ifrit alone.”
The first man stammered a response. “W-we have orders to protect—”
“Warrior, I am a Nahid standing before you, on a shedu, with Suleiman’s seal. Trust me, your orders did not consider this. Go.”
“You should listen to her.” A quiet voice spoke up. “I wish I had.”
Nahri whirled around.
Dara.
THE AFSHIN HAD APPEARED WITHOUT A SOUND BEHIND them, perhaps even more dazzling than Nahri, on a winged horse of shifting smoke and flashing embers. He was dressed in black, scaled brass armor covering his chest and wrists and glittering in the sun. A matching helmet with a crest of vibrant feathers crowned the ebony hair tumbling down his shoulders.
His horse landed lightly on the parapet and then fell apart in a rain of cinders. Dara approached, looking every bit the beautiful Scourge of legend. He was carrying one now—the foul weapon dangling from his belt along with a sword and a dagger, his bow lying across his back. The helmet threw his face into shadow, but his emerald eyes still shone fever bright, and when Dara moved closer, it took everything Nahri had to not step back. Forget the emotional entanglements between them—she was mad to think she could take on such a man. Why had she even thought this was possible? Because the peris gave her a fancy knife? Dara looked like death itself.
And how did you kill death?
Mishmish growled, baring his teeth and curving one wing around her. Dara stopped, glancing at the soldiers. “Leave us.”
The two men vanished, tripping over each other in their haste to get out the door.
Dara stared at her, his gaze tracing Suleiman’s ring blazing from her smoldering hand to the shedu curled protectively around her.
“You look glorious,” he murmured. “The Creator has favored you.”
Nahri’s heart was racing. “Probably means you should switch sides.”
Dara gave her a broken smile. Smoke curled from his collar, melting into the dark of his hair and making him as otherworldly as ever. “Were it that easy, my love.”
“You don’t get to call me that,” she snapped, her voice shaking with anger. All thoughts of lulling Dara into a false intimacy, of throwing herself into his arms so she could shove the peri’s dagger through his heart, had fled at the enormity of what he’d done. Not even Nahri could wear a mask after flying over street after street of ruined homes and untold dead.
“Was that your handiwork back there on the other side of the city?” she demanded. “Were a thousand Geziri dead not enough? Was Qui-zi not enough? You had to add another thousand? Five thousand? TALK TO ME!” Nahri screamed, her control shattering when he didn’t respond.
Dara squeezed his eyes shut. He was trembling, his lips contorting as though he were fighting his own response.
But when he finally spoke, his voice was flat. “I am loyal to the blessed Banu Manizheh. Those were her orders.”
“‘Orders,’” Nahri repeated. “A good man would have defied those orders.”
His eyes seemed to sparkle with unshed tears, but then the wetness was gone, vanishing as swiftly as it had come. “I am not a good man. I am a weapon.”
A weapon. Dara had called himself that before, but not in this oddly muted way, his head lowered. This was not the hot-tempered Afshin she’d known, defending himself in the corridor. This was not the Afshin she wanted. Needed. Nahri almost needed Dara to shout back at her, to give some hint that there had been emotion and a heart that roiled within him.
“I went back, you know. To the cemetery where we first met.” Fighting the hitch in her throat, Nahri plunged forward. “Was any of it ever real between us? Because I don’t understand how the man I thought I knew … who I thought I—” She could not say the word as easily as he did. “How could you have done it, Dara? How could you have stood by her side as she did that to the Geziris? How could you have done the things they said you did at Qui-zi? Their women … is that what you really are?”
The name of the city he’d terrorized long ago seemed to break whatever spell of dispassion he’d been under, a hint of despair stealing into Dara’s voice. “I … no. Qui-zi, their women—that part at least was a lie. My men never—”
Nahri recoiled. That was where Dara wanted to draw a line? “Oh, please. You really think no one in your batch of murderers went off mission between slaying shafit