Nahri beckoned Ali closer and then laid a hand over his heart. “Lift the seal.”
He complied, and it immediately fell away. They were getting better at this. She conjured a pair of flames in her other hand and used them to light one of the driftwood twigs they’d gathered. Then she let go of him, regret twinging through her as her magic fell away.
“Can I … can I sit with you?” Ali asked. “I don’t want to intrude or if it’s not allowed …”
Nahri blinked in surprise. “I wouldn’t have thought you wanted to.”
Ali gazed back at her, the ocean reflecting in his eyes. “I want to.”
“Then sit.” She patted the damp sand next to her. Nahri pressed the smoldering stick to the dried tuft of grass she’d stuck in the shell, and it burst into flame. Holding the stick in one hand, she bowed her head, praying quietly in Divasti.
It felt good to go through the ritual, better than she would have imagined. Nahri hadn’t prayed since she left Daevabad. She hadn’t actually prayed since the dawn of Navasatem when she’d lit oil lamps at Nisreen’s side. Nahri had always had a mixed relationship with her faith, mostly because it felt more like a duty than any true belief. She might be the Banu Nahida, but often she’d felt like a fraud, yearning to share the sincere devotion so many of the Daevas around her enjoyed. She wanted their certainty in a higher power, a meaning to the cruelly chaotic violence that plagued their world.
Do Manizheh and Dara pray? Was her mother even now leading dawn ceremonies at the Daeva temple and marking the brow of her loyal Afshin? Nahri knew Dara had once been devout—he’d killed people because he’d been told that was what the Creator required.
And for a long time, that thought alone would have been enough to shake Nahri’s faith. How could she share these rituals, these words, with those who would slaughter innocents in the same Creator’s name? But as she gazed at her crude fire altar and the sunlight-streaked sea, some of her doubts settled.
Manizheh was a murderer, plain and simple. Her mother could say otherwise all she liked; she was the one who had betrayed their role. For whatever had happened between their peoples, Anahid had built her city for all the tribes. She’d been a healer, a unifier, a woman blessed with miraculous powers by the Divine itself.
Manizheh did not own that. No one did. Anahid’s legacy and faith were things Nahri had equal claim on and could also be strengthened by.
She touched the smoldering stick to her brow to mark her skin with ash. Ali wordlessly lowered his head, and Nahri did the same for him. They sat in silence for a moment as the kindling burned and the sun pulled away from the waves.
“What do they mean?” he asked. “The prayers?”
Nahri flushed. “You’d be better off asking a priest. The prayers are similar to yours, at least from what I remember hearing when I used to beg for alms outside mosques as a child.” She stuck the driftwood in the sand, letting the smoke perfume her skin.
“And the rituals? The fire altar?”
“The rituals remind us to tend the altar and keep the flames burning.” She bit her lip. “I told Kartir once it seemed like a clever way to remind people to pray, since the fire would otherwise go out, and he told me I was a cynic. Even so, I like the ritual of the motions; they set me at peace. I like the continuity—that Anahid might have done these same things so long ago. That the Daevas have maintained them. That we have survived worse. When I first arrived in Daevabad, Nisreen told me I should take assurance from the flames that survived the night, because there would always be darkness. But as long as you kept a light burning, it would be okay.”
“That’s beautiful,” Ali said softly. “I never knew that. I probably should have. I should have taken the time to learn what so many people in my city kept sacred.”
“I imagine the Citadel thought it wiser to teach their soldiers that we were lecherous fire worshippers, not people. Made it easier to hurt us.”
“That doesn’t excuse my ignorance.” Ali stared at his hands. “I’ve hurt Daevas, and I’ve hurt shafit. I’ve said things and done things that have gotten people killed. I’ve killed them myself.” He lifted his gaze to study the smoldering grass on the floating shell. “We have a verse like that—like what Nisreen said. We say God is the light of the heavens and the earth, that it’s a light as steady and protected as a lamp behind glass and shines as brightly as a star. That it is always there to guide us.”
His last words, spoken with a hitch, echoed the growing decision in Nahri’s mind. She picked up a chunk of driftwood, breaking it up to still the trembling in her hands, and then carefully set one of the tiny pieces upon the kindling. It caught, fire licking through the dry wood.
“I’m not going back to Egypt, Ali,” she started. “I can’t. The way Qandisha was talking, I think the ifrit had their own aims in allying with Manizheh. There are too many coincidences. Seemingly no one knew Dara was enslaved, and somehow my mother ends up with his ring and the company of the ifrit who enslaved him? And they’re happy to help her, their mortal enemy?”
Ali had betrayed no surprise when she said she wasn’t going back to Egypt—perhaps he really was starting to read her—but looked unconvinced at her other words. “Your mother was clever enough to outwit my father. Do you really think she’d fall for an ifrit scheme?”
“I think the ifrit were scheming for millennia before we were born. And yes, I think Manizheh might have been so hungry for power and revenge
