The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy #1) - S. A. Chakraborty Page 0,172

experiment a dozen more times—successful in each instance—did she let herself relax. Then she glanced down at the table. There was one banana peel left.

She hesitated. And then she placed it over her left hand.

Her heart was beating so loudly she could hear it in her ears. But Nahri knew if she wasn’t confident enough to do this, she’d never be able to do what she planned next. She touched the tube to the peel and pressed down.

She pulled it away. Through a narrow, neat hole she could see unblemished flesh.

I can do this. She just needed to focus, to train without a hundred other worries and responsibilities dragging her down, patients she was ill-prepared to handle, intrigue that could destroy her reputation.

Greatness takes time, Kartir had told her. He was right.

Nahri needed time. She knew where to get it. And she suspected she knew the price.

She took a ragged breath, her fingers falling to brush the weight of the dagger on her hip. Dara’s dagger. She’d yet to return it—in fact, she’d yet to see him again after their disastrous encounter at the Grand Temple.

She drew it from its sheath now, tracing the hilt and pressing her palm over the place he would have gripped. For a long moment, she stared at it, willing another way to present itself.

And then she put it down.

“I’m sorry,” Nahri whispered. She rose from the table, leaving the dagger behind. Her throat tightened, but she did not allow herself to cry.

It would not do to appear vulnerable before Ghassan al Qahtani.

25

Ali

Ali dove under the canal’s choppy surface and turned in a neat somersault to kick in the opposite direction. His stitches smarted in protest, but he pushed past the pain. Just a few more laps.

He slid through the murky water with practiced ease. Ali’s mother had taught him to swim; it was the only Ayaanle tradition she insisted he learn. She’d defied the king to do it, showing up unexpectedly at the Citadel one day when he was seven, intimidating and unfamiliar in a royal veil. She’d dragged him back to the palace while he kicked and screamed, begging her not to drown him. Once in the harem, she’d pushed him in the deepest part of the canal without a word. Only when he surfaced—limbs flailing, gasping for air through his tears—had she finally spoken his name. And then she taught him to kick and dive, to put his face in the water and breathe from the side of his mouth.

Years later, Ali still remembered every minute of her careful instruction—and the price she’d paid for such defiance: they were never allowed to be alone again. But Ali kept swimming. He liked it, even if most djinn—especially his father’s people—looked upon swimming with utter revulsion. There were even clerics who preached that the Ayaanle’s enjoyment of water was a perversion, a relic of an ancient river cult in which they’d supposedly cavorted with marid in all sorts of sinful ways. Ali dismissed the sordid tales as gossip; the Ayaanle were a wealthy tribe from a secure and largely isolated homeland—they’d always provoked jealousy.

He finished another lap and then drifted in the current. The air was still and thick, the buzz of insects and the twitter of birdsong the only sounds breaking the garden’s silence. It was almost peaceful.

An ideal time to suddenly be set upon by another Tanzeem assassin. Ali tried to put the dark thought out of his mind, but it wasn’t easy. It had been four days since Hanno tried to kill him, and he’d been confined to his quarters ever since. The morning after the attack, Ali had awoken to the worst headache of his life and a furious brother demanding answers. Wracked with pain, with guilt, and his mind still in a fog, Ali had given them, bits of truth about his relationship with the Tanzeem slipping out like water through his fingers. It turned out his earlier hopes were correct: his father and brother had only known about the money.

Muntadhir was decidedly not pleased to learn the rest.

In the face of his brother’s growing rage, Ali had been trying to explain why he’d covered up Hanno’s death when Nahri had arrived to check on him. Muntadhir had bluntly declared him a traitor in Geziriyya and stormed out. He hadn’t been back.

Maybe I should go talk to him. Ali climbed out of the canal, dripping on the decorative tiles bordering it. He reached for his shirt. Try to explain