The emerald ring he and Manizheh had warred over. It had bonded to his finger, and blood erupted from his hand when Rustam finally ripped it off, as though the ring itself had been draining his life away.
“Get rid of it,” he mumbled, ash beading on his brow.
“Come with us,” Duriya had begged, adjusting the shrieking baby in her arms. “Please!”
Rustam shook his head. “Manizheh will return. I’ll hold her off as long as I can. Go!”
A race across the burning grasslands. It would have killed Duriya, should have killed her, her body still recovering from labor.
But magic poured from the dark-eyed infant pressed to her chest, healing her mother unnaturally fast. When the emerald ring began to shiver, scorching her skin, Duriya had hurled it into a field, hating what the foul gem had cost her.
Duriya was done with magic. Instead, she used everything else she had to get back home. Her wits and her wiles and her body when she had no other choice. She stole, and she begged, and she conned until she stood once again on Egyptian soil.
She didn’t go back to her village in the south. Instead, remembering what people said about the djinn not liking human cities, she found a town on the outskirts of mighty Cairo. Still on the Nile. Still close enough that she could kneel in the river’s shallows, cut her arm, and watch the blood and tears billow on the muddy water.
“Old friend,” she had wept, “I need a favor.”
The years passed in a blur, Duriya finding work as a midwife and healer of sorts—piecing together what she’d seen in the infirmary and what she’d learned from Sobek. Little Golbahar, for she’d kept the name Rustam had granted their daughter, grew strong, her djinn appearance masked by Sobek. Duriya loved her fiercely, doing everything she could to keep Gol safe and hide what she could of her daughter’s magic. When they curled up together at night, her daughter’s knees pressed against her belly, her little chest rising and falling in sleep, Duriya had prayed to all she knew.
It hadn’t been enough. Because Rustam had been right, and Manizheh eventually came for them.
The village hadn’t stood a chance, destroyed in a storm of fire, its people screaming. Duriya had barely had enough time to grab Golbahar, race for the river, and call for its lord.
Sobek had not been encouraging. “They are Nahids, and our pact has been paid. The blood your request would require …”
Duriya didn’t hesitate. She had known from the day they’d fled the burning plain that there was nothing she would not do for her child.
“I will get you your blood.” Then she kissed Golbahar’s head, told her she loved her, and shoved her daughter into the scaled hands of a monster.
When Manizheh arrived, she’d been furious. Duriya had never been more than a dirt-blooded nuisance, a lesser being barely worth her notice but for the Nahid child she had carried—and the ring Manizheh believed she had stolen. It didn’t take much taunting to shove her over the edge.
It didn’t take much to ensure Sobek got his blood.
The water was warm when Duriya finally fell, the Nile cradling her in a last embrace. She would swear clawed hands stroked her hair, but of course that was impossible. Sobek never showed such affection.
But he did whisper his promise as she died, as assuring as any prayer. “I will protect her. I will protect her always.”
NAHRI WAS WEEPING BEFORE THE TOUCH OF THE RIVER faded. Her own memories were coming back in pieces. Gripping her mother’s dress as Duriya jested with customers. Simple meals of beans and bread, of the sugary feteer her mother’s father had taught her to make.
Of the words her mother had told her every night, simple ones, but ones no one had told Nahri since, not in language she still used to summon flames.
I love you, little one. I love you so much.
Ali was already reaching for her. Sobbing too hard to speak, Nahri threw herself in his arms and there, in the garden where her parents had met, finally mourned them.
IT WAS EVENING BY THE TIME NAHRI MADE HER way to the palace kitchens. She knew she looked like a wreck, her eyes red and puffy from crying. She knew as well that it would have been wiser to wait until tomorrow, until her grief had settled. Even Ali had tried to gently dissuade her, fearing the devastation that awaited if she was wrong. There had been a war, after all, and so many people had died—especially in the palace.
Nahri had gone anyway.
The kitchen staff was threadbare, reduced to a handful of shafit. But Nahri knew the moment she saw his stooped back and oil-splattered galabiyya. The old man from Egypt who’d quietly cooked meals from their shared homeland and slipped her small trinkets.
He glanced up from the dough he was kneading, and it was the face from her mother’s memories, only more aged.
Nahri burst into tears. “Grandfather?”
“I KNEW THE FIRST SECOND I SAW YOU,” HE WHISPERED. “You look so much like her, and when you smiled at me …” Her grandfather wiped his eyes with the edge of his scarf. “You have her smile. She used to smile so much back home.”
The rest of the kitchen had cleared out, and the tea he had insisted on making for her sat untouched, the mint blackened. Nahri had no appetite for anything but his words.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked. “All this time …”
“I didn’t dare. They were treating you like royalty; I couldn’t take that away from you.” He shook his head. “I’d spent a generation in this city. I knew all too well how they treated shafit, and it wasn’t a life I would wish on my enemy, let alone my granddaughter.”
Nahri squeezed his hand. “I wish I
