Consciousness tickled at Nahri, the rich smell of mud and sweet birdsong pulling her from darkness.
The pain came next, her back and shoulders aching. Her head. Her arms. Everything, really.
And that damned sun. Too bright. Brighter than any sun in Daevabad had any right being. Nahri shaded her eyes with one hand, blinking as she tried to sit up.
Her other hand sank into mud. What in God’s name … Nahri looked around as sunspots cleared from her eyes. She was sitting in some sort of flooded marsh, waist deep in cloudy water. Just behind her was a grove of tall, bristling palm trees, scrubby greenery growing unchecked over a crumbling mud-brick wall.
Ahead was a wide river, its current languid as it stretched to flow across its floodplains. A narrow emerald band of greenery bordered the opposite bank, beyond which was desert, gleaming golden in the bright sun.
Nahri stared at the river in utter incomprehension. She must have taken a blow to the head. Because she would swear that it looked like …
“No!” A familiar voice broke the still air, ending in a wail. “No!”
Ali. Nahri scrambled to her feet, aching all over. What was wrong with her healing abilities? The mud sucked at her legs, and she clambered past the marsh to firmer land. She caught sight of more ruined structures between the trees: a cracked pigeon coop and the bare brick outlines of what might have once been small homes.
She pushed through a cluster of palm fronds. Just ahead was what looked like a village mosque—one long abandoned. Its minaret was broken, its dome cracked open to the sky.
Relief coursed through her—Ali was inside, his back to her as he peered past the top of the minaret. She staggered forward, her limbs protesting every jolt and her skin crawling. Nahri didn’t know where they were—it certainly didn’t look like Daevabad—but she felt as though she’d been here before.
She climbed up the ruined minaret’s stone steps. Thoroughly out of breath by the time she reached the top, Nahri stumbled forward, reaching for his shoulder as she wheezed out his name. “Ali.”
He was sobbing when he spun on her.
Suleiman’s seal burned bright on his temple.
The events of the night before came together too fast, too horrible, and then Ali was lunging at her, putting his hands on her shoulders like he never had before.
“You have to take us back!” he begged. Closer now, Nahri could see that his face was feverish, his entire body twitching. “Nahri, please! They have my sister! They have every—ah,” His voice broke as he clutched at his heart, gasping for air.
“Ali!”
He shoved himself away from her. “I can’t control this.” The smoky mark of the seal shimmered on his skin. “You should never have given me that ring! You should never have taken us away!”
“I haven’t taken us anywhere!”
Ali raised a shaking hand. “Then why are we here?”
Nahri glanced where he was pointing. She stood.
The sight before her on the not-so-distant horizon was immediately familiar. The ancient stone mosques and towering minarets. The forts and palaces of long-dead sultans and generals, dynasties lost to time. The countless blocks of multistoried buildings, all an earthy warm brown, a human warm brown, that Nahri knew rose over twisting, busy streets of jostling shopkeepers, gossiping coffee drinkers, and racing children. Over apothecaries.
Tears sprang to her eyes. It’s not possible. Her gaze immediately darted from the city she’d have known anywhere to the swollen river at its banks. The river for which she’d been jokingly named by fishermen who’d plucked her out of it as a child.
On the opposite shore, standing unmoving and eternal against the dawn sky, were the three Pyramids of Giza.
The words came to her in Arabic first, of course. “Ya masr,” she whispered softly as the Egyptian sun warmed her cheeks, the scent of the Nile’s silt on her skin. “I’m home.”