We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya #1)(58)

“I see you watching me, Huntress. Worry not,” Altair said, glancing at his wound. “I’ll be good as new in no time.” He eyed his companion. “Do you ever wonder why women focus so much on me?”

“Maybe because you resemble a lost, rabid dog,” the dark-haired one suggested in perfect seriousness.

Zafira bit down a laugh, and Altair swiveled to her with a comical pout. She was unsure of the relationship between the two Sarasins. They didn’t look like brothers, nor did they seem friends, yet they had a mutual respect she doubted either acknowledged. One of them held power over the other, yet she couldn’t discern which one.

Murderers, she reminded herself. That was all that mattered. And if the arrows with the silver fletching and fine wood were any indication, they had more means than Zafira could ever dream of.

After a beat of silence, she spoke. “Zafira.”

“Who’s that?”

“You asked for my name,” she said. Sand danced in the distance, sparkling beneath the sun’s rays. The world was still a shade darker than when she and Deen had first arrived. She touched the coolness of the ring he had given her and nearly swayed at the reminder of his still chest. Of the tears huddling in her throat.

Altair nodded, oblivious. “Seems your mother was following in the sultana’s footsteps when she named you.”

She blinked. “Oh?”

“Zafira means ‘victorious.’” Altair used the end of his turban to wipe the sweat beading at his brow. The cloth was dark and rimmed in red. It reminded her of a snake, the ones with vibrant colors, poisonous and alluring at once. “So does Nasir, the name of our beloved crown prince. You see, Huntress, I know a thing or two about names.”

“He knows a thing or two about too many things,” the other one growled.

“Oh, come now, hashashin. Is that jealousy I hear in your voice?”

An assassin. That explained his garb and calculated movements. It would have been easy to assume he had killed Deen, had Altair not threatened to kill her.

“I know what the prince’s name is,” she said.

Altair gave her a funny look, and the hashashin merely looked the other way.

They turned east, through an arching pathway littered with shattered stone and tiny dunes of sand. Altair hacked away dead vines as he went, and as happy as Zafira would have been to leave him to clean the ruins, she had a Jawarat to find.

And an escape to plan.

“We’re supposed to head this way,” she said, turning north and out of the shadows.

The Sarasins shared a look.

“I have a feeling the Jawarat will be closer to the center,” she added.

The hashashin eyed Altair’s path. “That’s where we’re going.”

His low, dead voice made her shiver before she replied, “No, that path will take us along the outskirts of the island.”

“Is that what your compass says?” Altair asked. “Did you … receive one?”

“Receive one?” she repeated, then recalled Deen’s compass and her heart cleaved in two as she remembered everything afresh. She shook her head before Altair could see her distress, before the hashashin, with his cold and calculating gaze, could read her.

He approached with a compass of crimson and silver in his gloved palm. It reminded her of the Silver Witch.

Altair looked over his shoulder. “Where does it point?”

“It’s broken,” he said, and snapped the lid closed.

Liar. She saw the point shifting.

“We don’t need a compass,” she said. “I know where I’m going. I’ve always known where I was going.”

She just didn’t know how. She once attributed it to experience. The way a baker would never measure out his semolina before making his daily batch of harsha. She had never needed a tool to show her where to go. But if a baker was faced with a wild, uncharted maze of a quantity, wouldn’t he at least hesitate? Wouldn’t he need a tool then?

Zafira hadn’t thought twice about which path to take in Sharr’s ruins. But that odd frenzy in her blood only settled when she turned in the direction she wanted to go.

“Ah, yes. Come, let’s follow the girl who decides her path based on how she feels,” Altair said, pulling her from her thoughts.

She rolled her eyes and left them behind. But hadn’t Deen said something like that, too?

Her path had gotten him killed.

Just as she paused, she heard the sheathing of scimitars, followed by the drag of boots across the sand-skittered stone. Leading the giant and his growling companion to their deaths wouldn’t be so bad.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Altair said, ever suave.

“No, you don’t,” the other said.

Zafira wouldn’t bother asking for his name.

“Why do you always think I’m talking to you?”

“Does it look like she’s listening to you?”

“Why do men think women can’t hear them unless we’re looking at them?” Zafira snapped.

Moments later, she heard nothing at all and swiveled to see them right at her heels, deathly silent. So the earlier shuffling was a ruse. The mystery of why they needed her set her on edge.

Zafira touched Baba’s jambiya at her thigh. “Well? Out with it.”