We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya #1)(32)

And the dead never dreamed.

“This is far beyond us,” he had whispered against her skin.

Was it beyond them? Who decides what’s out of reach, if not we ourselves?

The door to Zafira’s room opened now, framing Lana in soft light.

“Okht? I thought I heard the bed creak. I didn’t see you come in last night.” Her features were lit with relief, and Zafira pulled on a smile. “Ummi asked for you.”

The smile slipped from her face. “As she tends to,” Zafira said carefully, ignoring the yawning chasm of guilt.

Umm’s sanity had been fickle ever since Baba had crawled from the Arz, but she had her rare spasms of lucidity. Moments when Zafira made herself scarce, for it was easier than facing her mother.

“You should go,” Lana said quietly, hands clasped. The dying fire angled her face in shadows. Guilt tugged at her mouth. “I … I told her about the letter. And Sharr.”

With a sigh, Zafira threw the blankets off and stood, the cold going straight through the thin fabric of her old dress and into her bones. Lana padded away, and Zafira heard the shuffle of the majlis pillows by the front door, leaving her to her decision.

Through the threshold, she could see the rust-studded doorknob leading to Umm’s room. The same doorknob she brushed past every daama day, guilt searing the fibers of her being.

No more. She was going to Sharr. She could possibly die. She clenched her jaw and crossed over to Umm’s door. With every step forward, she felt like the condemned trudging to her beheading.

Approaching the Arz scared her less.

With bated breath, Zafira reached for the door. The wood scraped her bare palms. Push it open, coward.

She pushed. The door moaned. Five years, it seemed to cry. Five years. The woman inside lifted her head immediately, eyes locking on her, fingers twisting with the same disquiet rushing through Zafira’s veins.

Umm.

Zafira hadn’t exchanged a word with Umm in five years. Five years of having a mother in the same house as her, five years of silence. Some days, before the screaming began, it was easier to think Umm was dead, too.

She looked the same. Head held regally atop a slender neck like a gazelle’s. A slim nose that Baba loved. Lips a shade darker than red and eyes bright and cold as Zafira’s, feathered by lashes that softened their iciness. Her dark locks were feathered in white.

Those aged strands were a fist to her stomach.

“Zafira,” Umm said. Her voice was not the same. It was torn now, wearied by sorrow.

Zafira couldn’t move from the doorway. She couldn’t breathe.

“You never come to see me.”

Umm never ventured through the house, either. These scant walls housed three souls and an abundance of memories. Zafira threw a quick glance behind her, to where Lana was curled on the majlis, dutifully not paying attention.

“I can’t,” she breathed.

Umm’s voice was soft. “It was him or you.”

A conversation they should have had five years ago, had the pain not been so suffocating.

“You should have saved him,” Zafira whispered. Umm’s blankets were strewn about her, even the pale pink one Yasmine had made herself.

“There was no question of whether the child who had lived a fraction of the life he had lived should be spared or not,” Umm said, voice cracking in the end. When she drew her next breath, Zafira heard the rattle in her chest. The pain.

Zafira rubbed her face and her fingers came away wet with tears.

Umm lifted her hands. “Yaa, my abal, don’t cry for me.”

Oh, my wild rose.

Zafira hadn’t heard the endearment in years. Everything clawed up her throat, scraping her insides, tearing her resolve. Her father had whispered it last, and then she’d been fighting his iron grasp, gasping for her life.

She remembered that sudden stillness after Umm drove her jambiya through his heart. Red darted across her vision now. Dark red, a line painted down Baba’s chest.

Zafira stepped closer. She crouched. Sat. With each movement, her guilt grew as she realized how selfish she had been. She reached for Umm’s hands, closing her fingers around the coolness of her mother’s. The tears fell now. One after the other, they trickled from a crevice in her chest, turning into a stream flooding from her heart. Umm’s eyes wilted into sadness.

“Sometimes I forget his face,” Umm whispered.

How could something so painless as the loss of memory hurt so much? The raw despair in her mother’s gaze gripped her.

Zafira could never forget Baba’s face. She could never forget Baba—khalas, that was that. Yet she had ignored her living parent. She had left her mother to mourn alone. For no matter how much time Lana spent with Umm, it was Zafira who had been there when Baba breathed his last. It was Zafira who understood Umm’s grief.

That very mother who had saved her life.

She had allowed her pain to harden into anger. Allowed that anger to fester, blinding her to Umm’s suffering. If Zafira grieved from seeing her father die at the hands of her mother, how did it feel for Umm to live with the hands she had used to slay her beloved?

How had it felt for Umm to choose between one love and another?

Zafira forced air into her lungs. She shuttered her selfish, burning eyes and dropped her head to Umm’s lap, the gesture foreign. Familiar.

“Forgive me, Ummi. Forgive me,” Zafira pleaded. She repeated the words over and over. “For my elusion. For my anger.”