Shame on you. She makes herself comfortable and you betray her trust by ogling her? Ali dropped his gaze, heat creeping up his neck. His friend—his brother’s widow, no less—and here he was, fantasizing about her.
A bead of water blossomed on his forehead as if to mock his control. Ali could lower his gaze all he liked—he had plenty of experience doing that.
But he had absolutely no experience doing battle with the barbed, bladed, and wildly irresponsible notions in his heart that seemed to be gaining strength with each additional day he spent in Nahri’s company. Ali had never felt this way about someone before—he wasn’t even sure what he felt. This … this tangle of tenderness and longing, of sheer terror and unexpected light, the certainty that he could have blissfully spent the rest of his life with her hand brushing his wrist as they perused books and argued about food in a Cairo ruin, the sensation like he’d been shoved off a cliff each time she grinned … Ali didn’t know how to fight that.
He didn’t know if he wanted to.
You are becoming the lovesick fool you always denied being. And Ali didn’t have time for that. They had a very long journey on a very small boat to navigate—and then a war to fight.
“Is the pastry not agreeing with you?”
Ali jumped back to attention. “What?”
“You look like you’re about to throw up.” Nahri frowned, setting aside the instruments. “I knew you shouldn’t be using all this weird water magic. Let me examine you.”
Yes! Part of him cheered, thrilled at the prospect of her hands on his body. “No,” Ali said just as swiftly, cursing the entire concept of love. “I was just thinking … you wanted to know about the marid,” he blurted out. “About all the secrets I was keeping from you.”
Surprised pleasure lit Nahri’s expression. “I assumed I’d have to pry them from you.”
Oh, God, even for Ali this was a new low in putting his foot in his mouth. “I agreed there would be no more secrets,” he said faintly.
“Well, then.” Nahri straightened, packing up the instruments and turning to face him with a feline grace. Like a lion might calmly assess a trapped antelope. “Let’s get started with ‘the marid didn’t do anything to me, Nahri,’” she said, doing a poor impersonation of his voice. “‘I just conjure waterfalls in the library and send boats shooting up the Nile for no reason.’”
Right to it. Ali tried to refocus. “The marid did something to me.”
“Yes, I think that’s been established. What did they do to you?”
“I’m honestly not certain,” he admitted. “But what I do know is that after they possessed me on the lake, it was as if I had the same affinity with water as I do with fire. I could sense it, summon it, control it. In Am Gezira, it was a blessing: I was able to find springs and cisterns, to draw them up through the sand and turn Bir Nabat green. But when I returned to Daevabad …” Ali shivered. “The magic was too much. It was getting stronger, harder to conceal and control. I was hearing voices in my head, seeing things in my dreams—I was terrified that I was going to get caught.”
“Caught?”
“You know what people say about the marid. They’re demons, tricksters. My mother says they lure djinn in Ta Ntry to the water to drown them and drain their blood. Issa was ready to throw me before the ulema and denounce me as a heretic just for asking questions.”
“People are often afraid of what they don’t understand.” Fortunately, Nahri looked neither repulsed nor afraid—merely thoughtful, as though she was puzzling all this out. “Did the marid who possessed you say anything? Explain why they were giving you such power?”
Ali thought back to that awful night. To the way the marid had seized upon everything—everyone—precious in Ali’s memories and then tortured him, making him watch the most brutal of deaths. The way it had grabbed him with tentacles and teeth and shaken him like a dog to drag him from death’s embrace.
His mouth went dry. Ironic. “No,” he whispered, realizing it for the first time. “I don’t think they meant to give me these powers. Quite frankly, I don’t think they gave much thought at all to me. I think they saw a tool they could use to suit their purposes and changed me into what they needed.” Hatset’s stories of the demons who stalked Ntaran waterways and Ghassan’s recollection of the effort it took to recover Ali after the possession came back to him. “And I don’t know that I was meant to survive it.”
Silence fell between them, and when Nahri finally spoke again, her voice was uncharacteristically subdued. “I’m sorry, Ali. I know a lot happened between us that night, a lot I’m still angry about. But I also know you wouldn’t have gone into the water if it weren’t for him.” She didn’t have to say Darayavahoush’s name—the two of them danced around the topic of the Afshin like he was a pot of Rumi fire. “And for that I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be,” he muttered. “I don’t think either of us wanted things to go the way they did.”
She met his gaze again, and Ali felt something soften between them, a jumble of unspoken resentments and shattered hopes. They’d both had their lives ruined and shoved off course. But they were still here.
It was unfortunate, then, that Ali had far worse secrets to reveal. “I did learn something after the possession,” he continued. “Something I think you should know that might help us piece together the marid’s role in all this.”
“What?”
By the Most High, how should he say this? Ali adjusted the rudder, fighting for time. The secret he’d kept from his mother, the one that
