Selfish idiot. She was mourning and he could only think of himself, but he was tired. So daama tired of the vines those words had twisted between them.
She tilted her head, curious gazelle that she was. “Didn’t mean what?”
He tried but failed to stop the shadows leaching from his fingers. How was it that words were impossible, when drawing a blade and ending someone’s life wasn’t?
Because words cut deeper than swords.
He took a slow breath and lifted a hand to the back of his neck. Dropped it.
“What I said on Sharr. That it—that it meant nothing.” It was only after he spoke that he could look at her again.
In time to see her eyes drift to his mouth, to the burgundy linen of his qamis and back up again.
“What did it mean, then?”
Everything, he wanted to say, but there was a cloth in his mouth, woven from fear and suppression.
He’d been a fool to say what he’d said, he knew. He had closed the distance between them to stop her destructive path, to bring her to her senses, to distract her. He’d never expected to feel so much, to want so deeply, and that flood of emotion had terrified him.
She made a sound in the back of her throat when he said nothing, her disappointment damning, and then she was closing the door, bit by bit, as if waiting for him to put out his hand and stop her.
He was the crown prince, born to lead but forced to follow, follow, follow all his life.
And so he did nothing.
CHAPTER 11
Zafira pressed her head against the smooth wood and heard his heavy sigh on the other side, a reminder of how easily his aloof mask could fall apart.
Then, a long while later, his door slipped closed.
She knew there was more he wanted to say. There was chaos in his eyes and a barricade across his lips. She could have helped him along, but he was the prince. He should be more than capable. Skies, she was as pettish as Seif.
“Who was that?” Lana asked from the bed, wider than any Zafira had ever lain in. She spoke as if Zafira had just returned after a day of wandering through the stalls of the sooq. As if there weren’t a death or two strung between them and a new world cresting the horizon.
Again, Zafira waited for the burn of tears. Instead, there was a strange unraveling in her chest that made it easier to breathe.
Lana tilted her head, silently repeating her question. What could Zafira say—that he was a friend she had made? A boy she had kissed? A prince she must bow to? The assassin whose father was responsible for their mother’s death among hundreds of others?
“Nasir,” Zafira replied, setting aside the Jawarat. There we go. The world was full of Nasirs, wasn’t it?
Lana shot up. “As in the Prince of Death?”
Clearly not enough Nasirs.
“I wouldn’t … call him that,” Zafira said as Lana turned away so she could drop her clothes in a heap and sink into the cool bath.
“I didn’t know he would look nice,” Lana contemplated, and Zafira bit her lower lip, thinking of the crimson linen stretched across his shoulders, the little triangle of skin framed by his unbuttoned collar. The way the fabric of his sirwal clung to his thighs. He didn’t look nice, he looked … Zafira lifted her hands to her cheeks.
Something about knowing he was a short distance away when she wasn’t dressed terrified her more than the Arz ever had. It allured her more than the Arz ever had.
Lana came to the side of the tub. “You’re pretty when you’re happy.”
Zafira leaned her head against the rim. “I’m not.”
His soft voice caressed her ears. I didn’t mean it.
Some part of her had known it was a lie, even then. That moment between the marble columns was too real, too raw, filled with too much. It was how easily he spoke the lie that had angered her. How easily he would dismiss her, and himself.
“But you’ve caught the attention of the prince!”
Which was precisely it, wasn’t it? She had been drawn to him as he had been to her, and it wasn’t as if there was an abundance of women on Sharr to rivet him. It would be different now. “Didn’t you just call him the Prince of Death?”
“Prince of Death, Demenhune Hunter. Titles don’t tell you who a person is.”
Zafira sighed. “How can I be happy, Lana? I lost friends on Sharr. Ummi is dead. Our village is gone.”
Lana stared at Zafira’s hands for a beat. “Was Deen one of those friends?”
Zafira jerked, splashing water on her face, and Lana gave her a small, wavering smile.
“I had a feeling when I saw him stepping after you and boarding the ship. He was never as … resilient as you. You would fight your way out of the grave for us. You would kill for us. He was content enough with the chance to die for the ones he loved.”
Zafira studied Lana: the deeper layer of sorrow in her words, the glisten in her gaze. Sweet snow, her sister had loved Deen. Not in the way Zafira had loved him, for he had been one of her dearest friends. Not in the way Deen himself had loved Lana, as a doting older brother. But more.
Deen was soft where Zafira was hard. He was ready to see the best in the world, where Zafira saw darkness. Would it come as any surprise that Lana had fallen in love with him?
“One moment we were safe,” Zafira said softly, “the next there were three bowstrings snapping at once.” She would never forget that sound, or the breathless lack of it that followed. Her fingers closed around the ring hanging at her chest from a golden chain, and Lana’s eyes followed. “I’m sorry.”
Lana’s throat shifted. She struggled to find words, for the grief in books was a mere fraction of what the real world inflicted. “It was meant to happen, even if I wish it weren’t so.”
If Zafira had loved him, perhaps. Accepted his proposal. Married him.
She shook free from the line of thought and hastened to change the subject. “How did you escape the attack?”
“Misk,” Lana said, still somber. She boxed away her sorrow with a heavy exhale. “He was ready when the soldiers came in. As if he knew before it happened. A few of his friends ushered the caliph and sayyidi Haytham into their caravan.”
Of course he had. Because he was Altair’s spider, sent to spy on the Demenhune Hunter, and he would have received word as spies were wont to do. Clearly not early enough, if there had only been time to vacate the bigoted caliph and no one else. She felt a needless sense of betrayal, as if by knowing moments before, Misk had somehow played a part in the massacre.
The Jawarat hummed. Water dripped from her hair. Plink, plink, plink.
“I tried to go back for Ummi, but he wouldn’t let me, and when he went back, she was gone. There wasn’t time to keep searching, because we had to leave for the palace.”
There was a kind of sand, rare in the desert, that appeared as harmless as normal sand until it sank beneath one’s feet, swallowing the unsuspecting, worsening the longer they struggled, loosening its grip only when they did the opposite. That was how grief was. The longer one wallowed, the more it hungered.
Zafira tossed her towel onto the chair and tugged on fresh clothes.
“I thought it would hurt more,” Lana said, searching for a way to understand as Zafira pulled her to the bed.
“When we buried Baba five years ago, we buried part of Ummi, too. She’s been dead for as long as Baba has. She loved us, but not the way she loved Baba,” Zafira said carefully, as she herself tried to make sense of why she felt relief more than sorrow, guilt more than pain. “He was her life. We were the reminders of it.”