We Hunt the Flame(30)

“The sultan—”

“I’m coming,” Nasir snapped.

The man flinched and hurried out the door.

Nasir slid from the bed and stepped into the adjoining washroom. His stomach growled, thunderous, but as he finished dressing, he knew he wouldn’t have time for a meal, for the sultan didn’t tolerate tardiness.

What would it matter if I were late?

His mother was dead. Kulsum had lost her most prized possession. But there would always be something—the sultan could carve out Kulsum’s eyeballs, peel the fingernails off Haytham’s son. There was always something Sultan Ghameq could do to make one wish he had obeyed, to make one wish for death.

Nasir focused on the soft thuds of his footsteps until his breathing slowed. The massive doors to the throne room groaned as they swung inward, revealing the sultan on the Gilded Throne, receiving emirs. He was always awake, always at work, always sharp-eyed.

Nasir waited, even as the emirs sneered at him while they walked past, proud they were given the sultan’s attention before the crown prince was.

When only the two of them remained, Ghameq eyed Nasir’s clothing. “Where are you going?”

“You summoned. I thought it was for another kill,” Nasir said, realizing his mistake too late.

“How many times have I told you not to think?”

Nasir clenched and unclenched his jaw. “Do you wish for me to change?”

“I don’t care what you wear, boy,” the sultan said.

I don’t care echoed in Nasir’s eardrums.

“Fetch something to eat and meet me in my rooms. Make quick.”

For the briefest of moments, Nasir couldn’t move. The sultan had just told him to eat.

His surprise must have been evident on his face, because the sultan scoffed. “Your hunger is pinching your face. I need you clearheaded so that you can remember what I tell you in that ineffective head of yours.”

Of course. How could he think, for even a moment, that his father actually cared?



* * *



This time, he shoved his silver circlet on his head, and when a guard let him into the sultan’s chambers, Nasir’s pulse quickened. The room looked exactly as it had the day before. Even that wretched poker stood as it had after their meeting with Haytham.

He pulled the curtain to the side and entered a smaller room, where Sultan Ghameq lounged on his majlis, legs crossed and a hand on the medallion at his neck. Nasir pulled his gaze away, and his eyes fell on another doorway, beyond which was a bed curtained in ivory, adorned with silver flowers. Nasir froze.

“What?” the sultan asked.

Nasir did not want to answer. “I haven’t been here since—”

“Since she died,” the sultan enunciated, voice hard.

Nasir released a breath and stared back at his father, waiting. Wishing. Searching. And there it was, the tiniest fissure in the gray stone of the sultan’s eyes, gone before Nasir could grasp it.

He knelt, and the moment shattered.

“You’re leaving tomorrow,” the sultan said.

“For where?”

“Sharr.”

If he expected surprise from Nasir, the sultan wouldn’t be getting it. “Vicious” was a mild descriptor for Sharr, where the very sand dealt death, yet Nasir felt an odd sense of detachment from the fact that he would soon be deep within the island. Logic told him that he had much to fear: He wouldn’t be the dangerous one in the place he was being sent. He wouldn’t be in command.

But he had stopped listening to logic when his mother died.

“The Silver Witch is sending the Demenhune Hunter to retrieve the lost Jawarat, a book that will end this drought of magic.”

So Haytham’s assumption was true. A breeze slipped past the open window, dry and dead, like all of Sultan’s Keep.

“The Hunter is a da’ira. A compass. Hunting in the Arz is hard enough, but finding one’s way back successfully for five years? There is magic at play. A da’ira is one of the rarer affinities. He has only to set his mind to an object, and he will be led to it. I doubt the man even knows what he is, or he wouldn’t so recklessly reveal himself. The two men I sent to retrieve him never returned.” The sultan stroked his beard in apparent thought. “So you will have to catch him on Sharr. Use him to find the Jawarat, then kill him. Kill anyone else the witch sends, too.”

Kill, destroy. That was what had replaced logic.

“But magic—” Nasir started.

“Did I ask for your thoughts?” the sultan asked, putting him in his place.

He was a lapdog. He couldn’t expect to learn more. He didn’t deserve more.

But how? he wanted to know. How could the Demenhune Hunter have magic when there was none? When it was clear that Ghameq’s fire summoning was done through the long-banished dum sihr, magic no one in Demenhur—an ethical caliphate—would, or even could, touch?

It meant that everything about magic disappearing was more than black-and-white.

“The witch has wronged me on more than one count,” the sultan continued. “Do not let the book fall into her hands. If my assumptions are wrong, and the Hunter is no more than a man with a goal, move on.”

Move on. Innocent wording for “kill and be done with it.”

“Understood?”