do anything to me, Nahri,’” she said, doing a poor impersonation of his voice. “‘I just conjure waterfalls in the library and send boats shooting up the Nile for no reason.’”
Right to it. Ali tried to refocus. “The marid did something to me.”
“Yes, I think that’s been established. What did they do to you?”
“I’m honestly not certain,” he admitted. “But what I do know is that after they possessed me on the lake, it was as if I had the same affinity with water as I do with fire. I could sense it, summon it, control it. In Am Gezira, it was a blessing: I was able to find springs and cisterns, to draw them up through the sand and turn Bir Nabat green. But when I returned to Daevabad …” Ali shivered. “The magic was too much. It was getting stronger, harder to conceal and control. I was hearing voices in my head, seeing things in my dreams—I was terrified that I was going to get caught.”
“Caught?”
“You know what people say about the marid. They’re demons, tricksters. My mother says they lure djinn in Ta Ntry to the water to drown them and drain their blood. Issa was ready to throw me before the ulema and denounce me as a heretic just for asking questions.”
“People are often afraid of what they don’t understand.” Fortunately, Nahri looked neither repulsed nor afraid—merely thoughtful, as though she was puzzling all this out. “Did the marid who possessed you say anything? Explain why they were giving you such power?”
Ali thought back to that awful night. To the way the marid had seized upon everything—everyone—precious in Ali’s memories and then tortured him, making him watch the most brutal of deaths. The way it had grabbed him with tentacles and teeth and shaken him like a dog to drag him from death’s embrace.
His mouth went dry. Ironic. “No,” he whispered, realizing it for the first time. “I don’t think they meant to give me these powers. Quite frankly, I don’t think they gave much thought at all to me. I think they saw a tool they could use to suit their purposes and changed me into what they needed.” Hatset’s stories of the demons who stalked Ntaran waterways and Ghassan’s recollection of the effort it took to recover Ali after the possession came back to him. “And I don’t know that I was meant to survive it.”
Silence fell between them, and when Nahri finally spoke again, her voice was uncharacteristically subdued. “I’m sorry, Ali. I know a lot happened between us that night, a lot I’m still angry about. But I also know you wouldn’t have gone into the water if it weren’t for him.” She didn’t have to say Darayavahoush’s name—the two of them danced around the topic of the Afshin like he was a pot of Rumi fire. “And for that I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be,” he muttered. “I don’t think either of us wanted things to go the way they did.”
She met his gaze again, and Ali felt something soften between them, a jumble of unspoken resentments and shattered hopes. They’d both had their lives ruined and shoved off course. But they were still here.
It was unfortunate, then, that Ali had far worse secrets to reveal. “I did learn something after the possession,” he continued. “Something I think you should know that might help us piece together the marid’s role in all this.”
“What?”
By the Most High, how should he say this? Ali adjusted the rudder, fighting for time. The secret he’d kept from his mother, the one that risked undermining his people’s own understanding of their history and his family’s reign.
But there was no moving forward without addressing what had gone so terribly wrong in the past.
“When I first woke up after the marid possessed me, I was with my father.” Ali’s heart twisted with the memory, for it had been one of the few times in his life Ghassan had been a father first, fiercely protective and unusually gentle as he assured Ali that everything would be okay. “He was the one to suggest that the marid had possessed me. I didn’t believe him. I said the marid were gone, that they hadn’t been seen for thousands of years. He told me that I was wrong. That the marid had been seen—they’d been seen at the side of Zaydi al Qahtani’s Ayaanle ally during the invasion of Daevabad.”
Nahri blinked. “Zaydi al Qahtani worked with the marid? Are you sure? Because