it at Ali’s head. The prince ducked, and Nahri moved between them again, deciding today’s effort at uniting her allies was over.
“Ali, go. I’ve got this.”
He made a strangled sound of assent, his eyes still wide as he reached for the door, backing out of the cell as if he’d stumbled upon a cobra.
The moment Ali was gone, the rage left Jamshid’s face, and he collapsed, falling into a crouch on the dirt floor.
“I’m sorry,” he choked out. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that in front of you. But when you both walked in, I thought …” He sucked for air. “I thought maybe there was a chance.” He fell forward into his hands, his shoulders trembling as he sobbed. “Creator, Muntadhir, how could you? How could you?”
Nahri watched him, frozen in shock. This grieving man who looked like he hadn’t bothered even combing his fingers through his overgrown hair in days wasn’t the Jamshid she knew, the quietly dutiful nobleman whose words and behavior had always been so precise. He suddenly felt like a stranger—like someone who’d just hurt her actual friend—and for a moment Nahri was terribly uncertain.
He’s not a stranger. He’s your brother. But “brother” was a foreign term to Nahri—she didn’t know what that kind of relationship was supposed to look like. The siblings she’d spent the most time with were the Qahtanis—and if she’d occasionally envied the protective closeness between Zaynab and her brothers, the rest of the royal family’s explosive drama had made her feel better about supposedly being an orphan.
Try, just try. Nahri knelt at his side, laying a hand on his shoulder. “You don’t need to apologize to me, Jamshid. Just breathe.”
“I can’t.” He wiped his eyes. “Muntadhir … he used to tell me how terrified he was as a kid of Manizheh. Darayavahoush despised him. What kind of end was that for him?”
“A brave one. He made me give him Dara’s bow so he could shoot him with it.” Nahri hesitated, searching for anything that might give Jamshid some comfort. “A quick one. He took a mortal blow during the battle. He knew he wasn’t going to survive and feared he would only slow us down.” That was a half-truth, but now decidedly did not seem the time for the details of Muntadhir’s death.
Jamshid took a ragged breath and then straightened up. Nahri had to fight not to flinch. This close, his resemblance to Manizheh was unmistakable, the ghost of their mother’s face in her brother’s elegant winged brows and long-lashed eyes.
The shame that engulfed his expression, however, was all Jamshid. “What I said to Alizayd about Muntadhir and me … I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that in front of you. We never—I mean, after you married …”
Nahri took his hand. “Again, you don’t have to apologize. I already knew, and things were never going to be like that between him and me. But you should know—before we escaped, Muntadhir asked me to tell you that he loved you. And that he was sorry he hadn’t stood up for you sooner.”
Jamshid squeezed his eyes shut. “I used to tell him he was selfish. Creator, I wish he’d stayed that way in the end and gotten himself out. But Daevabad always came first,” he said bitterly.
A mantra you might be adopting soon, Baga Nahid. Nahri hugged her knees. “What have Hatset and Wajed told you?”
“I know the city fell and magic vanished. Scouts caught up with us while we were still in Am Gezira, fleeing on stolen horses like demons were after them. They said Banu Manizheh and the Afshin were back from the dead, and that my father helped them kill the king and all the Geziris in the palace.”
Nahri’s heart beat fast. “So they didn’t say anything about … you?”
“About me? No. I mean, they’ve been threatening me and making pretty damn clear what they think about Daevas, but otherwise they seem content to let me go mad alone down here.” Jamshid drew back, narrowing his eyes. “Why? You look worried. Is there something else?”
You might say that. “Jamshid,” Nahri began, “after the Navasatem attack, you wanted to speak to me. Your wounds were gone, you spoke to Razu in an extinct dialect of Tukharistani …”
He rubbed his head. “That seems like a thousand years ago,” he confessed. “I don’t know, maybe the Nahid magic you summoned to stop the Rumi fire finally healed me.”
“It wasn’t just me summoning Nahid magic.” When Jamshid only gave her a more