“What?”
“Pick that back up, you infuriating son of an ass. You haven’t been going east, you’ve been going north. So I’m in charge now since you’re too shitty a sailor to do anything right. I’ll get you to your marid witch—and then, more importantly—I’ll get you back.”
Ali was speechless, certain he’d heard that wrong. “I don’t understand.”
“That makes two of us,” Fiza muttered, pushing Ali out of the way so hard she nearly knocked him into the sea. “I’m helping you, prince. The right fucking thing to do and all that.”
“There’s no helping me,” Ali argued. “I’m not getting out of this. All you’ll do is get yourself killed, and I won’t—”
“I didn’t ask your permission. And I’m not doing this for you,” she snapped. “I’m doing this because I want you to go back to Daevabad and make good on the promises you made my people. I won’t let this all be for nothing.”
“Fiza …” Ali let out an exasperated sound. “Tiamat is just as likely to swallow me, you, and the boat whole if you stay. Please,” he added when she ignored him to adjust the rudder. “I’ve gotten enough shafit killed.”
“More reason to go back to Daevabad and see us free.” Fiza did—something—and the ship immediately seemed less rocky. “My mother could still be there,” she said, seeming to be talking to herself. “I think I’d like to see her again.”
“The only thing we’re going to see is the seabed.”
Fiza flashed a glare that could have burned Ali to a crisp. “You know how you’re always going on about how much you respect the shafit and want them to be equals? Shut your mouth and prove it. Respect my decision, stop arguing, and make yourself useful.”
That did shut him up. Ali swallowed hard, then asked, “What can I do?”
She showed him, and for the next few hours Ali jumped at her commands, tacking and furling and a bunch of other things that made no sense but allowed the ship to sail through the storm as if by magic. It was exhausting work, but it kept his mind off what they were moving toward, and Ali would gladly have let the ropes burn his hands and the spray soak his skin for days if it meant delaying the inevitable.
Sooner than he expected, though, the wind died completely. The rain still lashed their faces, but otherwise there was no movement. It was impossible to see anything in the thick fog, as though they were floating in a black cloud rather than upon a vast sea.
“We must be pretty far out by now, yes?” Ali asked, his heart skipping. “Maybe she forgot about me.”
Fiza looked uneasy. “They said nothing but ‘give yourself to Tiamat by the next high tide’?”
“I wasn’t really in the right frame of mind to ask questions.”
“Because of the threat to Ta Ntry?”
“Because I found out I’m descended from a Nile marid who created my family in the hopes of destroying the djinn world.”
Fiza spun to look at him. “Excuse me?”
“It’s a long story.”
The ship abruptly dropped.
They both lunged to grab on to the boat. Ali held his breath, expecting the motion to stop, assuming they’d just gone down the dip of a swell. Their boat had been rising and falling for hours with the natural motion of the waves.
But they didn’t stop.
“Alizayd.” Earlier Fiza had found a glass-enclosed oil lamp in the hold and lit it; the flickering flame now revealed her face had drained of color. “I don’t think they forgot about you.”
The wind returned, howling past as clouds of mist rushed away. A bolt of lightning, slow and lingering, splintered across the sky, casting jagged light over the ocean.
“Oh, God,” Fiza whispered. “Oh, God.”
They were indeed falling in time with a wave. With a whole army of waves. A wall of water surrounded them on all sides, higher than anything Ali had ever seen in his life, as though they’d been cast at the bottom of a mountain. More lightning, silent as death, flashed, illuminating the swelling waves as they reached a tipping point far above Ali’s and Fiza’s heads, the crests turning white. The wave edges touched, briefly enclosing the boat in a cocoon of water nearly as beautiful as the hidden passages of the Nile. More lightning flashed, glowing blue and green beyond the screen of water like an alien sky.
And then that oceanic sky crashed down.
35
DARA
For all that Daevabad was synonymous with the very idea of a city—bustling streets, towering buildings, and crowded markets—there was still wilderness to be found in the forests and rocky hills that hemmed the island’s terraced fields and shepherds’ pastures. Even after all these centuries, the land beyond the walls had remained Daeva. Their Geziri conquerors had never been able to replicate the knowledge Dara’s tribe had perfected over generations, and risking Daevabad’s nearest food source wasn’t worth it, not when the Daeva landowners could simply be bribed or terrorized into submission.
Dara slipped through the scrubby forest now, as silent and invisible as the frightening wraith he might have been considered in the human world. He wasn’t in the human world, however; he was on the island wherein he’d been born and which he feared was in more danger than ever. He passed fields devastated by hail and an orchard beset with locusts. Several farmhouses had burned; a broken mill left grain rotting on the ground.
He tripped over the landscape, his usual grace gone. If Dara had been boundless and powerful with Suleiman’s curse removed—an original daeva free to shed his form and fly on the wind—being “healed” among the smoldering heap of Nahid corpses had shoved him back into a tight, barbed cage. Everything hurt. Moving hurt, breathing hurt. His powers were brittle, shaky things, as if neither his body nor his magic belonged to
