“You don’t like Earth?” Phara was genuinely surprised.
Zanari tilted her head to the side, thinking. Most of her time in the human realm had been spent tracking a cannibal intent on eating Nalia and any other jinni he could get his hands on. Not the best introduction to another realm. And yet somehow, it had taken hold of her imagination.
“I’m not sure what I think of Earth,” Zanari said. “I haven’t exactly been sightseeing.”
“It’s a wonderful place,” Phara said. “And humans aren’t so bad, once you get used to them.”
“But wouldn’t you rather be in Arjinna?” Zanari asked. “To be in your own land and dance under the Three Widows during harvest time?”
“I’ve never been to Arjinna.”
Zanari nearly dropped the delicate bowl she was holding. “What? Not once?”
Phara shook her head. “I was born in the desert among the Dhoma, as was my mother before me, and her mother before her.”
“Phara, that’s just . . . wrong. Oh my gods, you’ve never seen the Water Temple of Lathor? The Infinite Lake? The Qaf Mountains? Are you serious?”
Phara laughed. The sound was like toasting wine glasses. She smiled, sly. “Maybe when you win the revolution, you can show me these things.”
“I’d love to.” She looked away before she did something stupid, like kiss Phara’s full, pink lips. Her eye caught an arch at the back of the store. “Should we see what’s in there?”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“I’m a healer, remember? My idea of an adventure is gathering herbs for my poultices.”
“Well, allow me to broaden your horizons.” Zanari moved forward, one hand holding a glowing ball of chiaan, the other gripping her scimitar.
She edged through a decaying wooden doorframe, Phara close behind. Zanari raised the light in her hand as they got deeper into the pitch-black room. First, it was just shadows and a musty scent and then . . . and then the room became a crypt. The ball of light in Zanari’s hand faltered as fear surged through her, cold and hot and gods. A fully clothed skeleton sat in a wooden chair, clutching a blanket. The bones had a macabre gleam in the flickering jade light of Zanari’s chiaan. Phara dug her fingernails into Zanari’s arm.
“I’m not sure about this whole broadening-my-horizons thing,” Phara said.
“Yeah, this wasn’t really what I had in mind.”
Zanari moved closer to the long-dead corpse and reached out a finger to move back the blanket the skeleton’s bones were curled around. When she saw what was underneath, she jerked away, her face pale. Wrapped in its decaying folds was a much smaller skeleton.
“Oh my gods,” Phara said, noticing the infant’s remains. “The poor thing.” She looked around the room. “Zanari . . . I think . . . I think they must have starved to death.”
“That is a really awful way to go.” That was one thing jinn never had to worry about—even the lowliest Djan could produce food.
“Manifesting that sandstorm to cover an occupied city was pretty low, even for the Ghan Aisouri,” Zanari said, when they’d returned to the main room. “I knew she’d probably magicked the dune, but gods, all these people . . .”
Phara leaned against a table in the center of the small store. “Are you saying that this Ghan Aisouri—Antharoe—are you saying that she buried the humans in this city alive and left my ancestors here on purpose?”
“Antharoe did the expedient thing. It would have taken too much effort to evacuate the city. She might not have known about the bottles of jinn, but if she did, I doubt she looked very hard for them.” Zanari wiped a finger in the table’s dust. “Just another day in the life of the Ghan Aisouri.”
Phara took in a shuddering breath. “It’s starting to make more and more sense, why my family stayed on Earth for so long.”
Zanari frowned. “Sometimes . . . sometimes I wonder why we stay. What we’re fighting for. It’s been so bad for so long.” She looked up. “Part of me feels like we should just get as many jinn out of Arjinna as we can. Come here and . . . start over.”
Phara shook her head. “The way your eyes light up when you talk about the Water Temple of Lathor and dancing under the moons—that’s what you’re fighting for. You’d never be happy here.”
Zanari wasn’t so sure.
The door pushed open and they both jumped. “Hey, we’ve been looking for you two,” Raif said. “You okay?”
