Zafira froze at his words. Sharr. What were the odds, hearing the name of that forsaken place twice in one morning? It was an island of evil, a place warned of in the dead of night beneath the flicker of a lantern. A fear just out of reach because it lived beyond the Arz.

It had been a prison fortress before it had stolen the Sisters and magic. Now it was wild and untamed, with oases run rampant, and it reached for Arawiya with the Arz, each tree another sentinel in its army.

“In the prison it once was?”

Deen shook his head, his gaze distant. “I was trapped inside a massive tree. Darkness like smoke. Whispers.” He grimaced and looked at her. “So many whispers, Zafira.”

She did not tell him of the whispers that shadowed her every waking moment.

Deen sighed. “I don’t know what it means, but did it have to plague me today of all days?”

“At least today you’ll have a distraction to help take your mind off it.” She reached for his hand, and he slipped his gloved pinkie around hers.

“Dear snow, is that you being optimistic?”

She laughed and his face sobered as they turned back to the village, ice crunching beneath their boots.

“Do you remember Inaya?”

“The thin baker’s daughter?” Zafira asked. No one baked bread in the western villages as scrumptiously as the thin baker did. His daughter was a soft-spoken girl with watchful eyes and a mane of hair as wild as a lion’s.

He nodded. “The baker took a fall a few days back, and it doesn’t look like he’ll walk again. So word spread that she was going to take the reins.”

Zafira’s stomach dropped.

“The za’eem’s men came this morning when she was opening shop.” Deen’s jaw was tight, and Zafira wanted to smooth the tension away with her fingers. “I was right there, selling skins to old Adib. One of them dragged her out. Another ordered some squat to take over and stand behind the counter, likely a man who’s never kneaded bread in his life.”

“And Inaya will be married in a few days to someone for whom she’ll make a good wife,” Zafira finished.

Deen murmured an affirmation.

This za’eem headed their village alone, but nearly every village head was the same. Everyone listened to the drivel of the caliph—drivel their useless sultan should have shut down but couldn’t care less about. Most days, Zafira didn’t even understand the point of the sultan if the caliphs were allowed to command so freely.

Worse, most villagers believed every twisted word—if the men, desperate in their need to pin blame, said the villagers would starve with a woman taking ownership of a bakery, they would believe it. The mere definition of superstition.

“Akhh, Deen, why?” Zafira’s vision pulsed red, and Sukkar snorted in concern. “Then there was that other girl last month, the one caught chopping wood in the Empty Forest, where every daama man and his grandfather chops wood. As if her hands would kill those trees any more than the snow does.”

Deen cast her a look. “Are you worried?”

“Worried?” Zafira almost barked out.

He smiled. “Sometimes I forget you’re not like me. Just be more cautious, eh?”

“Always,” she promised as they came to his and Yasmine’s house.

He nodded at the door. “She doesn’t know. Today doesn’t feel like the right time to tell her. Especially with that goat of a za’eem coming to the wedding.”

He was right. Yasmine would rip the za’eem to shreds herself. Zafira handed Sukkar’s reins to Deen, and he left to take care of the deer. She trudged up the two short steps, but before she could knock, her friend yanked open the warped door, worry and fury written across her face.

“I was hoping you’d be smiling,” Zafira said wryly, stepping inside.

Yasmine’s scowl deepened. “Oh, I’m smiling. Kharra, I’d be smiling even wider if you had missed the wedding altogether.”

Zafira clucked her tongue and shivered when the warmth of the fire touched her. “Such a foul mouth.”

“It’s nearly noon.” Yasmine pressed her lips into a flat line, never one for patience, unlike Deen.

“Sabar, sabar. I have a good reason.” Zafira thought of the baker’s daughter, Inaya, whose wedding would not be as happy as Yasmine’s. She dropped her hood and shook her dark hair free, rubbing her arms to loosen the cold that had rooted in her bones.

Baba had said the heat used to be sweltering once, with sand rising in dunes across the oasis-like caliphate. Snow had been a once-in-a-year treat, until the blizzards came and never left. It was the same day they, and those in the other caliphates, had lost the magic once housed in each of the five royal minarets.

Zafira had never known that life. When aquifers once summoned water, healers aided the injured, and ironsmiths manipulated metal. Magic was as distant as a mirage now, and the lands lay in ruin, worsening as the Arz grew.

Each caliphate had been left with some sort of curse: snow for Demenhur, desolation in Sarasin, soil destruction in once-fertile Pelusia, untamable sands in Zaram. Only Alderamin lived as it once did, selfishly isolating itself from the rest of the kingdom.

Zafira accepted a warm bowl of shorba from Yasmine and stirred the soft lentils, settling before the fire. She rubbed at the ache in her chest that panged whenever she thought of the magic she had never had the chance to experience. Of the sand that had never trickled between her fingers or shifted beneath her feet.