Zaramese crew as they studied him back.

More than a few went slack-jawed as the Silver Witch swept on board, and Nasir noticed that Kifah never acknowledged the witch’s aid. Nasir hadn’t either, for that matter—no one had. They were still reeling from the battle. From Benyamin’s death.

The girl who had ordered the plank—Jinan, the captain, he guessed—stepped forward and shooed the others back to their posts. “Everything in order?” she asked Kifah.

Kifah nodded, removed the turban that had been knotted around her waist, and began spreading the cloth on the gleaming deck. She took out the Jawarat and he noticed Zafira lurch forward, barely holding herself back when the Pelusian laid it in the fabric’s center. Then Kifah held up the heart she had collected.

“Let’s see the rest,” she said to Nasir.

He carefully unwound the red organs from the folds of his robes, gently laying them atop the cloth.

“There are only four,” Zafira puzzled, leaning over them. They gleamed in the early sun, steadily beating. Pulsing, red, and wet.

“Oi, Altair has the last one. Where is that bumbling fool anyway?” Kifah asked, wiping sweat from her scalp and leaving a smear of blood behind.

Everyone looked up when the general gave no response. Nasir called for him, unease creeping into his veins in the answering silence. Realization swept the deck.

The general had vanished.





CHAPTER 90


Altair was gone. The Zaramese crew even searched belowdecks, but he was nowhere to be seen. Zafira had been so engrossed in reuniting herself with the Jawarat that she hadn’t even noticed his disappearance.

“We’re going back for him,” Nasir said in the silence.

“What if he’s dead?” Kifah asked, forever optimistic.

“I know Altair, and he won’t die so easily,” Nasir said. “He’d crawl out of the grave if he had to.”

The prince produced a wooden crate he had picked up during their search of the ship. With a nervous, jittery energy that Zafira hadn’t seen in him before, he placed the four hearts and the Jawarat inside. The book called to Zafira from the confines of the box. Do not forget us. It spoke only to her, she knew. No one else had cut a gash across their palm and bound themselves to it. It pulsed in time to her heart; it breathed in her.

Nasir hefted the crate toward Captain Jinan. “Protect this at all costs. Or I’ll put your head in one of these boxes.”

Kifah shot him a glare.

Zafira glanced at the captain apologetically. “That’s his way of saying please.”

“I’m not sure I want to know how His Highness repays favors,” Jinan said, taking it from him. “You’re lucky Effendi Haadi paid me well.”

Something swelled in Zafira’s throat, and she swallowed it against the burning in her eyes. She could never think of Benyamin without remembering how she had pushed him away after everything he had done. Because he had put her mental state first. When she closed her eyes, she was in the dreamwalk again, on that gilded balcony in Alderamin, at ease and at home, Benyamin’s grin broad and his tears raw.