Zanari nodded. “Other than finding corpses.”
“Yeah. Didn’t realize we were in a graveyard.” A shadow passed over Raif’s eyes and he looked old and tired and too much like their father. He cleared his throat.
“We’re gonna set up camp and get some rest,” he said. “Better stick with the group until we know what we’re dealing with down here.”
“Good point,” Zanari said.
He headed back to the cluster of jinn standing on the main road. As Zanari moved to follow him, Phara grabbed her hand. The healer’s chiaan felt like a gentle desert breeze. The confusion, hurt, and frustration inside Zanari faded until all that was left was a deep peace.
Gods, that’s nice.
“I—” Phara stopped, blushing. “There’s a sadr that my mother used to say whenever I was discouraged. I don’t know if you’re religious, but . . . well. It helped me. Still does.”
Zanari wasn’t religious. But at the moment she wanted to be.
“I try to honor the gods,” Zanari said, careful. Hesitant. Among jinn, this topic was eggshells—things that break if you held them too tightly. “But it feels like they don’t listen anymore. Like maybe they never did.” Zanari sighed. She didn’t have the words for these thoughts, these feelings. This wasn’t the sort of thing the tavrai talked about. Dthar Djan’Urbi’s scimitar-wielding daughter didn’t have the sweet vocabulary of a Dhoma healer raised in the peace of a sun-kissed desert.
“I don’t mean to offend,” she finished. Healers, Zanari knew, were very devout. They had to be, in order to work their magic.
“Truth doesn’t offend. You’re speaking your heart—there’s nothing wrong with that, Zanari.” Phara interlaced her fingers with Zanari’s long, thin ones.
“I’d like to hear it,” Zanari whispered. “The sadr.”
The sadrs came from the jinn holy book, the Sadranishta, hundreds of prayers to the gods. Zanari knew some of them, the ones the traveling priests had said around Djan fires after a day’s work in the fields. Like the others in her caste, she’d never been able to read the holy book. Even after she’d been taught the language of letters, the words were too ancient for her newly educated mind to comprehend and, besides, the few copies that existed were locked away in the temples and palace.
Phara spoke, her voice soft with memory. “You cannot have the moon without the night. Its light needs the darkness to kiss. Who else can hold it but the shadows? What else can make it shine?”
The words slipped inside Zanari and filled her to the brim with something warm and sweet and good. They were nectar. Phara leaned close, her voice scarcely above a whisper. “The revolution is Arjinna’s moon, no? If you leave, what will be left? Only darkness.”
Her lips, just inches away from Zanari’s, seemed to catch the slivers of light that slipped in through the shop’s dusty windowpanes.
“This is getting complicated,” Zanari said, her eyes on those lips.
“The whole world is complicated. Maybe this moment—the present—is the only thing that makes sense.”
“Zan, what in all hells is taking so—” Raif pushed through the door, then stopped when he saw how close they were standing, his eyes going wide. “I’ll . . . um . . . yeah.”
He grinned, then scurried out. Phara giggled. “I was wondering what it took to surprise the leader of the Arjinnan revolution.”
Zanari thought of the look in Raif’s eyes when he told her that Nalia had killed Kir. “He doesn’t like surprises, that’s
for sure,” she said.
“But some surprises are good,” Phara said softly, a hopeful look in her eye.
Zanari smiled. “Yeah. Some surprises are good.”
She’d thought that when something like this happened to her—whatever this was—that it would be fireworks and magic and all-consuming want. Like it had been for Raif and Nalia. But this was a slow-moving river on a hot summer’s day, bees lazily buzzing, the feel of warm grass beneath her fingers.
Not exactly something Zanari had expected to find on her search for Solomon’s sigil.
