Nahri glared at the guards. “I’m excellent with faces,” she warned. “Be assured I won’t forget yours.”
One of the men snickered. “Good luck getting out of those binds.”
Fuming, Nahri returned to pacing the low stone parapet. She and a still unconscious Kaveh e-Pramukh had been dragged back to the palace and deposited at a pavilion high upon the walls overlooking the lake to await the king. It was the same place she had once stargazed with Ali, though there was no hint of the fine furnishings and sumptuous feast she remembered. Instead they were alone with four Geziri warriors bristling with weapons, warriors whose eyes had yet to leave her.
She stopped at the edge, staring over the distant, deadly water as she tried to shift the iron cuffs lower, wincing at the burn. But far worse than the pain was her feeling of helplessness. She and Kaveh had been here for what felt like hours, Nahri watching the sky grow an inky black while Jamshid was taken God only knew where.
The still lake caught her eye. Had it not been cursed, she might have been tempted to jump for her freedom. It was a long fall that would likely break a bone or two, but she was a Nahid. She could always heal.
Except that it is cursed and will tear you into a thousand pieces. Frustrated, Nahri turned back, fighting the urge to burn something.
The look on her face must have been obvious. “Watch yourself, fire worshipper,” one of the guards warned. “Believe me when I say none of us have patience for the Scourge’s whore.”
Nahri straightened up like a shot. “Call me that again and I’ll see you dead before dawn.”
He instantly moved forward, his hand dropping to the hilt of his zulfiqar before one of his fellows hissed a warning in Geziriyya, pulling him back.
“Banu Nahida?” Kaveh’s voice was weak from where he lay slumped against the wall.
Forgetting the Geziri guard, Nahri hurried to the grand wazir’s side. His eyes had blinked open, and he looked dazed. Unable to heal him, Nahri had settled for ripping a strip of cloth from his shirt and binding it around his head. Blood had soaked through the cloth in black splotches.
“Are you okay?” she asked urgently.
He touched his head and winced. “I … I think so.” He sat up slowly. “What … where is Jamshid?”
“I don’t know,” Nahri confessed. “Wajed took him from the midan, and we’ve been up here since then.”
Kaveh drew up, alarm flashing across his face. “What time is it?”
“Midnight, perhaps? Why?” she asked when alarm flashed across his eyes.
“Midnight?” he whispered. “Creator, no. I have to find him.” He grabbed her shoulder with his bound hands, and Nahri jumped at the breach in etiquette. “I need you to think, Nahri. Did they say anything about where they might be taking Jamshid? Anything at all?” His face looked gaunt in the dim light. “It wasn’t the Citadel, was it?”
She jerked free. “I don’t know. And you’re not the only one with questions. Why did you lie about Muntadhir being hurt?”
Kaveh looked only slightly remorseful. “Because I needed you and Jamshid somewhere safe tonight. Lady Nisreen … she was supposed to stay with the two of you in the infirmary, but …” Sorrow creased his features. “The Grand Temple seemed the next safest option.”
“Are you worried the shafit are planning another attack?”
Kaveh shook his head. He was toying with a ring on his hand, a gold band crowned with what appeared to be a copper-striped agate. “No, Banu Nahri. Not the shafit.”
The door opened just then, the guards bowing their heads as Ghassan entered the pavilion. Nahri drew back, dread coursing through her. There was open rage in his eyes—an expression that contrasted sharply with the weary slump of his shoulders, and one that sent a shiver down her spine. Ghassan al Qahtani was not a man who easily betrayed his emotions.
He drew to a stop, looking coldly down at the Daevas on the ground. “Leave us,” he snapped to the guards.
The soldiers were gone the next moment, closing the door behind them.
Nahri struggled to her feet. “What do you want?” she demanded. “How dare you drag us here when our people are wounded and grieving because of a lapse in your security?”
Ghassan tossed a scroll at her feet. “Are you responsible for this?” he asked.
