We Hunt the Flame(82)

Zafira released a slow exhale. First she thought the darkness was calling to her, and now the sands were speaking, too? She paused to look back: The fire was a glowing pinprick between the slabs of stone, but the stillness promised her presence wouldn’t be missed.

She quickened her steps until she passed one palm, two, and then entered a glade of several. She brushed aside brittle vines, gliding between meandering roots and rogue stone.

Tall grass settled to a shorter cover of plants. The stream was small, but it rushed from west to east, dusky blue beneath the still-heavy moon. Zafira grinned, never so happy to get clean.

Until she heard it.

Steel knifing the night. She breathed a string of curses and slipped back into the shadows.

There. The glint of a curved blade, a little ways to her left.

Against the moonlight, his profile gave him away: lithe and still. Uncovered, disheveled hair. Sharp nose. Barely parted lips. She imagined his bleak eyes churning a storm. He tipped his head up, and the length of his scar flashed.

Nasir. Something simmered in her stomach.

The prince lowered his head and leveled the scimitar ahead of him in slow movements. Zafira peered to her right but couldn’t see an opponent. He’s alone. She drew her eyebrows together as he shifted the scimitar ever so slowly, blade glinting in the moonlight, before it cut across the air in swooping crescents.

He paused with his scimitar extended, and she followed the glister of the blade to his arm as he drifted elegantly through the grass. She had heard of the hashashins and their training, but she had never guessed their drill could be anything less than violent brutality.

This wasn’t violent or brutal. This was a dance, graceful and lithe. A performance of finesse. He moved as if he were made of the water beside him, with a stillness in his shoulders and the length of his back. She could only imagine how much smoother his motions would be if he were gliding through sand, rather than the uneven grass of the oasis.

Lightning quick, he leaped, turning a full circle before slashing the scimitar down in a swooping arc. He finished with the flat of it against his other arm and exhaled.

He lowered the blade, setting himself in a new angle. Her eyes flared at the sight of his bare chest, slight ridges along his stomach casting shadows on his skin. Lean muscles coiled and flexed in time with his breathing. A pair of dark sirwal billowed, low on his hips.

When he turned to the water, her breath caught and her stomach heaved.

Leeches covered his back. Fat lumps of black in neat rows, almost as if arranged. They started at his shoulder blades and continued down, stopping at the waistband of his trousers. He disappeared into the stream, which had to be larger than a stream if he could vanish within. Perhaps it was a river. How would she know? Zafira lived in Demenhur. They had only snow, snow, and more snow.

She thumped her head against the nearest tree. She could almost feel Yasmine’s presence beside her, theories dripping from her friend’s lips like rose water at a wedding. A prince with leeches on his back, for what? Bad blood? Poison? Illness? He seemed healthy enough.

For the fun of it?

A muted splash interrupted her thoughts. Nasir emerged from the water, dark hair plastered to his skull, sirwal clinging to his legs and … She pinched her lips together and made a sound as her pulse quickened. Her neck warmed. But the leeches, Yasmine said in her head. You’re looking at him because of the leeches. Zafira added a touch of slyness to her friend’s voice for good measure.

She raised her gaze as he ran a towel across his body, movements slow. He rubbed it along his back without a care and turned, his back to the moonlight.

Shadows glinted and deepened.

Sweet snow below. They weren’t leeches or lumps. They were scars. Charred and blackened.

Zafira hissed a breath through her teeth.

Nasir stilled.

She did not move. She did not breathe.

He tilted his head.

She cursed, turned, fled. Skies. What was she doing, spying on the Prince of Death? She wasn’t sure if he would catch her, but she couldn’t leave the shelter of the oasis. She cursed the hindrance of her cloak when it snagged on the fringe of a palm, and she tugged it free before barreling forward. At the edge, she stopped and tucked herself into the trees, trying to catch her breath while she listened.

Silence, except for the pounding of her heart. Not a single sound of pursuit.

Until air compressed behind her.

A hand on her shoulder, and she was thrown against the tree. Long fingers pressed against her chest. Her hood fell back and she bit her tongue against a cry of surprise.

“You,” Nasir exhaled, his voice a tangled chord of chaos. Surprise flickered across his face. Water glistened in his hair, dripping onto a white linen qamis snug across his shoulders, sleeves rolled to the middle of his forearms. Every nerve ending crackled and simmered low in her belly. He looked younger, dressed the way he was, without his hashashin’s garb. Almost innocent.

It wasn’t just the clothes that had changed the prince but also the look on his face. The walls that had fallen, showing fear, surprise, that gaping unhappiness, and so many emotions Zafira couldn’t make sense of in the dark. His eyes swept across her face, snagging on her mouth, and her neck warmed again.

“Yes, me,” Zafira breathed.

That was all it took. Her voice, two words, and the walls returned, his mask firmly lifted back into place.

She looked down at his hand against her chest, foreign in its bareness without that dark glove enclosing it. He had long, elegant fingers. What would he have become, if it hadn’t been for the dark calling in his blood? Her gaze snared on the inside of his arm. Ink. His breath hitched and he snatched his hand away. Zafira licked her dry lips, ignoring a flare of disappointment.