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“Keeps the vocal cords young,” said Altair with a smile. He remained standing a beat longer before he lowered himself back to the floor. “I can take to singing, if you prefer.”
These were the moments that scared him. The ones in which his father sought his company for no reason other than companionship.
Moments that scared him because he enjoyed them. They carved new lenses through which the monster, cruel in his ambitions, became a man, curious and collected.
The Lion rarely touched the food he brought with him. It had given Altair pause at first, but if he kept fearing poison, he’d starve. A body like his didn’t maintain itself.
“You have my father’s eyes,” the Lion said.
Altair stopped with a piece of flatbread halfway to his mouth.
The Lion frowned as if he’d surprised himself, too. “I sometimes forget his face. Events, too. With the odd recollection that they were … pivotal somehow. Time has stifled the memories.”
Whatever the Lion believed had stifled his memories was not time, and Altair could see it bothered him, enough to bring a haze of madness to his gaze. The same glint from when he’d spoken of vengeance, as if he wanted it with an all-encompassing need but couldn’t fathom why.
“You loved your father,” Altair observed, and lifted his arms, flashing his shackled wrists. “Mine keeps me in chains.”
The Lion smiled. “I can remove them. Take you from captive to son. Ally. We will carve our names upon history, and we, too, shall live forever.”
Heavy words to be spoken in the height of the day’s heat. How easy it would be, Altair thought, to shift the work of decades over to the side of his father. He would accomplish the same: a new Arawiya untainted by the Arz, unfettered by the curses that magic’s absence had left behind.
He finished his bowl and slid his father’s, still untouched, toward himself.
“I won’t let you go, Altair, and they will not come,” the Lion said with certainty. “If they triumph because of the road you set them upon, what makes you believe you will garner credit? I’m no seer, but even I know what will come of it.”
“Oh?” Altair said when he shouldn’t have. The walls rumbled with the thunder of passing horses somewhere out on the streets.
The Lion looked at him, strangely intent, as if his son were a puzzle he was close to solving. As if he had solved him during the handful of meals they’d shared.
“You will be forgotten.”
There were words that warped shields and slowed quick tongues. Knotted strings around fingers and made them tremble, one, two, three, ten. Twisted inhales so their exhales shook.
Words like these.
Altair set down his bowl with too sharp a thud, avoiding his father’s gaze. He smoothed his hands down his arms, bare and suddenly cold.
A question tumbled out of him: “Have you found the zumra?”
The Lion tilted his head, as he did whenever curiosity struck. “I’ve sent for a scroll in the palace. It details a spell that will emulate the Huntress’s affinity. Why?”
We, too, shall live forever.
Altair dropped his fists on the table between them. Dust sprang from the little crevices. He latched his eyes onto the Lion’s amber ones, curious and staid.
No, Baba. He would not be forgotten. Not so long as his lungs moiled away. He had spent far too much of his life working for exactly the opposite.
“Unshackle me,” he said with careful reflection, “and I’ll tell you where they are.”
CHAPTER 17
When Zafira was young, her fingers just long enough to wrap fully around the hilt of Baba’s jambiya, she had scrunched her nose and asked him why it was so plain and so old. She had walked with him and Umm to the sooq, where the men wore their jambiyas with pride. Hilts of polished stone or wood, studded with jewels, carved with care, each curved dagger fancier than the last.
“A blade is born to murder and to maim,” he had told her. “It reminds me of all I’ve done. Each deer I have gutted, each rabbit I have ended. Lives are not meant for thieving, my abal.”
“Will you give me my own blade?”
Umm had smiled. “Girls are not meant to wield the toys of men.”
