We Hunt the Flame(128)

His dark thoughts scattered when Zafira laughed.

It freed him. Reached into that crevice between his rib cage and gave him life. A vial of light undeterred by the dark, a sound he would burn down cities to hear again, wild and free. She stood differently now. Shoulders pushed back, dark hair adrift in the wind. Taller. Stronger. A woman, through and through.

The woman he had believed to be a man, the Hunter he was sent here to kill. She caught him watching. “I will make sure no woman fears herself. Like in Zaram, and Pelusia, and Sarasin.”

“I have no doubt, fair gazelle.”

She met his eyes, and Nasir felt a jolt in his chest when diffidence darkened her cheeks. She stepped closer, and Nasir remembered the marble columns, those moments before she held the Jawarat, when he held her.

This means nothing. He wished he could take back his harsh words. It hadn’t meant nothing, no. Nor had that moment before, when she had cared for him with a gentle hand, without a hint of repulsion on her open face. It had been the culmination of his life, to be looked at the way Zafira Iskandar had looked at him. If only she knew.

But those three words lingered between them, lifting a guard behind her eyes as she regarded him now.

“And you? What will you do, Prince of Death?”

He didn’t say what he wanted to say. “If I live past this journey, I’ll see then.”

“You’ll live, Prince,” Kifah said, joining them. “The Huntress will make sure you do.”

The Huntress in question scoffed softly. “The Arz has fallen. I’m not a huntress anymore.”

Kifah shot her a look. “There’s still a Lion to hunt down and a general with a penchant for conundrums. Don’t tell me you’re hanging your hat up so soon.”

She smiled. “I suppose not, then,” she replied, relief toning her voice.

They did not look behind, to where Sharr wavered, a scourge on Arawiya’s map, a place of shadow and death. They had lived in the past for far too long. Yet Nasir would always carry a souvenir of the island in his soul, another scar to mark his suffering.

“We will raise dunes from the earth, and rain death from the sky,” Zafira said.

“And then some,” Nasir promised.

Kifah gave a sharp nod.

It was time for change to sweep across Arawiya, this zumra at its helm. He had a brother to save and a father to liberate, through death or otherwise. There would be more walls to hurdle, battles to triumph, and victories to glean. But walls were nothing for a hashashin.

And the Prince of Death never left a job unfinished.





EPILOGUE


There were only so many tears a soul could shed before weariness and fatigue dragged her to an endless pit of grief. Yasmine had seen too much.

She no longer felt the joy of her marriage. Dread and defeat bittered her tongue. A place ravaged by war was no place for happiness.

“This isn’t war,” Misk had said, lashing out in a voice that promised retribution. “This is butchery. Cold-blooded and heartless. It will not stop with us. Zaram will be next, then Pelusia, and then his crimes will come full circle, Arawiya under his black crown.”

They were already under his black crown. She didn’t understand what more the sultan wanted.

The men had been there, wearing the black and silver of Sarasin, waiting in the shadows between houses and trees. When the ship carrying Zafira and Deen had vanished from view, they came. Misk had friends, she learned, and so she and her husband had been lucky enough to slip aboard the caliph’s caravan, fleeing with little Lana.

She went back, days later. To the village where she and Deen had distributed meat. Where they and Zafira had grown up. Where the men had scorched the homes of the western villages and unleashed a vapor upon the vulnerable.

Children Yasmine had tutored, whose smiles she had coaxed and celebrated, now lay in small coffins, the ground too cold and hard to allow them proper burials.

Their deaths were bloodless, but the pallor of their skin spoke of hours of suffering. The few who survived told of the colorless poison.

There was no escaping something that killed through the cardinal act of inhaling.

Now Yasmine stared from the window of the caliph’s palace in Thalj, far, far away from the forsaken village she once called home. She had no home. And if the Sarasins continued under the sultan’s orders, no one in Demenhur would, no one in Arawiya would. What was the purpose of such slaughter?

“She will come,” Misk said. He rubbed warmth into Yasmine’s arms and pressed a kiss to her head.

Zafira. The sister of her heart. There was no way to send news to Sharr, and no way of retrieving news, either. She did not know if Zafira still lived, but she did know that her brother did not.

She would have learned more, if Misk had let her wander farther into the Arz when she had been in that senseless, helpless state. She would have died, too, but she had remained there long enough for the dark forest to show her something too vivid to be false.

The vision had gripped her: Deen dying by the hand of a golden-haired man who had attempted to kill Zafira.

Yasmine vowed to kill him. To bring to him the same level of suffering he had brought to her.

She didn’t know how she would, for between her and Sharr was her husband, the Arz, the Baransea, and possibly a thousand and one other things she didn’t know of. She was no Huntress, but she was Yasmine Ra’ad, and she would find a way. She didn’t even know if the golden-haired man still lived, nor did she know his name. One donkey at a time.