We Hunt the Flame(81)

“Is that why you came with Benyamin?” Zafira asked. “For honor?”

“The Darwishes are born to be erudites. To sit with folds of papyrus and dole out brilliant ideas as cows dole out milk. I like words all right, but I prefer the power of the blade. Even when they shoved a reed pen into my fist, I wanted that pen to be a spear. I wanted the power that came with knowing I stand between someone and death.

“My father’s a high inventor, and he hates nothing more than he hates magic. But I’m a close second, because he wanted all his children to be little copies of himself, and I refused. He made my siblings loathe me the way he did, but Tamim was different.” The warrior’s voice cracked at the name. “Had my brother not saved me from my own father in my own bleeding bedroom, I would have ended my life. My father punished him. He sent my beloved brother to the Arz. I followed, thinking I could save him, but they knew I’d come. They’d slit his throat first, the cowards.”

Kifah laughed. A soft, bitter laugh. “My scholarly brother bled out in my arms, and I screamed. And in answer to my anger, the trees disappeared, if only for a little bit.”

Zafira looked at her sharply.

“Tamim called it love, just before he died. Its own form of magic. Now I know it was the Arz, letting me change those trees to leaves because I’m a bleeding miragi.”

A miragi. An illusionist who could take one thing and make it something else entirely. That was how Kifah had hunted the cape hares. She didn’t need to outrun them; she only needed to illusion a trap.

Kifah shook her head. “His body wasn’t even cold before I took a razor to my hair and used his cuff to fashion the head of my spear. They say no one joins the school of the Nine Elite so late in her years. Yet here I am, wicked world.”

The fire curled and the moon held still as Kifah spoke her bladed words.

“I buried myself with Tamim that day. There is freedom in knowing you’re dead. When you’re a specter no one can touch.” Her smile was a knife. “The calipha refused Benyamin’s call for aid, because ‘Sharr is a gamble.’ But the dead are bound to no one, laa? I took my leave and joined the prattling safi. Not for honor, but because there’s no revenge sweeter than bringing back what my father loathes most: magic.” Kifah met Zafira’s eyes. “Do you see now, why I believed honor to be dead? When a woman who founded our kingdom cannot be trusted? When a father can’t even be trusted with his own daughter?”

Zafira didn’t know what to say. She knew the world was cruel, but she had never tried to perceive the limits of its cruelty.

“Did he— Did your father—” She couldn’t finish her question.

Kifah’s answer was a break in her stare, a parting of her mouth before she clenched her jaw and steeled her gaze once more.

It was answer enough.

“You and I are strangers, Huntress. Allies by circumstance. We may leave Sharr and never think of each other again. But in this moment, we are two souls, marooned beneath the moon, hungry and alone, adrift in the current of what we do not understand. We hunt the flame, the light in the darkness, the good this world deserves. You are like Tamim. You remind me that hope is not lost.”

She fell silent when something moaned in the shadows. A gleam shone in Kifah’s eyes when she continued. “Together, we will raise dunes from the earth and rain death from the sky. Together, we are capable of anything.”

Zafira didn’t think it was the fire that warmed a crevice in her chest.

Kifah Darwish lifted her lips into a smile, and it felt like the beginning of something Zafira never hoped for.

“So would you like some?”

Zafira stared at Kifah’s outstretched hands and took the blue pouch.

Candy-coated almonds it was.





CHAPTER 53


Zafira remained alert long after Altair had drifted off to sleep. Benyamin had tucked himself so far into his book, she might as well have called him asleep, too. Kifah slept on her back, red sash beneath her head, spear across her body, a fierce maiden at rest.

In this moment, we are two souls, marooned.

That was life, wasn’t it? A collection of moments, a menagerie of people. Everyone stranded everywhere, always.

Zafira rose and swept her gaze over the ruins. She couldn’t see the prince, which was for the best.

She snatched a fresh tunic and dug out a bar of her favorite soap from her bag. She pulled her cloak over her shoulders, the weight familiar and foreign at once. Almost like a barrier, almost like a cherished blanket.

She jerked away from scuttling beetles and hoisted herself to the highest point of the ruins, holding her breath when rubble crunched beneath her feet, and looked out. A small fold of trees dotted the landscape not too far from where she stood. If there was a stream, she intended to use it.

The sands held their breath as she stole between the fallen stones and stepped upon the shifting ground. Marhaba, darkness, my daama friend.

Marhaba, Huntress, our old friend, the sands whispered as they danced from dune to dune. The gibbous moon cast them in a tint of blue and black, a haze of shadow dulling her shine, steepening her cold to draw a shiver from Zafira’s bones. Ripples appeared across the dunes, deepening shadows that slithered like snakes. The wind moaned, cried, begged to be free.

What are you?

To define is to limit.