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Just like the Six Sisters of Old, who had staked their lives to bring daama Arawiya to fruition and now lay as parables of shame.
Had the Sisters been men, Arawiya would still have magic. Had the Sisters been men, the caliphates would not be cursed. Had the Sisters been men, everything would be as it once was. Or so the Demenhune caliph preached.
Zafira believed otherwise.
As she and Sukkar crested the last hill that stood between her village and the Arz, she wished, more than anything, that she could be herself. That women didn’t have to be the incapable creatures the men of Demenhur claimed them to be. The one solace she had was knowing that not all of the five caliphates held the same twisted views. In Zaram, women could fight in arenas, equal beside men. In Pelusia, a calipha governed alone, surrounded by her Nine Elite.
Zafira fingered her hood. If she escaped the confines of her cloak and the masquerade of a man, Demenhur would not praise her. Her accomplishments would shift into a cause for blame. A twisted foreboding of a predicament to come.
Gloomy thoughts for a wedding day.
A lone figure came into view, and Zafira had a fleeting moment of panic before she registered the soft features and sunlit curls. Deen. One of four souls who knew she was the Arz Hunter. He waited with a blade in his hands, unflinching against the cold winds.
Zafira dismounted and nudged his shoulder. “One day, you will venture the darkness with me.”
Deen smiled, eyes trained upon the Arz as he spoke his favored line. “But today is not that day.” Flakes of snow dusted his curls. His dimpled cheeks were pink from the cold, and his green coat bulged around his arms, muscled from his months in the army. “You were gone quite a while.” He wrinkled his nose. “Yasmine is going to have your head.”
Zafira scrunched the side of her mouth. “Not when she sees the deer I caught for the wedding feast.”
Deen and his sister, Yasmine, shared the same soft beauty—hair that shone like burnished bronze, rounded features, warm hazel eyes. He was beautiful, inside and out. Yet after his parents’ deaths, he had plastered on a smile that Zafira loathed, barely masking the torment floundering in his eyes.
A crease marred his forehead now. She knew he couldn’t see much of her beneath her hood and scarf, but his concern said he saw enough.
“Are you all right? Something happened in the Arz, didn’t it?”
“A little scare,” she said with a smile because he knew her so well. “You know how it is.”
He hummed and his eyes drifted to the dark forest again. “It’s getting closer, isn’t it?”
She didn’t need to answer. The Arz crept closer with each passing day, spearing their borders with bladed roots and swallowing the land. If the Demenhune thought they were dying with the endless snow, it was only a matter of time before the Arz swept across their caliphate—the entire kingdom—leaving them for the whispers of nightmares and monsters within the absolute black.
“Last night I dreamed I was on Sharr.”
Zafira froze at his words. Sharr. What were the odds, hearing the name of that forsaken place twice in one morning? It was an island of evil, a place warned of in the dead of night beneath the flicker of a lantern. A fear just out of reach because it lived beyond the Arz.
It had been a prison fortress before it had stolen the Sisters and magic. Now it was wild and untamed, with oases run rampant, and it reached for Arawiya with the Arz, each tree another sentinel in its army.
“In the prison it once was?”
Deen shook his head, his gaze distant. “I was trapped inside a massive tree. Darkness like smoke. Whispers.” He grimaced and looked at her. “So many whispers, Zafira.”
She did not tell him of the whispers that shadowed her every waking moment.
Deen sighed. “I don’t know what it means, but did it have to plague me today of all days?”
“At least today you’ll have a distraction to help take your mind off it.” She reached for his hand, and he slipped his gloved pinkie around hers.
“Dear snow, is that you being optimistic?”
She laughed and his face sobered as they turned back to the village, ice crunching beneath their boots.
“Do you remember Inaya?”
“The thin baker’s daughter?” Zafira asked. No one baked bread in the western villages as scrumptiously as the thin baker did. His daughter was a soft-spoken girl with watchful eyes and a mane of hair as wild as a lion’s.
He nodded. “The baker took a fall a few days back, and it doesn’t look like he’ll walk again. So word spread that she was going to take the reins.”
Zafira’s stomach dropped.
