Freedom's Slave

  “Shirin, come on! They’re going to start the reel,” he says, crouching before her.

  They are ten summers old, too young to join in most of the dances. She shakes her head, silent as always. She has not spoken for two years. She will not start today.

  “Come on, little wolf,” he says, more gently now.

  Inside she is wild, just like the wolf on her mask. Snapping teeth and bloodlust. Raif knows this and yet he still reaches out to her. He knows she will not bite him. Never him. They are the same age, but he is somehow older than she.

  In some ways.

  She slowly stands, then takes a step back. Uncertain. Before she can run away, he grabs her hand and pulls her into the circle of swirling jinn. His skin is warm and his chiaan feels like a summer meadow. Safe.

  She knows the steps, has watched this dance all her life. They kick up their feet, sending dust into the sky. Shirin throws back her head and laughs, a wolfish howl from her belly, and she can see the smile in Raif’s eyes, the happiness behind his dragon mask.

  When they are finished she opens her mouth, and for the first time since the overlord did what he did to her and to her mother, since the time she saw her mother’s ashes fly away on a gust of autumn wind, she speaks. The sound travels from her heart, up her throat, syllables made of gold and hope. The word she speaks is medicine. A cure.

  “Raif.”

  His eyes widen and he pulls off his mask.

  She is a locked door. He is the only one who can open it.

  The night after Shirin had discovered Raif was in love with a Ghan Aisouri, she pulled her second, Jaqar, deep into the forest. They were not two lovers on a tryst, but animals letting off steam. Rough bark against her back, teeth against skin. Both of them covered in blood and sweat, the grime of a battle they’d just lost to the Ifrit. It was surprising how easy it was to bed someone she wasn’t willing to die for. Shirin couldn’t pretend he was Raif; there was no gentleness in his eyes, no softness in his touch.

  Thank gods.

  Later, she’d bathed in the freezing River Sorrow and only let the tears come when she was underwater, holding her breath, wondering if she should just let go. Open her mouth, give up. It’d be so easy.

  But she was Shirin Djan’Khar: if she could survive an overlord who had done such despicable things to her, she could survive anything. And though it was Raif who’d given her back her voice, it was she—Shirin—who had kept her own heart beating, her lungs filled with air. No one owned her. No one.

  Nalia sighed, content, eyes closed against a soft sun, her skin lapping up a gentle breeze.

  The sand was warm beneath her towel and she sank into it. The waves crashed on the shore, a lull that filled her with a delicious drowsiness. She hadn’t felt this good in a long, long time. Maybe ever, come to think of it. Somewhere above her, a seagull cried, a child laughed. The faint strains of Edith Piaf filled the air: Non, je ne regrette rien.

  Dying felt like a trip to the Riviera.

  “Hayati, wake up,” said a soft voice. Clove-scented lips brushed her ear.

  Maybe it was the Riviera. Malek had a home there, where he took Nalia several times a year—he’d always said it was one of the last bastions of civilization. Of course he’d found a way to swindle the gods into giving him his version of paradise. Her silver-tongued captor, always on the make. The world had been his personal playground—why not the afterlife, too?

  “Hayati, I’m not going to ask a second time.”

  Nalia smiled, her eyes still closed. “Or what? We’re dead—you can’t punish me, and we both know you wouldn’t, anyway.”

  She reached up an arm to push him away. Malek caught her hand and held it. There was the gentle pressure of his lips against her palm and then he let go.

  “I’m dead,” he said, his voice quiet. She could feel his hot breath on her lips. “You, however, are not. Yet, anyway. Now Wake. The. Hell. Up.”

  He pressed his lips against hers and the warmth, the ocean, Malek—all of it disappeared. She was in a roiling sea, dark as midnight, and she couldn’t find the shore.

  6

  THE SUN TUMBLED INTO THE OCEAN’S HORIZON LIKE A swirling ball of molten gold that had fallen out of a god’s hand. To the north, the Qaf Mountains towered against the darkening lavender sky, lapis lazuli blue against a backdrop of Ghan Aisouri purple, with shots of green, pink, and orange: the Arjinnan aurora. The Three Widows rose together, dancers called to the stage to perform an ancient series of steps. They glimmered above the highest peak. One moon waxed, one waned, and the third was full.

