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The Lion gripped her arm, wrenching her forward and grabbing the Jawarat.
We are here for you.
And then the world came undone with a roar of anguish that brought them both gasping to their knees.
Always.
CHAPTER 54
The cruel sun scorches everything in blinding white light, but he does not blink. He does not look away. Every drop of blood is a knife to his chest. Each red splotch on the ground he feels keenly as if it were his own.
The stones strike again and again and again.
Pride lifts the chins of the safin. They wear white, but their hearts are made of black. Their ears are like his, pointed and sharp. A display of their immortality, heightened senses, and unnatural speed. They are special, their ears claim, and he is not.
&n
bsp; He has no heart. He knows this, for there is no beat in his chest, but they see reason to remind him. Over and over and over. His body was shaped to hold a heart—like safin, like mortal men—but his ifrit blood birthed him without the pulsing mass of red.
As the blood quickens from erratic drops to a terrible trickle, he wonders: Does one need a heart to feel compassion? Is the rise of pride the downfall of mercy?
He is created of evil.
His darkness is a curse.
He deserves death.
Then why are they killing his father instead?
He is an anomaly. Too young to kill, too strange to be shown the light of day.
Ropes bind his father’s wrists, locking him between two erected beams. The stones make sounds as they strike the ground, clattering like child’s play.
“Stop,” he pleads through the sobs in his throat, and someone kicks him into silence. His bag slides down his arm, skinny and bruised like the rest of him. Hollow cheeks, ribs he can count. This is what happens when hate puts stones in the hands of men. His books tumble out. His reed pens, new and sharp, snap beneath angry calfskin sandals.
The school is ten paces from him. It was built for safin scholars, a place his father had dreamed of sending him to ever since he’d been a boy with a tutor. He was to be a scholar, a man of ‘ilm. It is the reason for this madness.
“Baba,” he cries until he thinks he knows how a heart must beat. Baba. Baba. Baba. It drowns out his sobs. It drowns out their hurtful words. It drowns out his father’s very, very last exhale.
Their cruelty turns his father’s ocean-blue eyes glassy, unseeing. It makes his organs sputter and stop. Stop.
Stop.
What is mercy, if there is no one to give it?
What does it mean to be lenient, if there is no one who deserves it?
They ask, What of the boy?
Others say, Leave him. Death takes what is owed.
There is blissful silence then, for corpses do not speak. They cannot cry or feel pain. He picks up his broken pens. He slowly stacks his books and lifts the flap of his bag. It is new, sewn for his first day at this school. It almost smells stronger than the blood, but not quite. He’s never smelled blood before, but he will always remember this moment. The first time he inhaled the sweetness of spilled death.
Your mother would be proud, my lion.
His mother, who died gifting him to the world. His father, who died because his lion was not a gift but a curse. Ifrit are monsters, they say, not meant for union with pure-blooded safin. His mother was ifrit.
What are ifrit, if not another race? If not beings with homes and families and wishes of their own? They are his kin. And they have nothing, for the Sisters deemed them monsters and banished them to Sharr.