Nahri picked it up. She recognized Ali’s handwriting immediately. She read it … and then she read it again, convinced she’d misunderstood. The well-thought-out plans to spearhead an investigation into today’s attacks and ensure security for the city until passions had died down.
The calm assurances that he would return his father’s army when he was convinced there would be no retribution against the shafit.
Nahri stared at the words, willing them to rearrange. You fool. You could have gone to Am Gezira. You could have found some doting wife and lived a peaceful life.
“What?” Kaveh prompted, sounding worried. “What is it?”
Nahri dropped the scroll. “Ali took the Citadel.”
Kaveh gasped. “He did what?”
Ghassan cut in. “The question remains, Banu Nahida. Are you and my son working together?”
“No,” she said acidly. “Believe it or not, I did not have much time today between shrouding the dead and treating burned children to participate in a coup.”
“Is that why you dragged us here?” Kaveh demanded, glaring at the king. “You’ve lost control of your fanatical son—a danger you should have dealt with years ago—and you’re trying to pin the blame on us?”
Ghassan’s eyes lit with challenge. “Oh, has my simpering grand wazir finally grown a spine? A rather rich accusation, Kaveh, considering the part you played in inflaming people’s passions.” His face grew stormy. “Did you think I wouldn’t follow up on Ali’s suspicions about the attack on the shafit camp? Did you think you could light a spark like that in this city—my city—and not have it explode in your face?”
Nahri’s stomach dropped. It was one thing to hear the accusation from Ali—he could be a little overwrought—but the certainty in Ghassan’s voice and the flush in Kaveh’s cheeks confirmed what her heart had wanted to deny. She might not have trusted the grand wazir, but he was a fellow Daeva, a friend of Nisreen’s, and Jamshid’s father.
“You faked the attack on the Daeva couple,” she whispered. “Didn’t you?”
Kaveh’s face was bright red. “You and Jamshid needed to see the truth about the shafit, and it would have happened sooner or later on its own—it has today! How can you possibly defend the dirt-bloods after what they did to the procession? They have no business being anywhere near your ancestors’ hospital; they have no place in our world at all!”
Nahri jerked back like she’d been slapped.
But Kaveh wasn’t done. He glared at Ghassan. “Nor do you. Daevabad has not seen a day of peace since Zaydi al Qahtani bathed it in Daeva blood, and you are as treacherous as your barbarian forefather.” Emotion ripped through his voice. “I almost believed it, you know. Your act. The king who wished to unite our tribes.” Nahri watched as angry tears filled his eyes. “It was a lie. Twenty years I served you; my son took half a dozen arrows to save yours, and you used his life to threaten me.” He spat at Ghassan’s feet. “Do not pretend you care for anyone but your own, you filthy sand fly.”
Nahri instinctively took a step back. No one spoke to Ghassan like that. He did not brook the slightest dissent, let alone open insults from an upstart Daeva wazir.
That Ghassan smiled instead of opening Kaveh’s throat was petrifying.
“You’ve wanted to say that for a long time, haven’t you?” the king drawled. “Look at you, all full of spite and indignation … as if I have not accommodated your tribe’s frivolous grievances again and again. As if I wasn’t the one to lift you and your son out of your sad lives as petty provincial nobles.” He crossed his arms. “Let me return the favor, Kaveh, for there is something I have also long wanted to tell you.”
“Enough of this,” Nahri interrupted. Jamshid was missing and Ali was in open revolt; she wasn’t wasting time over whatever history Ghassan and Kaveh shared. “What do you want, Ghassan? And where is Jamshid?”
“Jamshid …” Ghassan’s eyes glittered. “Now, oddly enough, there is a Daeva I like. Certainly more loyal than either of you, though I can’t imagine from whom he inherited such wisdom. It clearly doesn’t run in his family.”
