We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya #1)(39)

Zafira hopped down from Sukkar, helping Lana do the same. When she placed a hasty kiss on Sukkar’s nose, he gave her a curious nudge, for even he knew Zafira was miserly in her affections.

Beside her, Yasmine and Misk dismounted a mare of their own, and Deen dug through the satchel strapped to Lemun’s saddle before letting out a whistle. “Now that’s a sight.”

Yasmine hummed in agreement, but she held herself differently. A little fragile, a little delicate.

Because of me. Zafira dragged Lana to the front of the crowd, brushing past a trio of boisterous men and a tiny seamstress, bits of thread clinging to her like worms.

They stopped at a border of black. Where the Arz had once reached for the skies, black pebbles covered the ground, and no sign of the forest remained. No stray tree, no pile of dead twigs, no bush or bramble. Nothing at all to hint at its existence.

It had vanished entirely, the odd stones left in its wake.

Deen stepped to her side, and when she squinted at him against the morning light, she knew that he, too, was reliving their encounter with the Silver Witch. It wasn’t loss that she felt, she realized. It was the familiar presence of something that was there, despite how it seemed to her eyes.

“Do you feel it?” she murmured to Deen when Lana bent to pick up one of the stones. The whisper of trees and the brush of leaves.

He nodded, and she quelled a surge of guilty, selfish elation because she wasn’t alone.

Deen lifted his eyes to the skies. “Not even the Silver Witch can be powerful enough to make an entire forest disappear permanently.”

“Maybe not, but she’s making the start of this journey easy,” Zafira said. Unease roiled in her stomach. If the Silver Witch could make an entire forest disappear, why couldn’t she retrieve a book?

“Which isn’t reassuring,” he agreed. “But this is what you’ve chosen, no? And if she can’t lie…” He trailed off.

“You believed that? What—if she lies, she’ll light up in flames?”

He gave her a mock laugh. “She simply can’t lie. Some creatures can’t. Like safin.”

Zafira loosed a slow breath as he meandered away. As if meeting creatures that weren’t human was an everyday thing.

A breeze heavy with salt brushed Zafira’s skin. She had been so engrossed with the lack of the Arz that she hadn’t noticed what its disappearance had given her: the sea. The daama Baransea, where, true to the witch’s word, a gleaming ship bobbed in its waters. It looked no more than a quick jog away—a lie, for the Arz was far larger.

Zafira imagined Baba beside her, finally seeing the sea he so loved, the vastness he had spun countless stories about. He had loved the idea of the sea, for he had never seen it. He never would.

“It’s real,” Lana whispered, a tiny thing for fourteen years. She latched her fingers around Zafira’s cloak.

“Did you doubt its existence?”

The waves lapped forward, each one imitating the last, and the longer Zafira stared, the more it felt she was moving with them.

“I don’t know. It was always a story,” Lana said, looking up at her. The melancholy in her eyes knifed Zafira’s chest. Finger by finger, Lana pulled away. Zafira felt she had upset her somehow.

She watched her sister show her salvaged stone to Deen and then Yasmine, who looked stunning as always in a pale blue dress laced with white. She watched Misk reach for the pebble, drawing a shy smile from Lana. It would last only a day, that shyness, and then Deen, Yasmine, and Misk would be her family.

Zafira, a memory.

When she turned back to the sea, she was surprised to see it waver before her. She was surprised by the tears that she wiped away, carefully sealing her heart once more.

The sea glistened like liquid jewels, freedom, beckoning as the Arz had. It called to her, a purr across the soft waves that sounded much like her name.

Chimes on the wind. Her name in a breeze.

“Hunter,” Yasmine hissed.

Silence fell, and she felt the weight of eyes like countless stones pelted upon her back. Black pebbles lay uneven beneath her boots. Zafira blinked and tried to make sense of the ache in her chest, the racing of her pulse. That whisper.

Yasmine looked as if roots were about to sprout out of the ground and swallow Zafira whole. It’s safe, Zafira wanted to say, but she did not doubt the Silver Witch’s smile. That flicker of darkness she felt whenever the woman was near.

She was saved from an explanation when a horn disrupted the silence; ululating and chanting soon followed as a caravan approached with half a dozen camels draped in wool, tan coats spotted with snow.

Zafira made sense of the chanting: Sayyidi. Sayyidi. Sayyidi.

The Caliph of Demenhur had come.

Yasmine yanked Zafira to the front of the crowd. A boy tried to look beneath her hood, but she tugged on the fabric, further shrouding her face. She clenched and unclenched her fists by her sides, the smooth leather of her gloves contouring around her fingers. She threw a discreet glance at Deen.

He was already watching her, eyes dark in thought.

Commotion surrounded the caravan as a man hopped down from one of the camels. He wore a red-and-white-checkered keffiyah atop his head. A small beard framed his chin. A slender nose, chiseled cheekbones—he was a good-looking man.

His eyes, however, made the air catch in her throat. Had that same haunted look not been in Lana’s eyes, Zafira wouldn’t have understood the utter despair. Who hadn’t the curse touched? Even the ones better off than she were suffering.