We Hunt the Flame(110)

“I couldn’t find your cloak,” he said softly.

Her gaze crashed into his, expecting to find something mocking in the gray, for no one mourned the loss of fabric. But he was solemn.

“I don’t need it anymore, I suppose,” she conceded. It had been her companion as much as the darkness had. But she had wandered Sharr without her cloak, slowly becoming one from it. She picked up the honey salve.

“No, I suppose you don’t,” he agreed with something akin to a smile. She wanted to pause this moment and capture his smile, however faint.

She kept one hand on his shoulder and brought the other to his skin.

“Don’t move,” she whispered. He froze at her words, at her touch. He didn’t even breathe, though she could feel his thunderous pulse beneath her fingers as she rubbed the ointment across the ruined flesh. The distance made her drunk and she swayed closer, pulling back with a clench of her jaw. Distract yourself. “My mother was a healer.”

“Was?” he breathed. She tasted sukkary dates in his exhale.

“She’s sick now,” she said shortly with a sad laugh. “The irony is not lost on me. She and Deen’s mother were two of the best healers in western Demenhur. Now one is dead; the other is very near it herself.”

She swallowed the sudden swell in her throat. Blinked away the burn in her eyes.

“Who killed Deen?” she asked softly, and leaned back to look at him. She needed to know. To expose that wound to the air before it festered even further.

He drew a sharp breath, and a window closed behind his eyes. “Why do you keep asking that? It doesn’t matter which of us killed him; the other had every intention to.”

“If he were here now, would you kill him?”

A piece of her fractured when he lowered his head, a fraction that would have been insignificant on anyone else but was an earth-shattering display of defeat for him. For unlike that moment with the poker, he was now in full control of his emotions.

“A monster will always be enslaved to a master. Even if that master has a master of its own,” he said.

“But a monster has power,” she insisted. Anguish drew lines on his face. “The power to break free of his bonds. You are not your father, nor are you the Lion that took his soul. You are not the sum of his disparagement.”

He stilled at her words, and all she wanted was for this broken boy to understand.

His slow, weighted words were a harsh whisper. “Then who am I?”

Zafira knew of his scars. His fear. He was just like anyone else: flesh that could be flayed. A human who could be punished and beaten. Used and discarded.

“Nasir bin Ghameq bin Talib min Sarasin,” she said instead. “Crown prince to a kingdom begging for someone to stand up to a tyrannical ruler.”

An empty laugh escaped him, and Zafira’s heart cleaved in two.

A dark tendril unfurled from his fingers and he clenched his fist, killing the dark flame. “I stood up once.”

Zafira didn’t breathe. He watched her hands as she uncapped another tin.

“I refused to kill. My resistance lasted however long I could withstand the pain. You saw all of my disgusting scars. They’re a tally of my kills—only I was tallied before each kill, with the poker, by my father’s hand.” He exhaled a heavy breath. “By the Lion’s hand.

“But the destruction to my body was nothing”—his voice cracked. The Prince of Death’s voice cracked and Zafira’s eyes burned—“compared to what I felt when I saw my mother crying as she watched.

“She was the one who trained me, employing the kingdom’s best hashashins. What was the point? Why does a prince need to be an assassin? Eventually, I could withstand the pain for as long as the sultan would press that poker to my flesh. As long as my body was being brutalized, someone did not have to die by my hand. But then he turned to my mother.” His breath shook. That was why the pain meant so little to him—he had learned to ignore it. “I had to choose between watching her suffer or killing another innocent person. And by the time I decided I would stop fighting, that I would do as he asked, it was too late.”

Kill or be killed.

A rim of red ringed his eyes. He looked at the streaks of shadow trailing up his fingers, blackening his skin, and then beyond her shoulder, to where the Lion’s palace loomed. The master of Sharr, maestro of words. Alive for the past nine decades while the people of Arawiya believed him to be dead.

She smoothed the paste onto Nasir’s skin, and he made a sound before he could stop himself.

“I should be relieved my father didn’t become a monster of his own accord. But … the villainy that took him whittled away at me, too. There’s no Lion controlling me. I became this.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a poet of the kill,” Zafira said softly, using his words. “Remain in the shadows and serve the light. Your father may never have control over his will again. You still do.”

His only response was the twist of his lips, as if what he had already said was enough to suffice a lifetime.

She changed the subject. “The others—”

“Will join us here.” He left no room for doubt.

He trusts Altair to stay alive. His brother. A safi who hid his identity. For what?

And why, when he had the chance to kill Altair, had the Lion held back?