Raif took up the rear of their small party, his eyes scanning the deserted streets of the city, Nalia by his side. It’d only been a few hours since her transformation in the lightning storm, and the enormity of what had happened to her seemed to be taking its toll. He could feel her exhaustion, the need to stop moving. The others were ahead, checking one of the vacant buildings to see if it was a suitable resting place for the night. The city was filled with skeletons, and no one wanted to sleep with the dead. Zanari had told him her theory about Antharoe leaving the humans in the City of Brass to die and he couldn’t help but agree—he’d thought as much that first night with the Dhoma. The city had been magically preserved, that much was clear. No natural sandstorm made domes above the cities it ravaged.
Nalia stopped, hands on her hips as she looked around, her eyes full of sorrow. “I can’t believe she’d let them die.”
Raif turned, confused. “Who? What are you talking about?”
“Antharoe.”
“It makes sense,” he said gently. “Other than the Dhoma, the jinn have never been friendly with humans. Maybe Antharoe felt it was a just punishment. Samar said this city was built by jinn under Solomon’s control and that as soon as they’d completed building the city, they disappeared.”
“The jinn in the bottles?”
Raif nodded. “I can picture Antharoe, looking at this human city built by jinn slaves. I almost understand why she did it.”
You’ve become the monsters you’re fighting. Maybe Jordif was right.
“Nothing could ever justify this.” She swept her hand over the city. “All these people—children, even. I can’t believe Antharoe was my hero growing up.” Nalia turned to him, her eyes anxious. “Her blood runs in my veins.”
He brushed her cheek with the back of his finger. “Hey,” he said. “You’re nothing like her.”
She stepped away from him. “I am, a little.”
He sighed. “Maybe a little. But only in good ways—your determination, your refusal to give up. Your power. That’s all.”
Nalia looked at him then, really looked at him, her heart laid bare. “Welcome back,” he murmured.
He pulled her into a nearby alcove and, rather than let go of her hand, as she was trying to make him do, he held her palm against his lips. He gasped as her chiaan surged into his skin. He could feel her, finally, he could feel Nalia’s chiaan flowing into him, rich and spicy, achingly familiar yet more searing than before, infused with lightning. It latched onto him like a drug, intoxicating.
Raif pressed his fingers against her lips and her eyes fluttered as his chiaan seeped into her skin. He smiled as he took her face in his hands and gave her the kiss he’d been dreaming about since before she woke up, since the moment he’d left the riad in Marrakech. Nalia melted against him, her lips matching the urgency of his own.
She tasted like a heady wine, and he wanted more more more. Her arms wrapped around him and pulled him against her and he didn’t care who heard them, didn’t care who saw, he needed to be as close as possible to her.
Then, without warning, she shoved him away, her palm pressing against his heart.
The rush of cold air brought him back to himself, and Raif stumbled, groping in the darkness. In the rusty orange light from the pillar by the main gate he saw the misery in Nalia’s face, the way she touched her lips like they were something rare and precious.
“Raif, we can’t. This has to stop.”
He could hardly control his breath, hardly think with her chiaan inside him, the smell of her all over him.
“Is this about Kir? You think I’ll change my mind, decide we can’t be together, after all?”
She shook her head.
He took a step toward her, but she pressed herself against the wall, as if she could somehow dissolve into the stone. Away from him. Which didn’t make any sense. Their connection, the way their bodies responded to one another—she wanted him as badly as he wanted her. It was undeniable. So what was going on?
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Her eyes were bright, too big for her thin face. They filled and she angrily brushed at the tears.
“Love is a weakness,” she said softly. “It’s one of the first things I was taught as a Ghan Aisouri. I used to hear my mother say that and think I was special because I had this wonderful secret—I knew how to love. But she was right.”
“No she wasn’t.” He took a step forward. “Nal, you’re exhausted. You’re not thinking straight, okay? I should have given you space, I just . . .” He stared at the ground, hands on his hips. “I miss you so godsdamned much.”
“It’s not about being tired or needing space,” she said. “Raif, Bashil died because I loved him. Calar used my brother to get to me. And even before that, I was willing to sell out the entire jinn race so that I could free my brother from Ithkar.”
