It was fire-bright, tipped in deadly sharp claws.
Before he could scream, a woman’s face swam into view. Nahri. No, not Nahri, though Dara could see the ghost of her in the woman’s expression. This Daeva was older, her face slightly lined. Silver stole through the black hair roughly shorn at her shoulders.
She looked almost as shocked as Dara felt. Delighted—but shocked. She reached up to stroke his cheek. “It worked,” she whispered. “It finally worked.”
Dara stared down in horror at his burning hands. The hated emerald slave ring glittered back. “Why do I look like this?” His voice broke in panic. “Have the ifrit—”
“No,” the woman assured him quickly. “You’re free of the ifrit, Darayavahoush. You’re free of everything.”
That answered nothing. Dara gaped at the incomprehensible sight of his fiery skin, dread rising in his heart. In no world he knew did djinn and daevas look as he did now, even when brought back from slavery.
In a distant corner of his mind, Dara could still hear his sister begging him to return to the garden of his ancestors. Tamima. Grief rushed through him, and tears streamed down his cheeks, sizzling against his hot skin.
He shuddered. The magic coursing through his blood felt raw: new and ragged and uncontrollable. He drew a sharp breath, and the walls of the tent they were in undulated wildly.
The woman grabbed his hand. “Calm yourself, Afshin,” she said. “You are safe. You are free.”
“What am I?” He glanced again at his claws, sick at the sight. “What have you done to me?”
She blinked, looking taken aback by the despair in his voice. “I’ve made you a marvel. A miracle. The first daeva to be freed of Suleiman’s curse in three thousand years.”
Suleiman’s curse. He stared at her in disbelief, the words echoing in his head. That wasn’t possible. That … that was abominable. His people honored Suleiman. They obeyed his code.
Dara had killed for that code.
He shot to his feet. The ground shook beneath him, the tent walls flapping madly in a gust of hot wind. He staggered outside.
“Afshin!”
He gasped. He had been expecting the darkly lush mountains of his island city, but instead, Dara faced a desert, vast and empty. And then with horror, he recognized it. Recognized the line of salt cliffs and the single rocky tower that stood sentinel in the distance.
The Dasht-e Loot. The desert in southern Daevastana so hot and inhospitable that birds dropped dead from the sky while flying over it. At the height of the Daeva rebellion, Dara had lured Zaydi al Qahtani to the Dasht-e Loot. He’d caught and killed Zaydi’s son in a battle that should have finally turned the war in the Daevas’ favor.
But that was not how things had ended for Dara in the Dasht-e Loot.
A cackling laugh brought him sharply to the present.
“Well, there is a wager I have lost …” The voice behind him was smoothly clever, pulled from the worst of Dara’s memories. “The Nahid actually did it.”
Dara whirled around, blinking in the sudden brightness. Three ifrit were before him, waiting in the crumbling ruins of what might have once been a human palace, now lost to time and the elements. The same ifrit who’d hunted him and Nahri across the Gozan River, a desperate encounter they’d barely survived.
Their leader—Aeshma, Dara remembered—dropped from a broken wall, sauntering forward with a grin. “He even looks like us,” he teased. “I suspect that’s a shock.”
“It’s a pity.” The ifrit who spoke next was a woman. “I liked the look of him before.” She gave him a sly smile, holding up a battered metal helmet. “What do you think, Darayavahoush? Want to see if it still fits?”
Dara’s eyes locked on the helmet. It had gone bluish-green with rust, but he instantly recognized the ragged edge of the brass shedu wings that sprouted from its sides. Shedu feathers, passed down from father to son, had once lined the helmet’s crest. Dara could still remember shivering the first time he had touched them.
With rising horror, he looked again at the crumbling bricks. At the dark hole they enclosed, a black void upon the moonlit sand. It was the well down which he’d been callously thrown centuries ago to be drowned and remade, his soul enslaved by the ifrit now casually spinning his helmet on one finger.
Dara jerked back, clutching his head. None of this made any sense, but it all suggested something unfathomable. Unconscionable.
Desperate, he reached for the first person on his mind. “N-nahri,” he stammered. He’d left her screaming his name upon the burning boat, surrounded by their enemies.
Aeshma rolled his eyes. “I did tell you he would ask for her first. The Afshins are like dogs for their Nahids, loyal no matter how many times they’re whipped.” He turned his attention back to Dara. “Your little healer is in Daevabad.”
Daevabad. His city. His Banu Nahida. The betrayal in her dark eyes, her hands on his face as she begged him to run away.
A choked cry came from his throat, and heat consumed him. He whirled around, not certain where he was going. Only knowing that he needed to get back to Daevabad.
And then in a crack of thunder and flash of scalding fire, the desert was gone.
Dara blinked. Then he reeled. He stood upon a rocky shore, a swiftly coursing river gleaming darkly beside it. On the opposite bank, limestone cliffs rose against the night sky, glowing faintly.
The Gozan River. How he had gotten here from the Dasht-e Loot in the blink of an eye was not a thing Dara could begin to comprehend—but it didn’t matter. Not now. The only thing that mattered was returning to Daevabad and saving Nahri from the destruction he’d wrought.
Dara rushed forward. The invisible threshold that hid Daevabad away from the rest of the world was mere moments from the riverbank. He had crossed it countless times in his mortal life, returning from hunting trips with his father and his assignments as a young soldier. It was a curtain that fell instantly for anyone with even a drop of daeva blood, revealing the misty green mountains that surrounded the city’s cursed lake.
But as he stood there now, nothing happened.
Panic swept him. This couldn’t be. Dara tried again, crisscrossing the plain and running the length of the river, struggling to find the veil.
On what must have been the hundredth attempt, Dara crashed to his knees. He wailed, flames bursting from his hands.
There was a crack of thunder and then the sound of running feet and Aeshma’s annoyed sigh.
A woman knelt quietly at his side. The Daeva woman whose face he’d awoken to, the one who resembled Nahri. A long moment of silence stretched between them, broken only by Dara’s ragged breaths.
He finally spoke. “Am I in hell?” he whispered, giving voice to the fear that gnawed at his heart, the uncertainty that had kept him from taking his sister’s hand to enter the garden. “Is this punishment for the things I’ve done?”
“No, Darayavahoush, you are not in hell.”
The soft assurance in her calm voice encouraged him to continue, and so he did. “I cannot cross the threshold,” he choked out. “I cannot even find it. I have been damned. I have been turned away from my home and—”
The woman gripped his shoulder, the powerful magic in her touch stealing his words. “You have not been damned,” she said firmly. “You cannot cross the threshold because you don’t carry Suleiman’s curse. Because you are free.”