At her side, Kaveh tensed and Nahri frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Ghassan paced closer, reminding her uncomfortably of a hawk stalking something small and fragile. “Did it never strike you as strange how confident I was of your identity, Banu Nahri? So immediately confident?”
“You told me I resemble Manizheh,” Nahri said slowly.
The king clucked his tongue. “But enough that I’d make a scene in court having only spotted you from a distance?” He glanced at Kaveh. “What do you think, Grand Wazir? It seems you knew Manizheh very well. Does our Nahri resemble her strongly?”
Kaveh looked like he was having a hard time breathing, let alone answering. His hands were clenched into tight fists, his knuckles pale and bloodless. “Yes,” he whispered.
Ghassan’s eyes flashed in triumph. “Oh, come now, you can lie better than that. Not that it matters. She has something else. Something her mother had, something her uncle had. Not that either of them was aware of it. Bit embarrassing actually.” He tapped the black mark on his temple, Suleiman’s eight-pointed star. “You think you own a thing, and well …”
A frisson of danger tingled across her skin. Hating that she was playing into his game but seeing no way out, she pressed. “Why don’t you try speaking straight for once?”
“Suleiman’s seal, child. You bear a shadow of his mark … right here.” Ghassan reached out to touch the side of her face, and Nahri jerked away. “To me, it is clear as day.” The king turned back to Kaveh, his gray eyes simmering with triumph and something else, something vicious and vindictive. “They all bear it, Grand Wazir. Every single person with Nahid blood. Manizheh. Rustam. Nahri.” He paused, seeming to savor the moment. “Your Jamshid.”
Kaveh shot to his feet.
“Sit back down,” Ghassan snapped. The cruel humor was gone from his voice in an instant, the merciless cold of a despot replacing it. “Or the only place Jamshid—your Baga Nahid—will end up is in a shroud.”
Nahri reeled, her hand going to her mouth. “Jamshid is a Nahid?” Bewildered and shocked, she struggled for words. “But he has no …”
Abilities. The word died on her tongue. Jamshid’s desperate questions about the Rumi fire that had burned him and his abruptly healed wounds. The ancient Tukharistani he’d spoken to Razu … and the raw burst of power Nahri had felt when he clutched her hand and she summoned a sandstorm.
Jamshid was a Nahid. Nahri’s eyes were suddenly wet. Jamshid was family.
And there was no way he knew it; he wasn’t that good of a liar. She whirled on Kaveh. He’d dropped back to the ground at Ghassan’s command but looked no less fierce. “You hid it from him,” she accused. “How could you?”
Kaveh was shaking now, rocking back and forth. “I had to protect him from Ghassan. It was the only way.”
The king scoffed. “Fine job you did of that; I knew that boy was a Nahid the moment you brought him to my court. The rest was rather easy to figure out.” Hostility leached into his voice. “The summer of his birth was when Saffiyeh died. The summer Manizheh ignored my pleas to return to Daevabad early to save her queen.”
“Saffiyeh was never her queen,” Kaveh shot back. “And Manizheh got barely a week with her own child before she was forced to return to you once again.”
“It was clearly enough time for her to do something to conceal Jamshid’s abilities, wasn’t it?” Malice twisted Ghassan’s face. “She always considered herself so clever … and yet her son might have used those abilities when Darayavahoush turned on him. An irony in that: the last Baga Nahid nearly killed by his Afshin, all while trying to save a Qahtani.”
Nahri looked away, heartsick. Dara probably would have thrown himself on his own sword if he’d known that truth. She leaned against the parapet, her legs suddenly weak. Ghassan and Kaveh were still arguing, and Nahri knew she should be paying attention, but suddenly all she wanted to do was escape this awful palace and find her brother.
“You should be grateful,” Ghassan was saying. “I gave the two of you a life here. Wealthy, respected, powerful …”
“As long as we danced to your tune,” Kaveh snapped. “Forget our desires, our ambitions; everything is in thrall to Ghassan al Qahtani’s grand plans.” His voice was cruel. “And you wonder why Manizheh refused you.”
