With the last of my strength, I pull from my finger the ring I forged for Aladdin and let it fall into the current. It is swept away, lost into the flow of the hours, to land by the side of a fallen queen, to be found by her handmaidens, to wait five hundred years for the right person to put it on. With it I send a whispered prayer.
“Find me, my thief.”
Then, with a soft cry, I release the threads. Something inside me snaps, and, gasping, I pitch forward into darkness.
Chapter Thirty
“ZAHRA.”
My eyes open, and Aladdin is there, peering anxiously at me. He brushes the hair from my face.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
I sit up. My thoughts swim languidly through still waters. Everything is blurred and unfamiliar. Instinctively I reach out for my lamp, finding nothing but a vague tingle, as if I am missing an arm.
“I was unconscious?” I ask.
“Yes.” He cradles my head in one hand. The other holds my arm. “Zahra, what did you do? What happened?”
My head aches as if it’s been beaten with rocks. I groan and wrap my arms around it, trying to quell the pain. Aladdin holds me for several moments, stroking my hair, while I whimper and cringe.
“Are you all right?” he whispers. “Zahra?”
“I’m okay,” I say through my teeth, pulling back a little. “What about you?”
He grins tiredly. “Alive, so I’m not complaining. Where’s the Shaitan?”
I lift my head and blink rapidly, and the world reluctantly takes shape. I’m still in the alomb. Only seconds have passed, it seems, but much has changed. The sky is clear and blue, except for the tattered remnants of clouds drifting northward. The Eye of Jaal lies in two pieces, cracked straight down the center, the fiery tunnel to Ambadya vanished. All around me, massive cracks splinter the stone and the massive columns, as if a god has struck the alomb with a celestial hammer. The sight chills me; I realize that I caused it, that the magic I drew upon to trap Nardukha is greater and more dangerous than I know.
“He’s gone.” I ache to my core, my limbs leaden with fatigue. “Held prisoner by time. He only exists in a single moment, and he can never touch us again.”
Aladdin blinks, then asks, “Will he come back?”
“No.” He couldn’t even see the threads that ensnared him. What must it be like to be imprisoned in a moment, to not even see the walls that trap you?
“And the jinn?”
I cross to the doorway and run my hands down its sides, then step through experimentally. Nothing happens. Walking to the edge of the alomb, I look down on Parthenia. Smoke rises from the city, but no jinn soar above it.
“They must have fled back to Ambadya. They felt the loss of their king and panicked. For ten thousand and one years the Shaitan has been the only force that joined them together. Theywill fracture into their ancient tribes, and they will not return for a long, long time.”
“How do you know?”
Grimly, I turn and meet his gaze. “Because they know that I am here, and they know I defeated their king.”
“So it’s over.”
I nod, a bit stunned. The world has taken on a dreamlike softness, not quite real.
“Zahra... what happened to you? I saw you go through the doorway, and I thought... I thought you were gone. Where’s the lamp?”
I tell him about the jeweled garden, and the vision of you I saw. But when I reach the point where I fell through time and stars, my words fail me, and tears spring to my eyes. The beauty and purity of those moments still overwhelms me, and I wonder if I will ever truly understand all that I saw.
“I came back,” I conclude. “And for the first time, my magic was my own. I’ll never spend another moment in that horrible lamp.”
“I still can’t believe it’s really you,” he murmurs, running his fingers down my cheek. “This face... it’syours, isn’t it?”
“The one I was born with,” I admit, heat rising under my skin as I feel a surge of shyness. I look down at my hands. “Do you... like it?”
