We Hunt the Flame(3)

Where the war horses had stood, the snow was now smooth and—

She yanked on Sukkar’s reins.

A woman stood against the plains of white.

A heavy cloak of gray, no, shimmering silver sat on her slender shoulders above a sweeping red gown. Her raised hood barely covered the top of her stark hair, as white as the snow. Her lips were crimson, a curve of blood.

Zafira swore the woman hadn’t been there a moment ago. A gallop began in her chest.

The Arz depraves an idle mind.

“Who knew you could kill so swiftly,” the woman said in a voice of silk.

Did the Arz conjure voices to its illusions, too?

“I am no assassin. I only evaded them,” Zafira said, realizing a beat later that she shouldn’t respond to an illusion. She hadn’t killed those men—had she?

“Clever.” The woman smiled after a pause. “You truly do emerge sane and in one piece.” A gust billowed her cloak. Her dark eyes drifted across the first line of the Arz trees with an odd mix of awe and—skies—adoration.

The woman wavered and solidified. Real and not.

“It’s a lot like Sharr, isn’t it?” Then she shook her head, every movement deliberate.

Fear simmered beneath Zafira’s skin at the mention of Sharr.

“Oh, how could I ask such a tease of a question?” she continued. “You haven’t been to the island yet.”

Are you real? Zafira wanted to ask. She demanded instead, “Who are you?”

The woman fixed her with that glittering gaze, bare hands clasped. Did she not feel the sting of the cold? Zafira tightened her fingers around Sukkar’s reins.

“Tell me, why do you hunt?”

“For my people. To feed them,” Zafira said. Her back ached and the deer was beginning to smell.

The woman clucked her tongue with a slight frown, and Sukkar trembled. “No one can be that pure.”

Zafira must have blinked, for the woman was suddenly closer. Another blink, despite her best efforts, and the woman had moved away again.

“Do you hear the roar of the lion? Do you heed its call?”

Where did this loon crawl from? “The tavern is in the sooq, if you’re looking for more arak.” But Zafira’s usual candor was hindered by the tightening in her throat.

The woman laughed, a tinkling that stilled the air. Then Zafira’s vision wavered, and the snow was suddenly clothed in shadow. Black bled into the white, tendrils reaching for Zafira’s ankles.

“Dear Huntress, a woman like me has no need for drink.”

Huntress. The reins slipped from Zafira’s hands.

“How—” The words died on her tongue.

A smile twisted the woman’s lips, and with it, Zafira’s heart. It was the type of smile that meant she knew Zafira’s secrets. The type of smile that meant no one was safe.

“You will always find your way, Zafira bint Iskandar,” the woman said. She sounded almost sad, though the glint in her eyes was anything but. “Lost you should have remained, cursed child.”

The silver of her cloak flashed when she turned, and then Zafira must have blinked again.

Because the woman had vanished.

Zafira’s heart clambered to her throat. Her name. That smile. There was no sign of the bleeding black or the silver cloak now. The snow was pristine as the claws in her brain loosened.

Then Sukkar was off before she could regain her hold on his reins.

She fumbled with a shout, sitting tall to keep from tumbling to the snow. He continued on a mad dash until they crested the slope and stumbled to a stop.

Zafira jerked back, cursing until Sukkar ducked his head with a dignified snort. Breathe. Assess. She looked back at the evernight forest once more, but the woman was nowhere to be seen. It was almost as if Zafira had imagined the entire encounter.

Perhaps she had. Zafira knew the Arz better than most, which was to say she understood that no one could ever know its secrets. To trust in its wickedness was to court a tortured death.

Do you hear the roar of the lion?

It wasn’t a roar Zafira heard. Something else beckoned from the darkness, enticing her. Growing with her every visit. It was as if a thread of her heart had snagged in the forest and was trying to reel her back in.

She drew in a sharp breath. Exhaustion had conjured the woman, that was all.

And now she was late. She veered Sukkar around with a huff. She had a dress to don and a wedding to catch.





CHAPTER 2


People died because he lived. And if that was the only way to carry forward in this life, then so be it.

There had been a particularly strong blizzard in the neighboring caliphate of Demenhur three nights ago, and Sarasin was chillier because of it. The combination of desert heat and the wayward cold rattled Nasir’s bones, yet here he was, far from his home in Sultan’s Keep, the small portion of land from which the sultan ruled Arawiya’s five caliphates.

Nasir’s missions to Sarasin always gave him a sense of nostalgia he never could understand. Though he had never lived here, it was the caliphate of his lineage, and it felt familiar and strange at once.

He came here for one act alone: murder.

Leil, the capital of Sarasin, was crawling with armed men in turbans of azure. Three stood guard at the entrance to the walled city. Billowing sirwal, instead of tighter-fitting pants, hung low across their hips, vain muscled arms glistened bronze. A gust of desert air carried the musky odor of hot sands, along with the chatter of children and their scolding elders.