The ring. Guilt stabbed him as Raif remembered how cruel he’d been to her, refusing to help free Nalia from her bottle until she agreed to take him to the sigil. At the time, he hadn’t known about Bashil, but that wasn’t the point.
“Love can be a strength, too,” he said. “It’s saved your life twice in the past few weeks.”
Raif, calling Nalia back from the godlands after Haran. And Malek—keeping her alive in the Sahara. He knew the pardjinn would have saved her with or without that wish.
“And almost killed you,” she said. “How many times have you risked your life and the revolution for me? If Calar finds out how we feel about each other, I guarantee she will use that. And everything you’ve been working for will suffer. We’re hurting Arjinna by being together. You know that. We have to stop.”
He remembered Malek’s words on the Sun Chaser: She’s the best weapon in your arsenal.
“You’re wrong, Nalia. The realm only stands to gain if you’re alive. I’d be a fool to let the Ifrit kill you. You hate them as much as I do; having you on the revolution’s side is worth any sacrifice I make,” he said. “Besides,” he added with a small smile, “I’ve already tried to stop loving you. I can’t. I won’t.”
“You’ll have to learn.” Nalia slipped past him, out of the alcove, and back onto the main street.
“Nalia.” She stopped. He knew how hard this was for her, saw it in the tightness of her shoulders, her clenched fists. “You’re the bravest person I know. But you’re being a coward right now.”
Nalia whirled around. “You weren’t there when he died,” she said, her voice shaking. “I refuse—I refuse to watch Calar take you away from me. I refuse to wash your dead body and sit by your side all night as your skin gets cold, knowing you will never smile again. I refuse to burn you, to taste your ashes on the wind.” She was yelling now, tears streaming down her face, chiaan sparking from her fingertips.
He stayed where he was, still. Silent. For a few breaths they just stood there, staring at one another. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet.
“Do you want to know the first thing I said to you, when I saw you lying in the tent, not waking up? With no chiaan and knowing what had happened to you, what happened to Bashil?”
“Raif, don’t,” she begged.
“I said, ‘I love you and I will never leave you again.’ And if that’s weak, then fine. I’m the weakest godsdamn jinni in the world. Push me away all you want, Nalia. I’m not going anywhere.”
29
AS NALIA ENTERED WHAT MUST HAVE BEEN A PALACE
IN the City of Brass, light spilled out of its main chamber. As she walked through the wide double doors, she came upon the Dhoma, deep in conversation. The Ifrit among them had lit several torches and placed them in the braziers hanging on the Roman columns that graced the wide throne room. Light flickered over the carved stone and reached up to the domed ceiling, where the shadows were thickest.
“Is everything all right?” she asked Samar as she took in their grim expressions.
“This is an odd question to ask in our situation, no?” he said, not unkindly.
She smiled. “I suppose so.” It felt like nothing was all right, anywhere. “Did you find any bottles?”
“No,” he said heavily. “And we have no idea where to start. We are not here for the sigil, so your Aisouri markings are of no help to us. We might have to go our own way.”
“You do what you want, brother,” Raif said, coming up behind Nalia, “but I wouldn’t want to go through this cave without as much protection as possible. Who knows what’s down here.”
“Raif’s right,” Nalia said, careful not to look at him. “Of course you’re welcome to do as you wish, but the bottles may be as difficult to uncover as the ring. They could be anywhere. And Malek has a theory that you’ll need the seal to open them, anyway.”
Samar’s expression darkened. “You know this for sure?”
Nalia shrugged helplessly. “From here on out, we don’t know anything for certain. But if we go our separate ways, we may never find one another again.”
“In The Arabian Nights—” Malek began.
“Just a human story,” Zanari said. “Gods!”
“The horseman was here, wasn’t he?” Malek said, glaring. “As I was saying, in The Arabian Nights, there’s a story: ‘The Fisherman and the Ifrit.’ The bottle the Ifrit is contained in is pulled up from the sea. My guess is the bottles you’re looking for are in some body of water. People lived here. They had to drink, fish, grow food. Their water source would be close.”