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Nasir lowered his head in respect. “It is good,” he said, “to have you with us again.”
She smiled, and Zafira remembered Umm when Anadil’s face changed. Perhaps it was a gesture true to all mothers, when their children humbled themselves in such ways.
* * *
Sarasin was frightening. Darkness at every turn, ifrit shrieking into the night that would have been day, had the sun not been a coward. They came across remnants of riots in small towns as ghostly as her own, where buildings lay in shambles, glass smashed and glowing in the light of bonfires. The lazy breeze carried leaves of papyrus.
Zafira snatched one from the air.
On it were lines and lines of Arawiyan letters scribed by a reed pen, the letters smoother with each new pass. It was a child’s. A practice sheet meant to be taken to school the next day. Her mind tucked the sheet into Lana’s small hands, when she was young, not yet six. Skipping home from the old schoolhouse, eager to share the happenings of her day.
She saw her eager footsteps turn panicked. Her skipping turned to fleeing. A child should not have to fear for her life in such a way. With a reed pen in hand, letters in her head, dirty sandals on her feet.
Death before her eyes.
This, because Zafira wanted magic, because she had braved the Baransea for the hearts and brought back Arawiya’s greatest foe. Lives had been upended by the Lion’s madness. While he practiced order in Sultan’s Keep, an entire fifth of the kingdom was falling apart, the rest well on their way.
The Jawarat watched it all through her eyes.
Do you see what happens when chaos unfolds? she asked it. The aftermath of mayhem.
It was silent, but it heard her—she knew by the contemplation pressing against her conscience. It was a new emotion, one it had been stumbling toward since she’d killed the caliph and felt her soul tip empty.
As if, perhaps, it no longer wanted control and a malleable will.
We have learned from you.
“Zafira?” Nasir’s voice rumbled through her back, lighting a fire across her neck. He steered Afya away, as if turning one’s back on ruin made it less real. “You’re speaking to it.”
“Does it speak to you, too?” she asked with some hesitance.
She knew his brow furrowed at her question. His silvery lilt stretched when he was confused or uncertain. “I didn’t say that.”
“It—” She paused, and she wondered if he took her silence as reluctance to speak to him or reluctance to speak of the Jawarat. Knowing how ready he was to disparage himself, it was likely the former, but he didn’t know the whole of it. Candor was never quite as bitter with him, because he had more than enough monsters of his own to ever judge her.
Still, she hadn’t told anyone the truth of the Jawarat for a reason. She hadn’t even told the Silver Witch, who had been like Zafira before she fell for the Lion’s silver tongue. She had shrouded the truth, but it had unleashed itself anyway. She had thought to keep its chaos a secret, but it had made itself known through her hand. Through the caliph’s death.
She gripped the book tight and opened her mouth.
“The Sisters created the Jawarat from and with their memories, but it was connected to the Lion on Sharr for long enough that it took some of his memories, too. It wants things. Dangerous things sometimes.”
A cold unassociated with their surroundings chilled her spine when he finally spoke.
“It?”
He did not dig or pry, or regard her any differently. She swallowed her relief. “I thought the Jawarat spoke using the voices of the Sisters, and then I thought its voice was the Lion’s, but it’s … not.”
“It’s a hilya,” he said. “Fuse enough magic and memory into a single object, and it results in near sentience.”
She brushed her thumb down its spine. It was a comfort, even now. A part of her, as nefarious as it was.
“Are you afraid of it?” He voiced his words slowly, as if she might startle if he spoke them too quickly. As if she might shove him off the horse and take off on her own.
“Shouldn’t I be? You saw what it made me do.”
“You journeyed to Sharr. You faced Arawiya’s greatest foe alone. If I were to assume anyone to be afraid of a book, it wouldn’t be you.”
There was something more being spelled out in his words. Admiration. It warmed her to her toes, and flooded her with the feeling that she was undeserving. She had done both those things, but so had he. What made her any different?
