“Yes,” Sobek replied softly. “You must understand, it will affect everything about you. Your life. Your mind. Your appearance.”
My appearance. It was stupid that such a thing made his heart skip in fear, but there it was. Ali saw how cleverly Tiamat had trapped him. She knew how he felt about the marid. Knew how his people felt about them. There would be no careful diplomacy, no masking the marid’s involvement as Ali’s ancestors had done—or even slowly revealing it when the dust settled, if indeed this won him their victory.
Come back to me, Nahri had made him promise. Ali closed his eyes, seeing the anguish on her face when he’d begged her to cut the seal from his heart. Seeing Fiza’s defiance when she’d insisted on accompanying him. Muntadhir’s grim determination when he stayed behind to fight, and the quiet bravery with which Anas had accepted martyrdom. All the prices others had paid.
Daevabad comes first. One of the few lessons his father had taught that Ali still honored.
Tiamat let out a scornful growl. See how he chooses them? The daeva brat lectures us on courage and then—
“Alizayd al Qahtani.” The syllables fell from his mouth like someone else was speaking them. Tiamat blinked, the great marid mother actually looking surprised, and so he repeated the words more firmly. “My name is Alizayd al Qahtani.”
Tiamat regarded him. He couldn’t tell if she looked annoyed or pleased.
So be it, she declared.
Ali didn’t even get a chance to conjure a last flame.
Her words had no sooner blossomed in his head than he was driven to the flooded sand. It felt like a pike had been thrust through his heart, one made of ice and metal barbs. It twisted, filling him with cold poison and sucking every hint of warmth away. Ali nearly bit through his tongue, trying not to scream as the pain spread in slow, agonizing waves.
He fell forward onto his palms. Molten fire danced from his hands, the warmest, most beautiful golden glow he’d ever seen. Like a caught ribbon, it reluctantly let itself be tugged away, drops clinging to his fingertips before they fell. Ali fought the wild urge to grab them, to gather the precious liquid draining into the sand. More ran down his cheeks, whether the blood Tiamat had claimed or tears, he did not know.
A deep, clammy coldness rushed through his body, claiming the space the five had occupied as the flavors of the air shifted. A hint of gray stole over his vision, and the black void was suddenly clearer. The scars the marid’s possession had carved into his arms were glowing, the lines of tissue melting into swirling paths of brilliant, iridescent scales.
Ali shut his eyes—he didn’t want to see this. Racked with pain, he was only barely aware of Tiamat speaking again.
Show him, Sobek. Show him what we are.
Sobek laid a hand on his skull. “Let them pass. If you fight, it will drive you mad.”
Ali was gasping for air, his eyes still closed. “What will drive me—”
Sobek’s memories poured into his head.
Ali cried out, water bursting from his skin. He tried to free himself, but the Nile marid was ready, holding him firmly in his arms.
“Let them pass,” Sobek urged again. “Let yourself hear and taste, see and feel. It is a blessing. Accept it.”
Let them pass. His mind laid open, raw and scoured, Ali had no choice. It was too late to turn back now.
Hear. The crashing of waterfalls and herons in flight. The singing of harvest songs in tongues no longer spoken and his name chanted in soft worship.
Taste. The iron earth of flooding fields and the blood of his prey.
See. The glimmering cap of a stone pyramid that touched the sky, a structure so striking that he rose from his river and felt the first touch of trepidation at what the humans could do. An empty plain that seemed to sprout into a city overnight.
Feel. His daeva child, his first, in his arms, strangely warm and wriggling. Then dozens, the affection with which the first greeted him fading to apprehensive reverence. His favored heir, the one who might finally promise deliverance, falling to his knees.
Forgive me, Grandfather, his heir begged. I could not betray them.
The sudden blow of Sobek’s banishment, loneliness as he watched his temples fall and mortals forget his name, scratching out his image and taking bricks with his visage for floors. The silence of centuries with no communing, no worship, no pacts until he was so weak he could no longer shift out of his crocodile form, until he’d crawled into the weeds, starving.
The little human girl who’d found him, utterly fearless as she slipped through the sugarcane surrounding her riverside village and dropped a pigeon in front of his jaws, the first offering he’d been given in a thousand years.
“My grandma said we should be good to crocodiles,” she’d announced, crouching across from him. Her words took him aback as much as her eyes. Big, bright, and brown, with a hint of the gold that had colored the eyes of his long-dead daeva kin.
A hint of magic.
Ali tried to return to himself and seize upon the memory, but instead he noticed that the water had been rising and was now creeping up his neck, lapping over his closed lips. Despite his promise, he wrestled against his ancestor’s grip, filled with the awful premonition that whatever the marid had already done to him, this last part would be the worst and place him at a remove from his people he’d never escape.
You promised you’d return to her. You swore to always put Daevabad first. Weeping and praying to God that there would be something left of him after, Ali let his lips fall open. Salty water poured down his throat, invading every corner of him.
Along with the lives and memories of hundreds of marid.
Rain spirits who danced in the clouds to shatter themselves upon the ground, seeping deep into the earth to join
