She bit her tongue. “And there’s no way to undo the bond?”
“Death,” the Silver Witch said, as if Zafira should have known. “Drive a dagger through the tome’s center, and you’ll be free of it.”
“How kind,” Zafira ground out. “I’ll be ‘free’ of everything else, too.”
She brushed her fingers across the green leather, thumb dipping into the fiery mane of the lion embossed in its center. The Silver Witch only hummed, studying the girl who knew the Lion almost as well as she did.
She envies us.
Zafira began to agree, before she clenched her jaw against the Jawarat’s whispers. They could be far-fetched, she realized. Why ever would a Sister of Old envy a mortal girl?
We will align with time.
Whatever that meant.
She jumped when the two lanterns struck with a sudden clang. Her quiver tipped, arrows spilling and dust swirling like the sands of Sharr. The Silver Witch didn’t flinch, though Zafira noted the tight bind of her shoulders, so unlike the languid immortal, before the door swung open, revealing a silhouette in the passageway.
Zafira recognized the mussed hair, the absolute stillness she had only ever seen in deer before she loosed a fatal arrow.
A cloak of darkness followed Arawiya’s crown prince inside. He was effortless, as always. Almost careless, if one wasn’t paying close enough attention to his deliberate movements. His gray gaze swept the small space and she couldn’t stop the flitter in her chest when it locked on hers.
And strayed to her mouth for the barest of moments.
“Are you hurt?” Nasir asked, in that voice that looped with the shadows, soft and demanding. But there was a strain to it, a discomfiture that made her all too aware of the Silver Witch watching every heartbeat of this exchange.
Zafira had known the context behind that question, once. When she was an asset that needed protecting. A compass guiding his destructive path. What was the reason for his concern now that they had retrieved what they once sought, rendering her purpose—on Sharr, in Demenhur, skies, in this world—obsolete?
Before she could find her voice, he was looking at the Silver Witch and gesturing to a dark trail on the floorboards that hadn’t been there before. Red stained his fingers.
“So this is why the ship isn’t going any faster.”
Waves crashed in the silence.
“I can perform the mundane tasks any miragi can,” his mother said finally, “but time is an illusion that requires concentration and strength, neither of which I currently have.”
“And why is that?” His tone was impatient, his words terse.
The Silver Witch stood, and despite Nasir’s height, everything shrank before her. She parted her cloak to reveal the crimson gown beneath, torn and stiff with blood.
Zafira shot to her feet. “The Lion’s black dagger. Back on Sharr.”
Beneath the witch’s right shoulder gaped a wound, one she had endured to protect Nasir. It was a festering whorl of black, almost like a jagged hole.
“The very same,” the Silver Witch said as another drop of blood welled from her drenched dress. “There is no known cure to a wound inflicted by cursed ore. The old healers lived secluded on the Hessa Isles, and if any of them still remain, my only hope is there.”
“What of Bait ul-Ahlaam?” Nasir demanded.
Zafira translated the old Safaitic. The House of Dreams. She’d never heard of it before.
“You can easily cross the strait from Sultan’s Keep and find what you need there.”
“At what cost? I will not set foot within those walls,” she replied, but Zafira heard the unspoken words: Not again. She had been there before, and it was clear the cost had little to do with dinars.
The Silver Witch was not easily fazed, so the flare of anger in her gaze and the frown tugging the corners of her mouth was strange. Notably so.
“Then you’ll leave us,” Nasir said, and Zafira flinched at his harsh indifference.
“I will be a walking vessel of magic. Of no use to you, but of every use to the Lion when he inevitably gets his hands on me,” the Silver Witch replied. “With my blood and his knowledge of dum sihr, no place in Arawiya will be safe. There is only so much he can do with my half-si’lah sons.”
Nasir looked down at his hands, where wisps of black swirled in and out of his skin. Almost as if they were breathing. His shadows hadn’t retreated like Zafira’s sense of direction had. He didn’t need the magic of the hearts when he could supply his own. He didn’t have to suffer the emptiness she did.
Something ugly reared in her, choking her lungs, and Zafira nearly dropped the Jawarat in her panic. Just as suddenly, the rage cleared and her heartbeat settled.
What— Her breath shook.
“This mess began because of you.” Nasir’s words were too cold, and she had to remind herself that he was speaking to his mother, not her. “We left Altair in the Lion’s hands because of you.”
The Silver Witch met his eyes. “There was a time when the steel of your gaze was directed elsewhere. When you looked to me with love, tenderness, and care.”
Nasir gave no response, but if the tendrils of darkness that bled from his clenched fists were any indication, the words had found their mark. He loved her, Zafira knew; it was why his words manifested so hatefully.
“I’ve taught you all that you know,” his mother said gently. “There is still time—I will teach you to control the dark. To bend the shadows to your will.”
“Just as you taught him?”
The silence echoed like a roar. Nasir didn’t wait to hear the rest. He turned and limped away, shadows trailing. Zafira made to follow, careful to keep her gaze from sweeping after him, for she was well aware that nothing passed the Silver Witch’s scrutiny.
“Heed me, Huntress,” the Silver Witch said. “Always carry a blade and a benignity. You may never know which you will need.”
Zafira felt the stirrings of something at her tone.
“And you cannot return home.”
Purpose. That was what she felt. Something dragging her from this sinking, burrowing sense of being nothing.
“If you do, your entire journey to Sharr—including your friend’s death, Benyamin’s slaughter, and Altair’s capture—will have been in vain.”
Perhaps the witch had always known someone with the rare affinity of finding whatever they set their heart to—a da’ira—wasn’t needed for the job. Perhaps she saw in Zafira what Zafira could not see in her, but knew from the memories of the Jawarat to be true. Someone like herself, guided by a good heart and pure intentions, before she fell prey to a silver tongue.
“The hearts are dying. They are organs removed from their houses, deteriorating as we speak. Restore them to their minarets, or magic will be gone forever.”
CHAPTER 3
Under his philosophy, retrospect was the antecedent of wrinkles. Yet shackled and shoved into the dank bowels of the ship, Altair al-Badawi could do nothing else.
He had spent most of his life vying for his mother’s love, trying to atone for the curl of her lips every time she turned his way. Though it hadn’t taken long to understand that she saw him as the culmination of her failures, it wasn’t until Sharr when he learned the extent of it: that she was a Sister of Old and the reason magic was gone, that she had—