You need to take the seal from me. Tonight.”
Nahri was already shaking her head. “I can’t. I won’t. It will kill you.”
“Then you can dump my body on a boat and float it out into her ocean. They’re the ones who like to bend the rules,” he said, unable to check the bitterness in his voice. “Let them have a taste of their own medicine.”
Nahri was staring at him with a look of utter hurt, the black hair he’d mussed hanging in waves around her shoulders. “How can you ask me that? Now?” she added, angry heat building in her voice as she gestured to their still very inappropriate positions. She shoved away from him, shooting up from the bed and leaving cold the space her body had occupied. “Creator, it’s like you’re in a competition with yourself over picking the worst time to say something.”
Ali pushed up, reaching for her hands. Any reserve of self-denial he’d built up had been ripped away with their first kiss; he didn’t want to ever stop touching her.
“Because I don’t know what else to do! I don’t want to die, Nahri, I don’t,” he confessed in a rush, cradling her hands in his. “I want to live and go back to Daevabad. But I’ll be damned if some marid uses me to take the rest of you down. At least with you”—Ali swallowed, his mouth going dry—“there’s a chance I might survive. I saw the way you operated on that boy.”
“He wasn’t you!” Nahri yanked her hands from his. “I’m not a surgeon, Ali, I’m a Nahid. I cut into people only when I have magic to heal them!”
Forgive me, please forgive me. “Then I’m going to ask Jamshid.” Nahri spun on him and Ali pressed on. “I’ll tell him everything about the seal. You know he’ll do it. But he’s probably not experienced enough to keep me alive.”
Nahri glared at him, looking freshly betrayed. “Would you do it?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Could you do it to me if the situation were reversed? Or did your father read you correctly that night?” Nahri lifted her chin. “Look me in the eye, Alizayd, and tell me the truth. You promised no more lies. If saving Daevabad had meant likely killing me, would you have done it? Could you take a blade to my heart and hope for the best?”
Ali stared back at her, shame slicing through him.
But he had promised not to lie. “No.”
“Then how can you ask it of me?”
“Because you’re better than me,” he said. “Because if you wanted it, you would be a good queen. Because you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met, and you’re clever.” Ali inhaled. “And because if you can look at this and see another way, I’ll trust you, I will. But if not, then, Nahri, I need you to be the Banu Nahida. Because in a couple of hours, Daevabad’s mortal enemy is going to have me, and Anahid’s ring can’t be in my heart when she does.”
Nahri stared at him, a dozen emotions passing across her face. Her black eyes glimmered, wet with the tears she so rarely let fall.
Ali wanted to throw himself at her feet. To beg her to save him and beg for forgiveness. To tell her he loved her and tell her to run back to Cairo and be free of yet another responsibility.
And then the emotions left her face, one by one, like a series of candles flickering out, leaving nothing to read, nothing to seize. The face of the woman who had stared down his father and deceived her mother. The Banu Nahida he’d watched pray at the seaside and pick herself up once more.
“I will need to get my tools.” Her voice had chilled. “And go speak to Jamshid—I’ll need his assistance.” Nahri stepped away, her entire demeanor changed, and Ali felt a wall crash down between them. “Prepare yourself.”
33
NAHRI
Nahri tapped on the sketch before her. “Go through it again.”
Across from her, Jamshid was ashen. He’d been getting paler since Nahri ordered him to her room, briskly told him the whole truth of Suleiman’s seal, and then unrolled Yaqub’s tools, announcing he was about to take part in some unplanned chest surgery.
“Again?” he repeated faintly. “We’ve talked it out ten times.”
“Were it possible, I’d have us practice twenty times. Again.”
“All right,” Jamshid muttered, visibly nervous. “We have Ali drop the seal while we’re touching him, and then I manage his pain while you work.”
“How?”
“By dulling the nerves like you showed