They’d taught her the worst thing they knew.
He blinked back tears, part of him still refusing to let the true horror land. It would drive him mad. She couldn’t have done this. Not really. The relic, the ring, this desperate mimic of ifrit cruelty. She couldn’t mean it. Manizheh was a Nahid, his Nahid. This wasn’t—
“On your knees,” she commanded.
Dara crashed to the floor, his knees hitting the carpet. Blood ran into his eyes from where she’d hit him with his knife. “Please let me go.” He was not above begging now, his voice trembling like a child’s. “Please do not make me a slave. Not again. Do not take my freedom from me. We can fix this. I can fix this!”
A little of the rage left her face. “I actually believe you. I believe you want to fix this.” Manizheh reached out, wiping the blood from his eyes with the edge of her sleeve. “I’m going to make it easier.”
“Easier?”
“I know you didn’t want the responsibility of more bloodshed. So now you won’t have to carry it,” Manizheh assured him. “I’ll carry it. I’ll make the decisions.
“You’ll just be the weapon.”
The full impact of what she’d done hit Dara like a pile of bricks. Once again, he tried to struggle. “No, my lady, please, you do not—”
She laid a finger on his lips. “I will wake you when you’re needed. For now sleep, Afshin. You seem so very tired.”
Dara was tumbling into darkness before she even finished speaking.
36
NAHRI
Nahri teased out the last tendril of iron from her patient’s neck with the surgical hook in her right hand, her left clamped against the back of his skull. With a precise twist, she caught a loop in the iron fragment and then carefully pulled it out, letting the metal drop in the tin pan beneath her elbow.
Her patient, one of Fiza’s fellows, tried to speak. “Is … that …” His words came out slurred, echoing the daze in his glazed eyes. Nahri had given him a potion that partially paralyzed his muscles to make the procedure safer.
“Almost done,” she promised him. “And you’re doing great. Let me just check something—” Nahri closed her eyes, letting her mind sink deeper into her healer’s sight. In a moment, his neck seemed to open before her—muscles and ligaments both there and gone, bone and blood and tissue shifting into separate particles. All traces of the iron were finally eradicated—al Mudhib’s foul brand removed.
With but a nudge of intent, the wound healed, and Nahri watched the torn flesh give way to healthy skin. After weeks without her magic, she’d been healing everyone who would let her, from burned cooks to soldiers wounded in training accidents. And not just because it was a relief to finally, properly have her abilities back.
But because staying busy was the only thing keeping her from jumping on a boat, sailing out to sea, and making some very unwise decisions involving fire and attempting to threaten an ancient marid queen.
She refocused, sensing a specter of the paralysis potion drifting through his blood. Nahri urged it to lessen its grip, though she’d already warned the man it would take another day to fully leave his body.
She let him go. “You are well and free, my friend. If you feel any pain or stiffness in your neck, come right back, but otherwise I think you’ll be fine.”
Her patient touched his throat, looking close to tears. “I never thought I’d get out of my indenture,” he confessed, his words clearer now. “Al Mudhib always found new charges to add against my debt.”
“Well, he can’t do anything to you now. He’s probably still waving a fist at the sky and cursing Fiza.”
His face fell. “I hope the captain comes back. She certainly seemed confident of it—she told us she’d gut us if her ship got damaged, but …” He trailed off, perhaps unwilling to put his fears into words.
Nahri knew how that felt. She’d been astonished to learn Fiza had gone after Ali, torn between relief and gloom. Fiza seemed like the type who picked the right gambles, and God knew Nahri was desperate to see Ali survive. But it had also meant another person Nahri liked, a woman who had the makings of a friend, ripped away.
Jamshid peeked in. “May I borrow the Banu Nahida?”
Her patient bowed. “I was just leaving. Thank you again, Lady Nahri.”
Jamshid let him stagger past and then entered the room, his eyes widening at the spread of tools and the makeshift apothecary Nahri had made from pilfered kitchen ingredients. “You set all this up fast,” he said, sounding awed.
“I made a promise to Fiza’s crew when they saved us that I’d get that brand out of their necks.”
Shuddering, her brother dropped into the opposite cushion. “I still can’t believe someone did that.”
“And I wish I’d been surprised.”
Jamshid sighed. “No, I guess you wouldn’t be surprised. But promises aside, are you okay, Nahri? I don’t think you’ve stopped working in days. I don’t think you’ve slept in days.”
“There’s a lot to catch up on,” Nahri said, defending herself. “I like healing people, and we could use all the goodwill here that we can muster. Believe me when I say the sentiment of ‘don’t kill the doctors’ probably took our family a long way during the Qahtanis’ reign.”
“Lovely.” He leaned his head back against the wall, peering down at her through half-closed eyes as though he knew to look at her directly would be unwanted. “And if I said it seemed like you sequestered yourself behind a wall of potions and scalpels to avoid both me and the having of emotions?”
“I’m fine.” Nahri forced a placid smile. “Truly.”
“You keep doing that. Making that face like I’m an enemy you have to guard yourself against. I’m not. I’m family, Nahri. You can
