CHAPTER 9

Night had fallen heavily across Demenhur, bringing a phantom silence with it. Snow swirled in wheezing gasps, and Zafira drew her scarf over her face. She was hooded and shrouded, yet it was easy to discern the Hunter, for chances of finding a man in the western villages with a sling of arrows across his back were impossible—she couldn’t even count herself. She smirked at her own joke. Yasmine would have snorted. Skies, she isn’t dead.

Zafira guided Sukkar up the sloping white streets, where houses stood like misshapen teeth. They were the tan stone and colorless mortar common in the desert.

Only, Demenhur was no longer the desert oasis it had been. She sighed, her breath clouding in the cursed cold, and pressed on.

The sooq was ghostly beneath the moon. The forlorn jumu’a boasted no sign of the wedding that had taken place mere hours before. Zafira passed Araby’s colorful sweet shop, the shutters pulled tight like those of most other shops in the sooq. Ornaments dangled on shop eaves, swaying eerily in the breeze.

She halted Sukkar before a shop well-known for catering to the jobless superstitious. Through the dark window, she saw grimy glass bottles glinting from the shelves, filled with Arawiya-knew-what. They were meant to be hung in the four corners of a house to deter ifrit, creatures of smokeless fire that could adopt the face of anyone, usually their victim’s loved ones. Despite not being able to wield magic the way humans and safin could, ifrit had wreaked havoc worse than either race before the Six Sisters of Old.

Each of the six hailed from the most prominent clans, united by their desire for a better world, rather than by blood. What intrigued Zafira most was what they were: si’lah, creatures mere humans couldn’t comprehend. Creatures not even the lofty safin could fathom standing beside as equals, let alone a handful of levels apart.

Once the Sisters had gathered their foes, the insidious ifrit included, they had no place to imprison them, until one Sister stepped forward with a plan. She was stronger than the others, for her heart was pure and she was adamant in her ideals.

On Sharr, the island she was to govern, she created an impenetrable prison where the Sisters jailed the creatures that plagued their people and where she reigned as its warden.

The ornaments hanging from the shop swayed, the strike of metal against metal drawing Zafira out of her thoughts. She eyed those glass bottles and wondered if they worked. If ifrit still roamed Arawiya, invisible to the eye or donning a human’s body.

She tugged her scarf back over her mouth and was just about to press Sukkar onward when tiny clay lions in the frontmost display caught her eye, sending a shiver down her spine. She didn’t know what the clay felines were supposed to fend off, because the Lion of the Night was dead.

The Lion’s mother was ifrit, and his safin father fought to keep him from being banished with the rest of her kind. But life in the safin caliphate of Alderamin proved more difficult, because pure-blooded safin bore a pride that none could rival. They murdered his father. Banned the Lion from magic. Crushed his core.

Baba always used the example of the Lion whenever he taught Zafira of oppression. Because the Lion did not let the safin crush him. He turned to Alderamin’s greatest asset—knowledge. He learned all there was, empowering himself with forbidden blood magic.

Before long, the only creatures more powerful than he were the Sisters themselves, though the fact didn’t faze him when he turned his wrath upon the Gilded Throne. Zafira always found it odd that the Lion, with all his knowledge, had made so bold a move. Because the Sisters quickly overpowered him, trapping him on Sharr and putting an end to his reign of darkness.

Decades later, he stirred trouble on Sharr itself, and the warden called for aid. The other Sisters flocked to her, armed with every ounce of Arawiya’s magic to defeat him for good.

No one returned.

His roar was the darkness. His den was the shadows. Yet Sharr swallowed them all—the Sisters, the warden, the Lion, even the prison. But the Fall of Arawiya was a victory, wasn’t it? Even if the people lost the Sisters and magic, even if the loss gave Demenhur a reason to prove that misfortune followed a woman’s actions, Zafira knew, in her heart, that the Sisters had protected them that day.

They had defeated the Lion of the Night with their last breaths.

She pressed her heels against Sukkar’s sides. Maybe the tiny lions were merely ornaments, a display of pride for the victory over a man who defied men, only to be slain by women.

“Whoa there.” She tugged on Sukkar’s reins before a run-down construction, charred black from a fire long ago. It stood behind the sooq, shadowed by the beauty of the House of Selah in the distance.

Zafira tied Sukkar to a beam under a half-broken eave and slipped between the old rails. The creak of the door echoed, and something scurried away in the dark. There was once a time when the hunger was so great, Demenhune of the western villages feasted on the putrid flesh of rats, which killed more than hunger ever would. That was before Zafira had succumbed to the call of the Arz.

She still remembered the bare relief on her parents’ faces when she had stumbled from the Arz with three rabbits in hand and a smear of blood on her cheek. Neither Baba nor Umm had known where she had gone, but it was the first time anyone had returned from the forest of no return.

Days later, Baba had shown her how to nock an arrow and how to ensnare a deer, just as his own father had taught him in the forests of northern Demenhur. But when Baba had taken the meat into town and began feeding the villagers, it was Umm who reminded Zafira that, as a woman, she would receive no respect for the work she did. Baba had only smiled, saying Zafira held the power to change the views of the caliph’s staunch believers, to give women the equality that was their right. The equality they received in Arawiya’s other caliphates.