  Arjinna.

  Taz stood just beyond the Gate of the Eye, its twisting bars bent from the force of the hundreds of hands that had just pushed through it with their last remaining chiaan. An army flowed beneath its arch, a river of flesh covered in dried blood and the gray dust of the Eye. The Ifrit soldiers who had stood guard outside the gate lay slumped against its columns, dead. Their blood dripped from the dagger in Taz’s hand and the scimitar Samar held loosely in his fingers. Taz’s eyes scanned their surroundings, but there was no sign of the Ifrit. Their presence would be noted soon enough. Two thousand jinn weren’t easily camouflaged.

  “So this is Arjinna,” Samar said.

  Taz nodded, overcome with the sight of his land after so many years of exile. When he’d left, he’d been angry and in love and eager to be as far away from his overlord father as possible. Returning after so many years gave him vertigo. Taz swayed, his body trying to remember this place, to comprehend that it existed while everyone he’d once known here was long dead. His throat tightened and Taz didn’t know if he wanted to sob from joy or utter horror.

  I shouldn’t be alive was all he could think.

  Samar clapped him on the back. “Welcome home, brother.”

  Home.

  “It’s your home too, you know,” he said, with a sideways glance at the Dhoma leader. If he felt unmoored, he couldn’t imagine how the Dhoma who’d never seen Arjinna before were feeling.

  “We’ll see,” Samar said, his voice uncertain.

  They moved farther afield as the army swarmed the clearing before the gate. Most of the soldiers immediately found their element in order to replenish their chiaan; others simply stared, dumbstruck, at the Arjinnan sky. Taz looked to where a small group of his soldiers surrounded Zanari. She’d collapsed as soon as she’d led them to the gate. They wrung their hands, faces ashen. There wasn’t much time left to save her.

  “We need to contact the tavrai immediately,” Taz said.

  Samar frowned. “Easier said than done.”

  Zanari and Raif were both unconscious. As the only jinn who were tavrai and had been in the realm during the past three thousand years, they were the Brass Army’s point of entry into the tavrai’s secretive world. Though Touma was trying to revive Raif with increasingly harder slaps to the face, the revolution’s commander had been heavily sedated and continued to appear as though he were in a deep sleep.

  Taz sighed, weary. “If we can’t revive him within the next few minutes, we’re going to have to send messengers to the forest.”

  From what Taz knew of the tavrai, the chances of the scouts gaining entrance to the impenetrable forest were slim. It was more likely that his Brass soldiers would be captured by an Ifrit patrol.

  Raif needed to wake up soon.

  “It looks like this every night?” Noqril asked in disbelief as he joined them.

  Taz smiled. “Every night.”

  How many times had he dreamed of this sky, the smell of the gentle breeze that blew around them? Taz headed toward a secluded patch of land, then leaned down and pressed his lips to the soil. He’d been waiting so long to do that. He raised his arms to the sky and let the wind surge around him, his element bringing him back to life. It was nothing like Earth. The very air here was charged, the chiaan igniting his blood, sending currents of energy roaring through him. He wondered if the Master King would have been able to bend the jinn to his will had h
e been in Arjinna. Solomon may have had a ring fashioned by his god, but the jinn gods ruled here. Magic lived in this air, wild and fierce.

  Off to the east, he could make out the water temple of Lathor. Its walls of water glimmered beneath the moons, catching the wan tangerine light of the setting sun. Taz stared at the sun until the final rays disappeared, the moons and stars now jewels in the crown of the sky. Taz stood still, his body tensed, waiting. He would only feel at home if he heard the sound he’d tried more than anything else to conjure in his memory when he was stuck in the bottle. Silence settled over the land in expectation.

  There it was—faint at first and then louder: the evening prayers began. The low bass of the haunting chants thrummed against him so that Taz felt the words in his very bones. It was as if the entire realm froze in awed wonder, allowing the words to fall upon it like a soft spring rain.

  First were the Shaitan prayers in Grathali’s temple high in the Qaf Mountains, where her worshippers could best access their element. Taz’s golden eyes closed as the pajai calling the prayer finished the final lines of the evening sadr:

  Restless goddess of the skies, send us your spirit on the wind. O Grathali, fill us with the power of your ever-changing, ever-shifting grace.

