Nahri’s heart was racing. “Probably means you should switch sides.”
Dara gave her a broken smile. Smoke curled from his collar, melting into the dark of his hair and making him as otherworldly as ever. “Were it that easy, my love.”
“You don’t get to call me that,” she snapped, her voice shaking with anger. All thoughts of lulling Dara into a false intimacy, of throwing herself into his arms so she could shove the peri’s dagger through his heart, had fled at the enormity of what he’d done. Not even Nahri could wear a mask after flying over street after street of ruined homes and untold dead.
“Was that your handiwork back there on the other side of the city?” she demanded. “Were a thousand Geziri dead not enough? Was Qui-zi not enough? You had to add another thousand? Five thousand? TALK TO ME!” Nahri screamed, her control shattering when he didn’t respond.
Dara squeezed his eyes shut. He was trembling, his lips contorting as though he were fighting his own response.
But when he finally spoke, his voice was flat. “I am loyal to the blessed Banu Manizheh. Those were her orders.”
“‘Orders,’” Nahri repeated. “A good man would have defied those orders.”
His eyes seemed to sparkle with unshed tears, but then the wetness was gone, vanishing as swiftly as it had come. “I am not a good man. I am a weapon.”
A weapon. Dara had called himself that before, but not in this oddly muted way, his head lowered. This was not the hot-tempered Afshin she’d known, defending himself in the corridor. This was not the Afshin she wanted. Needed. Nahri almost needed Dara to shout back at her, to give some hint that there had been emotion and a heart that roiled within him.
“I went back, you know. To the cemetery where we first met.” Fighting the hitch in her throat, Nahri plunged forward. “Was any of it ever real between us? Because I don’t understand how the man I thought I knew … who I thought I—” She could not say the word as easily as he did. “How could you have done it, Dara? How could you have stood by her side as she did that to the Geziris? How could you have done the things they said you did at Qui-zi? Their women … is that what you really are?”
The name of the city he’d terrorized long ago seemed to break whatever spell of dispassion he’d been under, a hint of despair stealing into Dara’s voice. “I … no. Qui-zi, their women—that part at least was a lie. My men never—”
Nahri recoiled. That was where Dara wanted to draw a line? “Oh, please. You really think no one in your batch of murderers went off mission between slaying shafit children and burying men alive?”
There was pleading desperation in his eyes now, as though he could speak more honestly about the past than his current duty to Manizheh. “You do not understand.”
“Then tell me!”
Dara looked pained. “They … some of the women had lain with shafit. My men would not have touched them.”
Nahri felt the floor move beneath her. “I hate you,” she whispered. “I hate that I ever had feelings for you.”
Still in his celestial finery, Dara dropped to his knees. The sight was incongruous. “I had to do it, Nahri. The people I believed were the Creator’s messengers on earth looked me in the eye and begged me to. I was eighteen. They told me we would otherwise lose the war and our world would be ripped apart.”
“And the people at Qui-zi? The mothers and children you ripped apart? Did they not beg you? Tell me,” Nahri demanded when he dropped his gaze in shame. “Tell me how you could look at people—at anyone—hear those cries and not break? Tell me how you could do it again. You’re not eighteen anymore, Dara. You’ve got centuries on me, and do you know what I did when Manizheh asked me to join her? To view the massacre of innocents as an acceptable price for victory?
“I turned her down.”
But at her mother’s name, Dara had rocked back on his heels, a vacant daze sweeping his features. “You should not have. Banu Manizheh is blessed, rightly guided, and I am loyal only to her.” Again, the stilted, almost rehearsed-sounding words. “I cannot act against her. I cannot speak against her.” He was staring at her, a glimmer of odd beseeching in the otherwise bleak set of his face. “Please understand.”
“But I don’t understand!”
Still on his knees, Dara shivered and then rose to his feet in an awkward fashion entirely unlike him, as if he was fighting his own body. He clenched his fists, embers falling from his lips. “I have orders to capture you.”
“You take another step near me, and my shedu is going to have orders to eat you.” The threat didn’t take, because Dara was still moving toward her. Yet he was going slowly, like he might have been wading through churning water. He stepped into a ray of sunlight, the angle finally illuminating his visage beneath the helmet.
Nahri went cold.
Jagged lines of smoldering fire cracked across the left side of Dara’s face like a lightning bolt, creeping down his neck to vanish under his collar. He was pale, too pale, a gray cast to his skin and deep shadows beneath his swollen, glassy eyes. He looked … sick, in a way that instantly reminded her of the cursed simurgh back on the beach.
But there was no vacant stillness in Dara’s eyes. There was complete and total despair, hopelessness beyond anything she’d seen from him before.
Her throat caught. “What’s wrong with you?”
Dara stared at her, pleading in his gaze. “I have orders to capture you,” he repeated, seeming to choke on the words as if an unseen hand were strangling him. “You have betrayed your people and your family. But Banu Manizheh is ever compassionate.” The overly formal words didn’t match his devastated
