pain vanished as did his exhaustion, a cruel reminder once again that this was what Dara truly was now. And considering how his own people had just fled from him, perhaps he should keep this visage. He certainly felt like a monster.
Dara strode back to his conjured shedu, his warm breath coming in a steamy hush. His boots crunched on the ground. He frowned at the sound and then glanced down.
Fine crystals were racing across the churned earth.
Ice. Dara suddenly realized everything had gone quiet. Cold. The stillness to the chill air was utterly unnatural, as though the wind itself were holding its breath.
Dread rising in his core, Dara moved fast, closing the distance between himself and his winged creation. He reached for its mane.
The wind exhaled.
A blast of frigid air hit him so hard that Dara stumbled back from the shedu, falling to the frozen earth. He covered his head as the remains of the travelers’ camp went hurtling by, flung across the landscape by the howling wind. The shedu disintegrated in a puff of smoke that was gone on the next breeze, the air churning so violently Dara felt as though an invisible assailant were pummeling him.
The storm vanished nearly as soon as it came, leaving behind barely a breeze. The entire landscape had been iced over, glittering in the dying sun.
Dara was shaking, breathing fast. What in Suleiman’s eye had just happened?
But the answer was already coming to him on the stinging breeze. Not fire nor water nor earth.
Air.
The peris.
He shivered again. But of course—this was where Khayzur had been slaughtered by his own people, doomed for the “crime” of saving Dara’s and Nahri’s lives. Because it hadn’t just been the marid who’d toyed with Dara. No, it had been Qahtanis and Nahids, marid and peris.
Anger roiled through him. The accusations he hadn’t been able to shout at Manizheh, Khayzur’s gentle last words, and Nahri’s betrayed eyes. Dara was so sick of despairing over his fate, of guilt eating him alive. Now he was just furious. Furious at being used, at letting himself be used again and again.
These creatures did not get to make him feel worse.
“Where were you when my people were slaughtered?” he howled into the wind. “I thought the mighty peris did not interfere, did not care what the lowly daevas did to each other?” He threw out his fists, fire bursting from his hands. “Go on! Break your rules, and I will return to destroy you as I did the marid! I have flown to your realms—I will do so again and set fire to your skies. I will leave you nothing but smoke to choke on!”
The chill immediately left the air, the ground beneath him warming. Dara shoved himself to his feet. He would not be intimidated by a damn breeze.
But it pulled at him even as he stalked away, the wind flowing through his hair and tugging at his clothes. It felt like a warning, and when combined with the sight of the diseased trees across the Gozan, the mountains concealing an even more broken city, it created a ripple of undeniable fear that crept down Dara’s back. The peris didn’t interfere. It was their most sacred code.
So what did it mean when they sent a warning?
8
NAHRI
The reeds tore at Nahri’s legs as they hurried through the flooded marsh. She burst into fresh tears, burying her face in the warm neck of the woman carrying her.
“Shush, little love,” the woman whispered. “Not so loud.”
They climbed down into the narrow canal that watered the fields. Nahri peeked up as they passed the shadoof, the wooden beams of the irrigation tool jutting up against the night sky like massive claws. The air was thick with the smoke and screams of the burning village behind them, the curtain of papyrus doing nothing to conceal the horror they’d narrowly escaped. All she could see of their village now was the shattered top of the mosque’s minaret above a sea of sugarcane.
She dug her small fingers into the woman’s robe, clutching her closer. The smoke burned Nahri’s lungs, nothing like the pleasantly clean scent of the tiny flames she liked to sing into creation. “I’m scared,” she whimpered.
“I know.” A hand rubbed her back. “But we just need to get to the river. El Nil. Do you see it?”
Nahri saw it. The Nile, flowing fast and dark ahead. But they’d only just crashed into its shallows when she heard the voice again—the stranger who’d arrived speaking