Razu stayed quiet until the shafit doctor left and then entered the apothecary. “How are you feeling?” she asked. “Truthfully?”
Nahri managed a smile. “I’m exhausted and would like to no longer experience emotions, but besides that, I’m fine.”
The older woman joined Nahri to lay a hand on her shoulder. “I couldn’t help but hear some of your conversation as I approached. I’m sorry—I must confess that I suspected you might have been Rustam’s. When we first met, I felt a shadow of the bond I’d had with him. I never had that with Manizheh, and it did make me wonder.”
“Was he like her?” Nahri couldn’t keep the fear from her voice.
Razu reached out, sweeping one of the curls Chandra had mussed out of Nahri’s eyes. “No. Rustam never had the drive his sister had or her darkness. He was very kind and very skilled, but the Qahtanis had defeated him long ago, and I think he was just trying to survive.” She gestured at the courtyard garden beyond the apothecary door. “He would have loved this place. He was incredibly talented with plants and pharmaceuticals. He’d be sitting outside, and flowers and vines would start crawling over him like pets.”
“That happens to me sometimes,” Nahri realized, fresh sorrow twisting through her. “God, there’s just so much I’ll never know.”
Razu gave her a hug. “I’ll help you piece together what I can. I have my stories, and I’m sure others do as well. Rustam didn’t take many confidantes, but he was a well-liked man.”
Nahri tried to smile. But in truth, it wasn’t just her father she wanted to know about. She wanted desperately to know who her mother had been. To fill in the blank spaces in her mind and memory that had been wrenched open even further with Manizheh’s cruel admission. Nahri wanted to know about the Egyptian who had come to Daevabad and crossed the path of a Baga Nahid. The woman who had defied death and Manizheh’s wrath to return to her country and make a pact with the lord of the Nile himself.
Razu released her. “I haven’t only come to talk about Rustam, however. I came with a message.” Her bright green eyes met Nahri’s. “The Afshin would like to see you.”
DESPITE HAVING LIVED IN DAEVABAD FOR YEARS, Nahri had spent little time in the forests on the other side of the island. Besides well-guarded Daeva farms, the remaining wilderness was said to grow wild and unchecked. There were whispers that it was haunted, of course. That the fields of waist-high wildflowers and impenetrable woods were thick with the spirits of star-crossed lovers and wailing huntsmen, with the lost souls who’d fled to the forest and taken their lives rather than surrender to Zaydi al Qahtani’s original forces.
Nahri wasn’t sure she believed that, but it was remarkable how quickly the sounds of the city vanished once she and Razu crossed through the ancient cedar doors that separated the Daeva Quarter from the woods. A well-worn road cut deep in the rocky soil, leading through a tunnel of greenery, but otherwise nature ran unchecked: vines crawling up the brass walls and the trees so thick their depths melted into darkness. Beyond, the mountains that had always been so distant now loomed close, Daevabad’s island freshly nestled in their heart.
“Dara wanted to meet me here?” Nahri asked.
“I did.”
She and Razu both jumped at Dara’s voice, the Afshin suddenly on the road behind them as if he’d been there all along.
He must have seen the looks on their faces. “Forgive me. I did not mean to startle you.”
Nahri stiffened. He was both the Dara she had known—his distinctly old-fashioned accent and the utterly unapologetic-sounding apology—and a stranger, the enemy general she had until just a few days ago been planning to kill. Though it was healed, her shoulder suddenly ached, a shadow of the wound his arrow had struck.
“That’s all right.” Nahri could hear the chill in her voice, the distance she was already trying to force between them, her body protecting itself from a future hurt.
Razu touched her wrist. “Would you like me to stay?” she asked in Tukharistani.
“No, I’m fine,” Nahri insisted, feeling anything but.
Razu gave Dara a look of fierce warning and then departed. But the moment she was gone, the tension in the forest seemed to soar. It was the same wall that had reared up between them at the hospital—Nahri simply did not know how to feel about the man before her.
She stared at him, not missing that Dara was doing the same to her. Out of the splendid uniform he’d worn as Manizheh’s slave, he was dressed plainly in a midnight-colored jacket that fell to his knees and baggy trousers tucked into dusty boots. His head was bare, his black curls hanging loose around his shoulders.
And yet there was something so alien about him. A feeling of otherness that Nahri had noticed back on the roof, but not given much thought to in the madness of restoring magic and moving an entire island.
“You’re not marked by the curse,” she said, realizing it aloud. “By Suleiman’s curse, I mean.”
An expression Nahri couldn’t read swept Dara’s face. “No, I suppose I am not. I feel restored to what I was when Manizheh resurrected me in the desert.” He raised his hand, and it briefly shifted, his skin turning fiery and his fingers ending in claws before turning back. “An original daeva.”
“With powers Suleiman considered too dangerous to allow to persist,” Nahri added. “And I must say, I agree.”
“Then I suppose it is only right you now bear his ring.” Dara stepped closer, his emerald eyes trailing over her face. “How are you feeling?”
Like I’m being stabbed by an ice dagger again. “Fine,” she lied. “Powerful.” That wasn’t a lie. “Capable of taking down an original daeva.”
Dara blinked in surprise, and one corner of his mouth turned up in the bare lines of a smile. “Six years in Daevabad, and your tongue is no less