“I suspect the reason she refused me—however disappointing—sits in front of me now.” Ghassan was eying Kaveh dismissively, but there was a resentment in his gray gaze that he couldn’t entirely mask. “Manizheh clearly had a peculiar … taste.”
Nahri’s patience abruptly vanished. “Oh, get over yourselves,” she hissed. “I’m not standing here listening to some old men bicker about a long-lost love. Where is my brother?”
Ghassan’s expression darkened, but he answered. “Somewhere secure. Where he’ll be staying, with people I trust, until the city is calm again.”
“Until you beat us back into obedience, you mean,” Nahri said bitterly. “I’ve been down this path with you before. Why don’t you just tell us what you want?”
Ghassan shook his head. “Direct as always, Banu Nahri … But I know your people. Right now, I imagine a good number of Daevas are hungry for shafit blood, and it’s clear the shafit feel similarly. So let us settle things down.” He turned to Kaveh. “You’ll be taking the blame. You will confess to faking the camp assault and arming the shafit who attacked your procession.”
“I had nothing to do with what happened to the procession,” Kaveh said heatedly. “I would never!”
“I don’t care,” Ghassan said flatly. “You will take responsibility. The ruined grand wazir, driven to destruction by his own twisted fanaticism. You will confess to plotting against your Banu Nahida, and after unburdening yourself so, Kaveh …” He nodded coolly toward the wall. “You will take your own life.”
Kaveh’s eyes went wide, and Nahri swiftly stepped forward. “I’m not going to let you—”
“I am not done.” Something different, more complicated to read, flickered across Ghassan’s face. “For your part, Banu Nahida, I am going to need you to send a letter to my youngest and inform him that you have been arrested and charged with being his co-conspirator in an attempted coup. And that you will be executed tomorrow at dawn should he not surrender.”
Nahri felt the blood drain from her face. “What?”
Ghassan waved her off. “Believe it or not, I would rather not involve you, but I know my son. Ali might be happy to martyr himself, but I have no doubt he will no sooner see that letter in your handwriting than throw himself at my feet.”
“And then?” she pressed. “What do you intend to do with him?”
The cold humor vanished from Ghassan’s face. “He will be the one executed for treason.”
No. Nahri exhaled, pressing her hands into fists. “I’m not going to help you trap him,” she replied. “I’m glad he’s taken the Citadel. I hope he takes the palace next!”
“He’s not going to be able to take it by dawn,” Ghassan said evenly. “And you’ll not only write that letter, I’ll have you dragged to the midan so you can weep for him to save you if necessary. Or I’ll kill your brother.”
Nahri recoiled. “You wouldn’t.” Her voice was shaking. “You wouldn’t do that to Muntadhir.”
Ghassan’s brows lifted in faint surprise. “Not one to miss much, are you? Though, yes, Banu Nahida, I would. Indeed, Muntadhir would be wise to learn to keep his heart closer. He risks himself with such affections in this world.”
“What would you even know about affection?” Kaveh cut in, his eyes wild. “You’re a monster. You and your father used Manizheh’s love for her brother to control her and now you plan to do the same to her daughter?” Kaveh glared at Ghassan. “How could you ever claim to care for her?”
Ghassan rolled his eyes. “Save me the false pieties, Kaveh. You’ve too much blood on your hands.”
But Kaveh’s words were the reminder that Nahri needed.
She closed her eyes. She’d tried so hard to wall herself off from the king, to mask her vulnerabilities and make sure there was no chink in the armor she drew around herself. He already had the fate of her tribe in one fist, had used the threat of violence against them to force her into obedience more than once for years.
But her efforts hadn’t mattered. Because he had always had something so much closer. Precious. He’d built a chink into her armor from the start, and Nahri had never even known it was there.
