There is something wrong with me, with all of this. For Dara couldn’t get the sight of Manizheh surrounded by murdered Daevas, using magic she shouldn’t have had, out of his head. He couldn’t even bear to look at the relic she’d embedded in his wrist, the sick contraption of metal and blood. Dara had wrapped it in linen, but lines of speckled black gold still traced out across the left half of his body, the jagged lines of light pulsing with each ragged beat of his heart.
You should have fled, Afshin, Vizaresh had mocked. But Dara hadn’t fled. He couldn’t.
Now, though, he was headed toward an objective that felt even worse.
You are supposed to serve. To obey. A good Afshin could advise, they could argue, but they obeyed. That was their code.
But you do not only serve the Nahids. You serve the Daevas, and they need you too. Dara kept walking.
The crumbling structure where they’d arranged to meet looked like little more than a jumble of rocks. In Dara’s day, it had been a celebrated pilgrimage spot: a cave in which a famed Nahid ascetic had prayed for survival from a famine only a few centuries after Anahid herself had died. It had been popular with couples hoping to conceive—a thing his people didn’t do easily—and there had been all sorts of rituals associated with the place, from leaving a silver coin inside an infant’s hat at the cave’s base to simmering the small purple flowers that grew on the surrounding hills into a tea. Judging from the look of the cave, its significance had either been forgotten or failed to survive the Qahtani invasion—like so much of the world Dara had known.
A figure emerged from the shadows. “Stop.”
Dara recognized the curt voice as belonging to the rude female warrior from Am Gezira and immediately scowled. “Where is my priest?” he demanded. “Where is Razu?”
“We’re here.” Razu stepped out from the cave, holding a small torch, Kartir behind her.
Dara stared at the three of them, fighting the wild urge to run in the other direction. Traitor, his mind berated him. It had been berating him since Dara had sneaked from the palace in the dead of the night to surprise the priest in his temple bedchamber. “She has done something terrible,” he’d burst out before the startled old man had gotten a word in. Dara had not been able to say the phrase “blood magic” or put into words the true horror he feared, but his ramblings about Manizheh demanding the names of the murdered Daevas while Aeshma gloated—not to mention the sight of the vile contraption shackling his wrist—had been enough to make Kartir go pale.
“We need to talk to them, Darayavahoush,” the priest had said after a long moment of silence. “This is beyond us now.”
At the time, it had felt like the right decision, the scenes from the arena scoured in Dara’s mind, and yet now this seemed like a rash mistake. Manizheh had just been betrayed by Daevas she believed she could trust, and now her Afshin was taking a secret meeting with her enemy?
Kartir must have seen the expression on his face. “It is all right, Darayavahoush,” he said, his voice gentle. “All is as planned.”
Planned. That only made Dara feel worse. No matter what Manizheh had done, every bit of training and worship that had been carved into him was resisting this. Suspicion still gripped him as well, and Dara conjured his own torch, throwing brighter light on the djinn. Dressed in rags that looked stolen from various men, the Geziri warrior—Aqisa, Dara remembered, from his rampage at the hospital—was smirking, her crossbow aimed at his heart and a knife and sword at her waist. He glared at her, not missing that she appeared markedly thinner.
“Afshin,” Razu prompted, a note of warning in her voice. “Kartir said you were coming in peace. The face you are making does not indicate peace.”
“Neither does the crossbow aimed at me. I came to talk to your princess, so where is she?”
Aqisa tapped a pair of iron cuffs hanging from her belt. “You’ll be putting these on before you see her.”
“I will shove them down your throat.”
Kartir let out a frustrated sigh. “Dara—”
“I have had enough of iron for several lifetimes,” Dara said, hissing through his teeth. “Not to mention bondage. I am not putting those on. You either trust me or you don’t.”
“I don’t.” Aqisa cocked her head. “Tell me, what exactly is the difference between you and a ghoul? You both rise from the dead, make irritating moans that pass for speech—”
“That is enough, Aqisa.”
The command was richly spoken, the new woman’s voice calm and assured. And indeed, when Zaynab al Qahtani stepped out from the cave, she did so as though she might have entered a throne room rather than exited a hiding spot.
Dara straightened up. He’d gotten a glimpse of Zaynab at the hospital, but he took his time examining her now. Doing so perhaps should have filled him with shame—proper Daeva men did not stare at unrelated women. But Zaynab al Qahtani was their nearest enemy. While she stood free in Daevabad, ruling her own united block of armed Geziris and shafit, she presented an alternative to Manizheh, a reminder that the city hadn’t truly fallen. Not yet.
So he looked at her. Zaynab hadn’t given him much to read—she was dressed in black from head to toe and had wrapped one end of her headscarf across her face, concealing all but her luminous gray-gold gaze. Dara could see the resemblance to her younger brother in the set of her high brow and large eyes, and he wondered how else she might be similar to him. Did Zaynab share Ali’s fierce faith and refusal to compromise? Or had a life in the palace tempered her, taught her the art of politics and accommodation—not to mention lethal scheming—that Muntadhir had
