Stunned silence fell over the stadium. Blood, sand, and sweat blurred Karina’s vision, but she forced herself to hold her head high in front of the thousands of people who gazed down at her. She pointed her stick at the council.

“It seems, Grand Vizier, you have underestimated exactly how much I can handle,” she called out, each word sending a fresh throb of pain through her body.

A single cheer went up, followed by a massive wave of sound. In every direction, the people of Ziran, from the youngest children to the oldest elders, were cheering.

Not for the Kestrel.

Not for Hanane.

For her.

Karina grabbed Dedele’s fallen half of the stick and raised it high above her head like a warrior returning home from battle. As the roar of the people intensified, she basked in triumph at the stunned looks on the council’s faces.

Ziran belonged to the Alaharis. As long as there was breath in Karina’s lungs, it always would.

Anyone who tried to take this city from her would soon discover that the Kestrel’s daughter had talons of her own.

19

Malik

He’d had her.

Malik had been alone with Princess Karina for nearly an hour. He’d been close enough to touch her; in fact, he had touched her, had brushed against her several times as he’d fixed her dress.

The Great Mother had practically handed him the chance to kill her on a silver platter, and he’d thrown it away without even realizing.

Now Malik stood with his fellow Champions in the wings of the stadium, all of them staring at a blood-covered Karina as they tried to process what they’d just witnessed.

“Was the princess like this when the two of you were together?” whispered Malik as the crowd continued its now ten-minute-long cheer.

“Not quite.” Tunde’s tone was awestruck, and his eyes followed Karina’s every move.

The stories had painted Karina as irresponsible and lazy, but that image was at odds with the girl he’d met last night, the one who had saved a stranger from a raid and put her own life at risk to end a riot.

And both those girls were at odds with the one making her way out of the stadium, covered in both her own and Dedele’s blood.

But perhaps what bothered Malik most was that Karina was no longer just an abstract target in his mind. Now he knew that she couldn’t sew and that she’d had horrible migraines since she was a child. That she had a laugh like a cool breeze on a warm day and was very bad at riddles.

She was a person now. Building the courage to kill an idea had been hard enough. Killing a person seemed impossible.

Eventually, Karina returned to the stadium in a clean outfit, her hair still tied back. Malik was too busy staring at her to notice the High Priestesses signaling to him and the other Champions from the stage.

“Go!” Tunde shoved Malik forward, and he snapped back to awareness. It was time to begin the Second Challenge.

The Champions filed into the stadium to significantly less applause than Karina had received. Malik’s eyes met hers, and they widened in recognition. He grimaced; just like that, the element of surprise—the one advantage he’d had—was gone. Karina’s expression darkened, but she smiled quickly before turning to the audience.

“My apologies for the delay. I got held up in a small matter,” she yelled, and the people cheered again. The vitriol Malik had seen for the royal family last night was gone, replaced by pure adoration for a girl who had proven herself before the eyes of the entire city.

Karina continued, “Before we leave for the noonday meal, it is time to reveal the rules of the Second Challenge!”

Karina clapped her hands, and two servants wheeled a massive wooden box to the center of the stadium.

“During my Grandmother Bahia’s quest to free the trapped gods, she found herself needing to cross the domain of Yabissi, the Nine-Headed Gazelle. When grandmother asked for her passage, Yabissi said to her, ‘I have lived long enough to see the stars forget their own names and the sun bend backward to meet the moon. But in all my years, I have never once seen anything that has brought joy to all my heads at once. Do this for me, and I will grant you the passage you seek.’ And so Grandmother Bahia began to sing. It is said her voice was so beautiful that all nine of Yabissi’s heads wept with joy, and the gazelle gave her one of her prized antlers to form the hilt of her legendary spear.

“Thus, Champions, your task for the Second Challenge is to honor the request Yabissi made of Grandmother Bahia—give a performance that creates joy. Except tonight, all of Ziran is Yabissi; instead of nine heads, you must entertain fifty thousand. Do you understand?”

“We understand!” cried the Champions. Malik swallowed thickly, already hating the direction this challenge was headed in.

Karina gestured for Driss to approach the box. “Please reach inside and retrieve an object.”

Driss did so and pulled out a beautiful curved takouba with a gold hilt encrusted with rubies. One by one, each of the Champions retrieved an item from the box. Some were grand, like a silver mirror that shimmered like moonlight, others completely mundane, like Tunde’s bread basket.

Malik was last in line, and he hesitated as he reached the box—what if there were more swords inside and they lopped his fingers off?—before closing his eyes and plunging his hand in. He brushed against something hard, something squishy, something that felt like a bunch of fur balls glued together, until he felt something comforting and soft. Malik pulled his hand out to reveal a plain leather bag with long-faded embroidery, not unlike his old satchel. The crowd didn’t even cheer, and his face flushed with embarrassment.

When Malik had stepped back into line with his pitiful item, Karina said, “We will reconvene here at sundown. In the order of the current rankings, you will each craft a performance around the item you have drawn. You may bring any other items you need with you, but you must be the only person on the stage. The audience will vote on which performances they most enjoyed, and the two who are ranked lowest of the five will be eliminated from the competition.”

Dedele was uncharacteristically quiet, her shoulders slumped after her defeat. During the match, Malik had seen her exchanging words with Karina, and now he wondered exactly what they’d discussed to make the Fire Champion look so forlorn.

“Best of luck to all of you,” yelled Karina, and as Malik and the others hurried off the stage, he put all thoughts of amber eyes staring at him through a bloodstained face out of his mind.

Malik had never performed anything in front of an audience before, unless one counted that time Nana had forced him into a lamb costume as a child and made him dance for her friends. He’d never even told a story to an audience bigger than his sisters and a few of their old farm animals. Now he needed to perform in front of fifty thousand people and do something spectacular enough to convince them not to eliminate him from the competition?

“I can’t do this,” Malik groaned, putting his face in his hands.

“Not with that attitude, you can’t!” said Tunde. The Water Champion examined a calabash labeled All the Wisdom in the World, then discarded it with a scoff. “Do these people have anything that isn’t completely useless?”

After the announcement of the Second Challenge, a pop-up market had conveniently appeared outside the Azure Garden, full of merchants more than eager to help the Champions plan their performances—for the right price. Tunde and Malik had spent the last hour combing through the stalls for anything that might be of use to them. Khalil had come by earlier, only to sulk off muttering about ‘overpriced vultures.’ No one had seen Dedele since she’d gone to tend to her wakama injuries, and neither of them knew or cared where Driss had stormed off to.

Tunde continued, “Did your parents not force you to study a talent as a child so they could show you off to all the aunties and uncles? Mine was the balafon; I could probably play that cursed instrument in my sleep.”

Leaning against one of the tentpoles, Leila chimed in, “Some of our parents had more important things to spend money on than the balafon.”

Leila had hit a dead end in her research on Idir, and she had the bad mood to show for it. Malik certainly hadn’t helped matters by turning up at the Azure Garden in the dead of night with injuries he couldn’t explain; both his sister and Life Priestess had chided him extensively for that. Farid had also increased the number of guards stationed around the riad, likely thanks to his, Driss, and Tunde’s little misadventure. Just his luck.

Though perhaps it was a good thing Tunde was present, because it meant Malik did not have to explain yet how he’d botched another chance to kill Karina when Leila was already upset.