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“I didn’t fear Sharr or the Lion that way,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing. Again. The Jawarat blurs the lines between good and not.”
It was what every sane person feared, she realized, but with the Jawarat, virtue had been extricated from her, separated. An entity of its own both hers and not.
“Stealing the Lion’s memories didn’t make it inherently wicked,” Nasir observed, and perhaps it was the cadence of his words, the way he was trying to make sense of it along with her, but she was suddenly filled with such gratitude that she almost leaned into him. She held still, terrified by her heart. “It’s like anyone else now, burdened with the task of choosing between good and evil. Why allow yourself to be controlled when you can be the one in control? You can control it. Sway its intent.”
Was she already doing as much, hence the change she’d noted? The silent rumination since they’d left Demenhur? She twisted around, pain making her flinch. He was beautiful, even in darkness. Alive, when he spoke to her. “Half of what you say to me is what you need to hear yourself.”
Nasir emitted a laugh, a broken, hag
gard thing more contained than free, and Zafira was aware she devoured his reactions the way a rose sought out sunlight.
As they continued onward with the phantom of his laugh in her ears and Afya’s occasional snorts, she noticed his path had begun tilting east.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” he began hesitantly.
“Oh?”
“We’re going to Qasr al-Leil.”
Qasr. Sarasin for “palace.”
He paused when she stiffened like a board. “Not Sultan’s Keep.”
At first, she thought she didn’t understand, but then she did—sudden and striking.
Her fury snarled through her like an angry vine, ripping every semblance of calm. Nasir brought Afya to an abrupt halt as Zafira wrenched around to face him. Her wound wheezed a warning, and she dragged one knee up between them to ease her strain.
He had never left Demenhur for her.
He had never planned to take her to the Sultan’s Palace at all. He had—
“You mocked me. You lied to me.” Her voice was a growl. Her anger was the Jawarat’s. No—the daama book was gratingly silent, and this, this was her. Where was the outrage it once used to drive her?
His resilience broke under her accusation. “I did not lie to you. Once my work here is through, we’ll continue onward to Sultan’s Keep. To defeat the Lion and restore magic. Does that sound acceptable?”
He spoke gently, as if she were an insolent child. As if she didn’t hold power in her hands.
“What work?” she asked, her voice flat with wrath.
Regret pinched his gaze. “Killing.”
Her snort made him flinch. She wondered how the jambiya he had gifted her would look with its hilt protruding from his heart.
No, bint Iskandar.
She laughed out loud at the Jawarat’s dismay. The sound of her madness echoed in the dark desolation of Sarasin, the hungering breeze carrying it through the empty streets.
This is not you, the book said with that same hesitance after she’d killed the caliph and woken beside Lana.
Laa, this is what you wanted me to be.
“If I pushed you off this horse, would you die?”
Nasir’s face transformed with a slow, surprised laugh. “Perhaps.”
He looked at her as if she were a marvel he had yet to decipher. Laa, he was mocking her, and it made her murderous. It filled the Jawarat with foreboding that once would have been glee. What had changed? She threw herself at him, uncaring that one of them might fall and break their neck.
Nasir only gripped her, stronger than she had known him to be.