  The priest’s magically amplified voice carried across Arjinna, to the ears of every Shaitan in the realm. Taz could imagine the other pajai, who sat at the four corners of his caste’s main temple, whispering the words of the evening sadr, their palms raised to the sky as the head chanter’s voice soared to the very ears of the gods. For most of his life, all Taz had wanted was to become a temple priest, to make those sacred vows that would consecrate his life to Grathali. He craved their peace. He wanted to be good. It had been his father’s worst nightmare, a son giving up his birthright as a Shaitan overlord, choosing instead the monastic life of the pajai.

  As soon as the last notes of the Shaitan prayer faded, the Djan pajai in the temple at the entrance to the Forest of Sighs began the Djan sadr, a similar prayer, but this one directed to Tirgan, god of earth. Taz listened to that one, too, its low earthy notes that crashed against one another like an avalanche. Then the Marid call to Lathor, goddess of water, the prayer swirling around him, a storm that turned to mist. Finally, the deep bass of the Ifrit call, once barely discernible over the range from Ithkar, but now piercingly loud, coming directly from the palace. Their pajai’s words burned and their edges were sharp, prayer as battle call. A temporary stillness rested in the wake of the prayers, and in that stillness, Taz reached deep inside himself for courage.

  He would need it more than ever now that his empress was dead. Taz had been quick to fall in line with Nalia, a welcome relief from the prospect of beginning his life anew, alone and adrift on Earth.

  And now?

  He turned to where Raif was finally showing signs of consciousness. Was this the future of Arjinna, a grieving boy and an army of orphans?

  Raif opened his eyes, bleary. “Whatshappening?” he mumbled, confused. “Wherearewe? WheresNalia?”

  “Just a little more of this tonic, brother,” Touma said. “This should clear your head in no time.”

  Raif gagged as the liquid slipped down his throat, then rubbed his temples, moaning. Though he was able to stand on his own, he swayed slightly and Touma stood behind him, one hand held out in case he should fall.

  “Perhaps we kept him spelled too long,” Samar said.

  Taz shook his head. “We didn’t have a choice. There’s no way we would have gotten him here otherwise.”

  Suddenly Raif went still, silent. His head snapped up, eyes clear and furious as he looked first at Samar, then Taz. Whatever Touma had given him was undoubtedly working now.

  “Where is she?” His voice was cold, deadly.

  How to break a heart without shattering it completely?

  “She’s gone, brother,” Taz said, soft. “You know that.”

  Without a word Raif turned toward the Gate of the Eye, a ruin now, and began pushing through the ranks of jinn who continued to stream through it.

  “Raif!” Taz hurried after him, grabbing hold of him just as Raif reached the pitch-dark of the world beyond, sprinting in the opposite direction of the army.

  Raif whirled around and drew back his fist in one swift movement. He stood there, poised to fight, breathing heavily.

  “I didn’t travel through hell after three thousand years in a bottle to play nursemaid to a child,” Taz growled. Tough love was the one thing he’d learned from his father. “Your sister’s dying and you have an army stranded in a field. Get out there and contact the tavrai before Calar kills every last one of us.”

  Raif’s fist fell to his side. “What do you mean, Zan’s dying?”

  “That last trip through the Eye nearly killed her after she got wounded by a ghoul—remember? She needs the best healer you can find.” Taz stepped closer to him, barely able to distinguish Raif’s features in the darkness. “I lost my rohifsa, too. I know I’m asking you to go against every instinct you have. But you can save your sister’s life. Hurry, or she’s gone as well.”

  Raif turned to the Eye, his hand reaching into the darkness. It hovered there for a moment, as though Nalia could simply reach out and grab hold of him.

  “She died for you,” Taz said. “You must live for her. Anything else would be dishonoring the one you love.”

  It was painful to see the battle Raif fought, as though he were being shredded on the inside by a vicious, clawed creature. Taz knew this was an impossible choice, that he was telling Raif to move a mountain, to run across the sea. Raif doubled over, hands on his knees, as one gut-wrenching sob tore from him. Taz turned away. No matter how much he understood what Raif was going through, this was a private grief.

