* * *
This time, he shoved his silver circlet on his head, and when a guard let him into the sultan’s chambers, Nasir’s pulse quickened. The room looked exactly as it had the day before. Even that wretched poker stood as it had after their meeting with Haytham.
He pulled the curtain to the side and entered a smaller room, where Sultan Ghameq lounged on his majlis, legs crossed and a hand on the medallion at his neck. Nasir pulled his gaze away, and his eyes fell on another doorway, beyond which was a bed curtained in ivory, adorned with silver flowers. Nasir froze.
“What?” the sultan asked.
Nasir did not want to answer. “I haven’t been here since—”
“Since she died,” the sultan enunciated, voice hard.
Nasir released a breath and stared back at his father, waiting. Wishing. Searching. And there it was, the tiniest fissure in the gray stone of the sultan’s eyes, gone before Nasir could grasp it.
He knelt, and the moment shattered.
“You’re leaving tomorrow,” the sultan said.
“For where?”
“Sharr.”
If he expected surprise from Nasir, the sultan wouldn’t be getting it. “Vicious” was a mild descriptor for Sharr, where the very sand dealt death, yet Nasir felt an odd sense of detachment from the fact that he would soon be deep within the island. Logic told him that he had much to fear: He wouldn’t be the dangerous one in the place he was being sent. He wouldn’t be in command.
But he had stopped listening to logic when his mother died.
“The Silver Witch is sending the Demenhune Hunter to retrieve the lost Jawarat, a book that will end this drought of magic.”
So Haytham’s assumption was true. A breeze slipped past the open window, dry and dead, like all of Sultan’s Keep.
“The Hunter is a da’ira. A compass. Hunting in the Arz is hard enough, but finding one’s way back successfully for five years? There is magic at play. A da’ira is one of the rarer affinities. He has only to set his mind to an object, and he will be led to it. I doubt the man even knows what he is, or he wouldn’t so recklessly reveal himself. The two men I sent to retrieve him never returned.” The sultan stroked his beard in apparent thought. “So you will have to catch him on Sharr. Use him to find the Jawarat, then kill him. Kill anyone else the witch sends, too.”
Kill, destroy. That was what had replaced logic.
“But magic—” Nasir started.
“Did I ask for your thoughts?” the sultan asked, putting him in his place.
He was a lapdog. He couldn’t expect to learn more. He didn’t deserve more.
But how? he wanted to know. How could the Demenhune Hunter have magic when there was none? When it was clear that Ghameq’s fire summoning was done through the long-banished dum sihr, magic no one in Demenhur—an ethical caliphate—would, or even could, touch?
It meant that everything about magic disappearing was more than black-and-white.
“The witch has wronged me on more than one count,” the sultan continued. “Do not let the book fall into her hands. If my assumptions are wrong, and the Hunter is no more than a man with a goal, move on.”
Move on. Innocent wording for “kill and be done with it.”
“Understood?”
Nasir dipped his head. Whether he wanted to do this or not was unimportant.
“Why me? Why not a contingent?” Nasir asked. He might be the only one who wordlessly did the sultan’s bidding, but how was Nasir expected to succeed on an island not even the Sisters had returned from?
“A more strategic option, but we are dealing with a fickle witch, not a mortal rival.”
Fickle, indeed.
Nasir thought of the ivory curtains to his left, in that room he doubted even the sultan slept within anymore. The words rushed from his mouth before he could stop them. “And if I don’t?”