We Hunt the Flame(7)
His scimitar sang as he pulled it free. Owais exhaled and wound his turban around his head, eyes flashing in the glint of the blade, a brilliant chestnut hidden beneath the folds of aging skin. A smile curved the man’s lips once more, and Nasir thought of the sultan passing him the fold of papyrus. He thought of Owais’s warning and realized the absurdity of killing a man for the mere act of reading.
But he never left a job unfinished.
There was a hitch in the man’s breath when the metal touched his skin. One last spike of emotion before Nasir shifted his arm and blood oozed free. Somewhere, children were losing their father. Grandchildren were losing their greatest love.
He pulled a feather from the folds of his robes and touched it to the blood. It settled on the dead man’s chest, its black vane tipped glimmering red.
Anyone who saw it would know Owais’s killer. They would know vengeance was impossible.
The hashashin in Nasir crouched. He closed the man’s eyes and straightened his turban. “Be at peace, Owais Khit min Sarasin.”
Then Nasir filled his lungs with the familiar stench of blood, and left.
He pinned the flap open so that the people would know. It was the one lenience he could leave them—a marker to help them bury the dead. The people would never consider Nasir an ally, but in that moment he almost felt like they could.
They were right to hate him, for Nasir had killed more than he could count. It used to matter, before. Now it was nothing more than a swipe of his sword. Another felled soul.
To the people, he was not Nasir Ghameq, crown prince of Arawiya, no. He was the purger of life.
The Prince of Death.
CHAPTER 3
In Demenhur, they blamed women because of the Six Sisters. Zafira carried the knowledge like a wound that could never heal.
That word—Huntress—was a thorn dragged across the wound, fresh pain gritting her teeth. She had always been the Hunter. She had always referred to herself as the Hunter. And though she was convinced she had imagined the silver-cloaked woman, the illusion was a reminder that no matter what she did, she could always be brought to blame.
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.