  Taz runs through Solomon’s palace, keeping to the shadows as he searches the harem. He needs to tell Lokahm that they’re really going to do it: rise up against the Master King. Tonight. Taz’s worry mounts as he fails to find Lokahm in any of the usual places. All the other eunuchs have been accounted for—where is his rohifsa?

  He enters the bathing room. The air is full of fragrant steam and the sound of dripping water. The marble walls sweat.

  “Lokahm?” he whispers.

  Then he sees the body. Taz falls to his knees, his agony echoing off the walls around him.

  Raif straightened, his eyes dead. “I will never forgive you for taking away my choice back there, for letting them drug me.”

  Taz nodded. “I know.”

  Raif turned to the light of his land and walked toward it.

  Nalia, a voice whispered.

  The broken jinni remained still. The gray dust of the Eye coated her body, a shroud. Her clothing was drenched in blood, now stiff and dry. One arm was bent at a sickening angle. The corpse beside her had begun to decay, filling the air with the scent of rotting flesh.

  Nalia.

  The jinni stirred, just barely. A twitch of a finger, a fluttering eyelid.

  Rise, empress of Arjinna. Your land awaits you.

  A strangled gasp, lips parted.

  Will you desert those who love you in their time of need?

  Nalia Aisouri’Taifyeh opened her eyes.

  7

  “SHAME, SHIRIN DJAN’KHAR. SHAME.” FJIRLA DJAN’URBI’S eyes—nearly the exact shade as Raif’s—sparked with anger. “My husband did not give his life in battle so that the tavrai could kill themselves.”

  Shirin met the elder’s gaze with her own fierce, stubborn one. They had been disagreeing about the tavrai’s last stand since Shirin began planning it.

  “I can think of nothing more honorable than dying in battle,” Shirin said. “You want us to wait here like cowards, hide from the Ifrit for the rest of our lives?”

  “It takes more courage to live than to die,” Fjirla said.

  Godsdamn her, Shirin thought. It was easy for the widow of Dthar Djan’Urbi to hand out criticism as though it were a daily ration of bread—she never had to get her han
ds dirty, never had to make the tough choices.

  Shirin’s face warmed, her resolve slowly cracking. A voice spoke up from behind her—Jaqar.

  “Ever since Calar’s law against manifestation, the people have turned on us almost completely,” he said. “With the Ifrit continuing their offensive, our only advantage is the element of surprise. They’d never expect an attack of this size. This is war, grandmother. And wars are meant to be fought.”

  Fjirla shook her head, disgusted. “Ma’aj yaqifla.”

  I wash my hands of it.

  Raif’s mother walked away, toward the ludeen that had once held her whole family. Now all of them were dead, or as good as dead. I know what that feels like, Shirin wanted to say. I know your loneliness, what you carry inside you.

  A shout went up near the entrance to the encampment and Shirin turned, her heart stopping as she took in the jinni striding toward her. Joy—so much of it and so fast—rushed through Shirin, a flood that threatened to drown her.

  “Raif,” she breathed. Once again, it was the only word she could say, the only one that had ever mattered.

  Against all the conceivable odds in the universe, he was home.

  His eyes found hers, a darker shade of green than she remembered. No, not darker—dull, vacant. It was as if the fire burning inside him had gone out.

  “Raif?” she whispered.

  He looked at her for a long moment, as though he couldn’t understand her. As though he didn’t know her. It seemed as if he’d come from the depths of hell, his clothes tattered and bloodstained, every inch of him covered in what looked like ash. He sported a sizable bruise on his cheek. Gods, what had happened to him?

  Raif, Raif. Her heart beat out his name, but she hated herself for it. He was here with her, no doubt. The Ghan Aisouri. She’d done this to him. Raif was hurt—broken in some way Shirin didn’t yet understand. But he was here, and that was all that mattered now.

  There was a cry behind them. Fjirla was running toward Raif, her long white hair flowing behind her like a flag of surrender. She threw her arms around her son, sobbing. Raif stood there, unmoving, unmoved. After a few moments, he maneuvered out of her embrace.