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“There was no question of whether the child who had lived a fraction of the life he had lived should be spared or not,” Umm said, voice cracking in the end. When she drew her next breath, Zafira heard the rattle in her chest. The pain.
Zafira rubbed her face and her fingers came away wet with tears.
Umm lifted her hands. “Yaa, my abal, don’t cry for me.”
Oh, my wild rose.
Zafira hadn’t heard the endearment in years. Everything clawed up her throat, scraping her insides, tearing her resolve. Her father had whispered it last, and then she’d been fighting his iron grasp, gasping for her life.
She remembered that sudden stillness after Umm drove her jambiya through his heart. Red darted across her vision now. Dark red, a line painted down Baba’s chest.
Zafira stepped closer. She crouched. Sat. With each movement, her guilt grew as she realized how selfish she had been. She reached for Umm’s hands, closing her fingers around the coolness of her mother’s. The tears fell now. One after the other, they trickled from a crevice in her chest, turning into a stream flooding from her heart. Umm’s eyes wilted into sadness.
“Sometimes I forget his face,” Umm whispered.
How could something so painless as the loss of memory hurt so much? The raw despair in her mother’s gaze gripped her.
Zafira could never forget Baba’s face. She could never forget Baba—khalas, that was that. Yet she had ignored her living parent. She had left her mother to mourn alone. For no matter how much time Lana spent with Umm, it was Zafira who had been there when Baba breathed his last. It was Zafira who understood Umm’s grief.
That very mother who had saved her life.
She had allowed her pain to harden into anger. Allowed that anger to fester, blinding her to Umm’s suffering. If Zafira grieved from seeing her father die at the hands of her mother, how did it feel for Umm to live with the hands she had used to slay her beloved?
How had it felt for Umm to choose between one love and another?
Zafira forced air into her lungs. She shuttered her selfish, burning eyes and dropped her head to Umm’s lap, the gesture foreign. Familiar.
“Forgive me, Ummi. Forgive me,” Zafira pleaded. She repeated the words over and over. “For my elusion. For my anger.”
Selfish. Childish. Hateful. Skies, there was no daughter in Arawiya worse than her.
“Don’t beg, child. I, too, am sorry,” Umm lulled, and took Zafira’s face in her hands. There was no glint of madness looking back at Zafira from the ice-blue eyes she had inherited. “You did not come to me, and I did not come to you. We are both at fault, are we not?”
No. It was Zafira who was at fault. She had failed her duty as a daughter.
Umm brushed her thumb across Zafira’s damp cheek. “Lana tells me you will go to Sharr.”
She supposed her tears had to do with more than Umm and Baba. It was everything else, too. Yasmine’s marriage. Deen’s proposal. This trek to Sharr.
“I won’t be like Baba. I won’t return to hurt you. I will be victorious, or I will die.” There was steel in Zafira’s voice.
“I am not trying to stop you, my abal. I only want to know what the search is for.”
“The return of magic,” Zafira said. “The destruction of the Arz that took him from us.”
Umm considered that before she curved her lips into a smile, sending a thousand memories soaring through Zafira. She could see Baba there. She could see warm bread fresh out of the oven. Blankets creating a cocoon. She could see Lana’s small hands and Umm’s favorite ma’moul cookies.
It was gone now. All of it. Everything.
Because of the Arz.
“Avenge his death, Zafira. Avenge your father and destroy that forest.” Umm brushed her thumb across her cheek again, giving her a flicker of light to guide her unknown path. A path Zafira swore to follow.
“Be as victorious as the name I have given you, and bring the desert to its knees.”
Zafira took her mother’s words, one by one, and swallowed them whole.
* * *
