Nahri gasped—and the garden vanished.
The memories came so fast and so thick that at first it was hard to separate them, Nahri only catching flashes before they were replaced by others. The smell of fresh bread and cuddling against a woman’s warm chest. Climbing a tree to look at fields of waving sugarcane hugging the Nile. Bone-deep grief, wailing as a shrouded body was lowered into a grave.
A name. Duriya.
And then Nahri fell deep.
She was no longer the Banu Nahida, sitting in a magical garden at the side of a djinn prince. She was a little girl named Duriya, who lived alone with her widowed father in a Nile village.
Duriya raced between the sugarcane fields, jumping over the irrigation ditches and singing. She was alone as always—little girls with gold flickering in their eyes, who made cookfires flare when they got angry, had no friends—and so she spoke to the animals, telling them stories and confiding her secrets.
Then one day, one spoke back. The oldest crocodile she’d ever seen, half-starved on the riverbank. One whose eerie gaze had flickered with recognition at the gold in her eyes and the offer of salvation.
“Bring me blood,” Sobek had begged. “I am so hungry.”
So Duriya did. Pigeons and fish she stole from coops and nets, determined to keep her scaly pet alive. Both lonely in different ways, she spoke to him and he spoke to her. In exchange for blood, Sobek taught her small tricks, magic and mortal alike. How to conjure fire and urge wheat to blossom. The best plants for making salve and drawing out poison.
Such skills were useful in her small village. Duriya was clever, and she was discreet. She might have made a happy life for herself there, if she found an adoring husband on the dim side.
But there were those who hunted humans who did magic, and when the Nile was at its lowest, Sobek too far to hear her cry for help, one of them found her.
The djinn bounty hunter had been merciless. There was money to be made in returning shafit—the word Duriya learned that would define the rest of her life—to some magical city with a foreign name on the other side of the world. The djinn had offered to spare her father if Duriya went willingly, making clear with his metal-toned eyes on her body what “willingly” meant. Tearfully, she had agreed, and then he had lied, seizing them both, and taking her anyway in the dark on the longest journey of her life.
Thus had been her introduction to her new world.
Daevabad. An overcrowded apartment in a crumbling section of the city with other shafit who spoke Arabic, who welcomed Duriya and her father and helped them find jobs in the palace. The palace itself, a thing from a fairy tale filled with equally beautiful and monstrous creatures. A king said to set vicious beasts upon his enemies and a pair of black-eyed siblings who broke bones from across the room. Frightened out of her wits, Duriya was relieved to find herself only responsible for serving the queen—a kind woman whose open love for her little son made Duriya think there was something possibly human about the creatures who’d destroyed her life.
But then the queen died, and Duriya was given to the Nahids.
A black-eyed man who veiled his face and prayed to a fire altar she couldn’t understand. Who never spoke to her until he’d caught Duriya in the garden and called the jute plants she was growing to make molokhia for her homesick father a weed. The Baga Nahid had gone to tear them out, and, enraged, Duriya had struck him, lashing out with all her frustration at one of the most dangerous men in Daevabad.
He’d looked at her with astonished eyes, his veil torn and the gash she’d cut on his lip healing even as she watched.
But Rustam hadn’t demanded her execution, nor had his even more frightening sister boiled her blood. Instead, he’d listened as Duriya tearfully explained why she wanted the jute, and then he touched the dark earth and made a dozen new stalks sprout.
She fell in love. It was foolish and dangerous, and back in her village, Duriya would never have been so bold. But she’d been desperate for a bit of happiness, and a sad-eyed fallen prince who was just as trapped as she was made an irresistible mark. Until her belly began to swell and her own cuts began to heal, the child growing inside her rich with magic.
Telling her father had gone badly. Telling Rustam had been worse. Duriya had not grasped the politics of the city she’d been imprisoned in. They were all djinn to her, and she hadn’t understood Rustam’s panicked pleas when he took her to his sister.
“Help me, Manu,” he’d begged, and Manizheh had taken one look at Duriya’s belly with her unreadable eyes and agreed. Again, Duriya had been smuggled away, not daring to tell her father lest the palace intrigue she’d gotten caught up in ensnare him as well.
Her daughter, born on the road and blinking up at Duriya with black eyes. Rustam holding her, a look of fragile wonder in his face as he kissed the top of the baby’s head, touching her soft curls. She’d been a mix of both of them, too djinn to pass in the human world and yet visibly shafit.
“I want to take her home,” he whispered, tracing a tiny peaked ear. “Back to Daevabad.”
Duriya had been shocked. “But you said no one could know.”
“Let people know. I don’t care.” Rustam, always so soft-spoken, was suddenly fierce. “I want to have a family in the city my ancestors built and teach my daughter our ways.”
But Manizheh had had other ideas.
The burning plain full of broken bodies. Rustam, dazed and dying, having battled with magic Duriya hadn’t known existed as he struggled to help her onto the last horse.
“Return to the human world,”
