drowning us all because we declared it impossible.”
“Then you go give yourself to her, Baga Nahid.” Hatset glared at Jamshid. “It was Anahid who stole her lake, Nahids who forced the marid to serve them. Why should my family, my son—who has done nothing to any of them—pay the price?”
Ali stayed silent. He hadn’t spoken since denying Sobek at the river, letting the Nahid siblings fill Hatset, Wajed, and Issa in on what had transpired. He didn’t know what to add that wouldn’t shatter his mother further or make the man he called uncle look as though he hadn’t just aged a hundred years. Ali was supposed to be the reckless optimist, the idealist who never gave up.
But there was no fixing this.
So he said nothing. Instead, he stared at his stinging hands, which were cracked and dry. Ali had scrubbed his skin until it bled upon his return to the castle, scouring away every last bit of moisture, every physical reminder of the monsoon marid that he could.
Not that it mattered. Ali couldn’t undo what had happened or what he’d learned.
It’s not possible. Ali found himself repeating his mother’s desperate words. He’d come to terms with the fact that his father had been ready to turn into a butcher, a man he was required to stand against. But this, oh, God. Sobek was beyond even that. He was a creature from another age, another element. A world that had required blood and rites, which Ali’s had rightfully stomped out.
Those couldn’t be his roots.
The door to his room opened, and Nahri slipped through the sliver of light. Ali dropped his gaze to the floor; he couldn’t look at her.
“Fiza is all right. She took a nasty bump to the head, but she’ll be fine.” Nahri hesitated. “But she said she was leaving.”
Ali closed his eyes. Everything they’d knit together was falling apart.
Jamshid’s voice grew even more alarmed. “What about her ship? Her crew?”
“I didn’t ask,” Nahri said. Ali could sense from her voice that she was studying him. “But people know something’s up. Apparently as the tide’s been going out, it’s been leaving lumps of gristle and blood and rotting fish on the sand.”
Dead silence met that until Jamshid broke it. “Maybe we should all be going with Fiza.”
“We don’t have enough ships to evacuate even half the people here,” Wajed pointed out. “And by the next tide? All we’d do is put ourselves on the ocean when it smashes into the coast. If the marid meant their threat, the timing was deliberate. Not to mention the rest of the djinn and humans on the coast won’t have any warning at all.”
Ali finally spoke. “Then I need to go. There is no other way.”
His mother whirled on him. “I will lock you in a cell if you say that again.” Denial and grief warred in her voice. “You’re not going anywhere, Alu. This is preposterous. Our family hasn’t had anything to do with the marid in centuries, no matter what involvement this Sobek claims he had with our ancestors. And I won’t lose you,” she said, her hand trembling as she waved a finger in his face. “Not again.”
Guilt twisted through him. How could Ali do this to the mother who’d fought so hard to save his life? Whose husband had been murdered and whose daughter was surrounded by enemies?
Then again, how could he not?
Issa spoke. The scholar had been unusually quiet and deliberative as his mother and Jamshid argued, but Ali recognized his careful cough as the sound of a man with bad news.
“If Tiamat has demanded it, the prince may need to go. She is not just a marid. She is beyond our comprehension,” Issa explained. “Stories of her predate Suleiman and speak of her as the great ocean itself, an abyss of chaos and creation. She very well could be the mother of the marid, having birthed them millennia ago when the world was still new.”
“A collection of blasphemous legends,” Hatset scoffed. “Primitive tales from an age of ignorance.”
“Respectfully, my queen, I would not speak so blithely. It is not blasphemous to say this world is vast, that much of its history remains shrouded. There are things God set beyond our understanding. We don’t have many of her tales, but Tiamat must have inspired a great deal of fear to be remembered and spoken of the way she was, so many centuries after she was active.”
“Then where has she been?” Hatset challenged. “If she’s so powerful, why