She tried to think. If Ali had taken the Citadel, this was no mere palace revolt; the bulk of the Royal Guard was now out of Ghassan’s hands. She remembered the haunting waves of Geziriyya drifting over the air, recalling what she knew of Daevabad’s neighborhoods. Ali could already be in control of the Geziri Quarter. The shafit district.
She opened her eyes. “You think he can do it, don’t you?” she asked Ghassan. “You think Ali can beat you.”
The king’s eyes narrowed. “You’re very out of your depth, Banu Nahida.”
Nahri smiled; she felt sick. “I’m not. I used to be very good at this, you know. Reading a mark, spotting weaknesses. You and I actually have that in common.” Her throat hitched. “And Jamshid … I bet you savored that secret.” She inclined her head toward Kaveh. “I bet you delighted in it every time you saw him, contemplating the ways you could revenge yourself on the man who had the love of the woman you wanted. You wouldn’t give that up easily.”
Ghassan drew up. The king’s face was calm, but Nahri didn’t miss the heat in his voice. “None of this posturing will get your brother back any sooner.”
I’m sorry, Jamshid. I’m so sorry. Nahri exhaled, fighting the deep, awful sadness wrapping her heart. “I won’t help you.”
Ghassan’s eyes flashed. “I beg your pardon?”
“I won’t help you,” she repeated, hating herself. “I won’t let you use my brother against me. Not for any reason.”
Ghassan abruptly stepped closer. “If you don’t do this, Banu Nahida, I’m going to kill him. I’m going to do it slowly and I will make you watch. So you may as well do us all the favor of simply obeying now.”
Kaveh scrambled up, alarm twisting his expression. “Banu Nahri—”
Ghassan backhanded him across the face. The king was obviously stronger than he looked; the blow sent Kaveh sprawling to the floor, a burst of blood on his mouth.
Nahri gasped. But the casual, brutal violence only made her more determined. Ghassan was a monster. But he was a desperate one, and Nahri trembled to think what he would do to Daevabad in the wake of a failed coup.
Which meant she’d have to do all she could to make sure it didn’t fail. “You’re wasting your time, Ghassan. I’m not going to break. This city beats in my family’s blood. In my blood.” Her voice shook slightly. “In my brother’s blood. And if the last Nahids need to die to save it …” She stilled her trembling, lifting her chin in defiance. “Then we’ll have served our people well.”
Ghassan stared at her for a very long moment. His expression wasn’t inscrutable now, and he didn’t bother arguing with her. Nahri had read her mark.
And she knew he was about to destroy her for it.
He stepped back. “I’m going to tell Jamshid who he really is,” he said. “Then I’m going to tell him how his sister, having grown tired of sleeping with the man he loves, betrayed them both to save a man he hates.” The words were crude—the last attempt of an angry old man who’d traded decency for a throne that was about to be wrenched away by his own blood. “Then I will finish the job your Afshin started and have your brother scourged to death.”
“No, Ghassan, wait!” Kaveh threw himself before the king. “She didn’t mean it. She’ll write the letter—ah!” He cried out as Ghassan kicked him in the face, stepping around his body and reaching for the door.
With a wail, Kaveh smashed his hand against the stone. Nahri heard a sharp crack, his ring shattering.
A strange coppery haze burst from the broken gem.
In the time it took Nahri to draw a quick breath, the vapor had bloomed to engulf the grand wazir.
“Kaveh, what is that?” she asked sharply as copper tendrils darted out like a dancer’s hand, reaching, searching. There was something familiar about the movement, about the metallic shimmer.
The king briefly glanced back, looking more annoyed than anything.
The vapor rushed at the copper relic bolted through his ear.
It instantly melted, and Ghassan cried out, clasping his head as the liquid metal surged into his ear. Suleiman’s seal flashed on his cheek, and Nahri swooned, her magic gone.
But it didn’t last. The king’s eyes went wide and still as a haze of copper veiled their gray depths.
Then Ghassan al Qahtani fell dead at her feet.
