We Hunt the Flame(93)

She supposed that would have to be enough.





CHAPTER 60


Zafira thought of the dreamwalk as they continued onward the next morning. She thought of Alderamin and quelled the hope that rose when she pictured Demenhur the same way—alive, free from the Arz and endless snow. Yet every step solidified another realization: finding magic meant losing herself. She would need to bury a part of herself in Sharr before she left. If she left.

It wasn’t as easy as Benyamin had put it. What purpose would she have, if she was no longer the cloaked figure who fed her people the magic of the Arz?

The more she thought about it, the further she unraveled.

The darkness no longer simply called to her; it had opened a void inside her, gaping and hungry. Everywhere she glimpsed, she saw the kaftar’s roving eyes and the ifrit’s fiery staves. The glimmer of a silver cloak and the curve of a crimson smile. Zafira fought a shiver.

Is it wrong to seek redemption as any mortal might? The words could be taken a hundred ways. Everything the witch had said had been carefully worded, her emotions deliberately enacted.

Zafira did not trust her, she realized. But she did not distrust her.

“Are you all right?” Nasir asked.

He was likely concerned about his compass going astray. The hum she was beginning to associate with his presence started up again.

“I’m fine,” she said as she tried to make sense of their route.

“You don’t look fine.”

She turned to him angrily. His dark hair had fallen over his forehead. A smear of blood stained his cheek. What did he know about how “fine” looked? About how she looked?

“Then stop looking,” she snapped.

She had journeyed to Sharr with one purpose: to find the Jawarat. Now a thousand different paths had unfurled like intricately woven Pelusian rugs, and she wasn’t certain what she was doing anymore.

The idiot prince didn’t leave her side. Not even when she sidestepped a length of brushwood and changed direction. Still, she kept pace with him, because … because she didn’t want him to leave her side.

“Will there ever come a time when you won’t see me as a monster?” he asked suddenly.

She stopped at the softness of his tone, so unlike the unfeeling prince she had come to know. Some part of her wanted to reach for him, to smooth away the unhappiness creasing his face, to touch the scars that made him him.

“Monsters cannot become men,” she whispered instead, and the darkness hummed its agreement.

He exhaled through parted lips, and his unhappiness only increased. “Of course. That was selfish of me.”

That does not mean I cannot love a monster.

Where did that come from? I can’t very well say “like,” can I? Doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Zafira closed her eyes and dipped so far into her thoughts that when he spoke again, she almost jumped.

“You feel it, don’t you?” he asked.

He was standing so daama close, she could feel the heat of his body.

“The darkness. Luring.”

She pursed her lips against her surprise. He feels it, too?

“My mother once said that just as our eyes tailor to the darkness, so do our souls.”

This time, she couldn’t hold back her surprise. He was the last person she expected such a thing from.

He read her face and looked away, and her eyes traced the knotted skin of his scar. She knew that tone. The way he said “mother.” It was how she spoke of Baba. It was how they spoke of one who was but never again will be. His tone was rife with unspent love.

“You miss her,” she said, feeling guilty for thinking he was incapable of the sentiment. Was his mother the reason for the ink on his arm?

He didn’t answer, and she didn’t think he would, until some moments later, when he spoke.

“Sometimes,” he said quietly. “Most times.”

She couldn’t stop her smile.

His eyes dipped to her mouth, and the gray of his eyes turned liquid black. Like a fool, Zafira ran her tongue across her lips. Their gazes crashed, and she drew in a sharp breath, for there he was, a boy again, unmasked.

Still every bit a murderer as he always was. But. But what? Zafira didn’t know, except that a “but” had begun to slip into every thought related to the Prince of Death.

She couldn’t muster more than a whisper. “Who killed Deen?”

Nasir lifted his mask back into place. “A monster. For a monster will always be enslaved to a master.”





CHAPTER 61


Control was slipping between Nasir’s fingers like the sands of Sharr. He was aware he’d had very little control since arriving on Sharr, but it only worsened with each passing day.

He had come with a simple plan: kill the others, find the Hunter, retrieve the Jawarat, and return to Sultan’s Keep. Now everything was in shambles, including himself. When she met his eyes and flashed her smile and spoke in her lilting accent, he wasn’t heir of Arawiya, hashashin, and Prince of Death.

He was a boy.

“We’ll stop here for the night,” Benyamin said when they followed a trickle of a stream to a glade of dying palm trees. Here, the structure was still intact, the pointed archways like mouths waiting to devour them.

Altair frowned up at the starless sky. “Not that there’s a difference between night and day anymore.”