Her abilities slammed back into her. Nahri covered her mouth with a startled cry, staring in shock as copper-flecked black blood poured from the king’s ears, mouth, and nose.
“By the Most High, Kaveh,” she whispered. “What have you done?”
“What had to be done.” Kaveh was already crossing to Ghassan’s body, stepping into the pool of spreading blood without hesitation. He retrieved the king’s khanjar, quickly using it to slice through the binds on his wrists. “We don’t have much time,” he warned. “We need to find Jamshid and secure Muntadhir.”
Nahri stared at him. Had he lost his mind? Ghassan’s guards were just outside the door. They weren’t getting away, let alone finding Jamshid and “securing” Muntadhir, whatever that meant. “Kaveh, I think—”
“I do not care what you think.” The barely checked hostility in his voice shocked her. “Respectfully …” It sounded like he was struggling not to shout. “You’re not the one making decisions tonight. A thing that is clearly for the best.” He glanced at her, his eyes simmering with anger. “You will answer for the choice you just made. Not tonight. Not to me … but you will answer.”
A fly buzzed past her ear. Nahri barely noticed; she was speechless. Then another swept past her face, brushing her cheek.
Kaveh turned to look at the sky. More flies were coming, a swarm from the direction of the lake.
Grim determination swept his features. “It is time.”
There was an angry shout from beyond the closed door.
Nahri instantly recognized the voice. “Muntadhir!” She lunged for the door. His father might be lying in a pool of blood on the ground, but right now Nahri trusted her estranged husband far more than the mad wazir who’d orchestrated a riot and assassinated a king.
“Nahri?” Muntadhir’s voice was muffled through the door, but from his tone, he was clearly arguing with the guards on the other side.
Kaveh shoved himself between Nahri and the door. “Muntadhir cannot come in, Banu Nahri. He cannot be exposed to this.”
“Exposed to what?” she cried. “The fact that you just murdered his father?”
But as she tried to wrestle past him, she suddenly spotted what Kaveh meant.
A coppery haze was reforming above the dead king. Glittering particles, like minuscule metal stars, swirled up from Ghassan’s pooling blood, forming a cloud twice the size of the one that had escaped Kaveh’s shattered ring.
Nahri instantly backed away, but the vapor flowed harmlessly past her and Kaveh, separating and undulating around her waist like a wave. The flies zipped over them all, dozens now.
Muntadhir broke down the door.
“I don’t care what he said!” he shouted, trying to shove past a pair of guards. “She’s my damned wife and …” Muntadhir recoiled, his eyes locking on his father’s bloody body. “Abba?”
The guards reacted more swiftly. “My king!” Two flew to Ghassan, the other two going for Nahri and Kaveh. Muntadhir didn’t move from the door frame, falling heavily against it as if it was all that was keeping him on his feet.
The flies suddenly flickered into flashes of fire, dissolving into a rain of ash.
“Muntadhir, I didn’t do it!” Nahri cried as one of the guards grabbed her. “I swear! I had nothing to do with this!”
A roar broke the air, a scream like the crash of ocean waves and the bellow of a crocodile. It sounded dully distant, but it set every hair on her body on end.
Nahri had heard that roar before.
The vapor struck again.
The guards who’d gone to Ghassan screamed, clutching their heads. The soldier who’d seized her dropped her arm and backed away with a cry, but he wasn’t fast enough. His relic dashed into his ear with vindictive speed. He shrieked in pain, clawing at his face.
“No.” Kaveh’s horrified whisper cut through the wails. His gaze locked on Muntadhir, still framed against the door. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen!”
Muntadhir’s eyes went bright with fear.
Nahri didn’t hesitate. She shot to her feet, running across the pavilion as the coppery cloud, now tripled in size, flew at her husband.
“Banu Nahida, wait!” Kaveh cried. “You don’t—”
She didn’t hear what else he had to say. The vapor just behind her, Nahri threw herself at Muntadhir.