in preparation for his imminent death.
The marid. The creatures who had toyed with him, changed him, ruined him, and saved him. The ones who terrorized his people in Ta Ntry and dragged the Citadel into the lake. One was now so close Ali could smell his silty breath.
Sobek studied him with an open, merciless appraisal, his eerie eyes tracing the seal marked on Ali’s cheek and the blood running down his arms. His gaze shifted to Nahri, and then Sobek tilted his head, glancing at Ali with expectation in his cold expression.
And all of Issa’s words rushed back into his head.
The marid can give you almost anything you desire. The pacts djinn and humans made with these evil creatures for power, for wealth. For love. Pacts sealed in blood and death and the damnation of their souls. Pacts Ali would never in a thousand years contemplate.
Until Nahri was lying too still in his arms.
Ali gazed up at the marid, blinking back tears. He couldn’t not know. “What is your price?” he asked hoarsely.
The marid regarded him with those unfeeling, alien eyes. “You have taken the ring of Anahid the Conqueror from the city of fire?”
Still dizzy, Ali fought for a response. “The ring of Anahid the Conqueror? You mean, Suleiman’s seal? I … yes,” he managed. “But—”
“Then the price has been paid.”
Before Ali could react, the marid was kneeling at his side. He took Nahri from Ali’s arms as though she weighed nothing and laid her on the riverbank between them.
Fresh grief stabbed through Ali at the sight of his friend so unresponsive. At any moment, Ali expected to see Nahri’s dark eyes open, rolling with sarcasm. The thought of her not waking was unbearable.
“Give me your hands,” Sobek demanded.
“My hands?”
“It is against my nature to restore a drowned one. I will need to use you.”
Ali held out his hands, trying to still their trembling and failing the moment the marid’s scaled fingers slid over his. His heart hammered as Sobek pressed his hands down, one over Nahri’s heart and the other upon her mouth.
He extended his claws, and Ali gasped as they pierced his skin.
But a far worse violation waited. Because with a wave of icy magic, the riverbank vanished, and then Sobek was in his head.
The intrusive presence was so horribly familiar that Ali tried to jerk back, thrown into his memories of the marid’s torture on Daevabad’s lake. It was too late: Sobek was already leafing through his mind. The harem garden back in Daevabad’s palace materialized before Ali’s eyes. The willow tree he and Zaynab used to hide under as small children, the canal …
“Look what I can do!” Zaynab wiggled her fingers over a glass bowl of water. The liquid inside rose to dance in the air, following the movement as they giggled together—
Ali shoved wildly at the presence in his head. “Get out of my mind,” he choked out. “You don’t get to see that.”
Sobek sank his claws deeper, both in Ali’s hands and in his mind. When he spoke, it was not aloud. This is how you save her.
Shaking, Ali tried to back down.
He was suddenly older. Still a child, but in the striped gray waist cloth of a Royal Guard cadet. He was again in the harem, but this time with his mother, learning to swim.
Hatset held him by his skinny waist. “Straighten your legs, Alu. You cannot swim crumpled up like a ball.”
“But why do I need to learn how to swim?” he’d asked, his child’s voice high and plaintive. “None of the other boys do. They make fun of me, Amma. They call me a crocodile.”
His mother had taken his chin in one hand. “Then you tell them crocodiles snap up boys like them every day and drown them in the river. You are my blood, and this is what we do.”
The garden vanished again, and then pain tore through his body, teeth and scales and claws. His possession on Daevabad’s lake. Ali screamed his own name and then was racing through the water. “Kill the daeva, kill the daeva—”
The flooded fields of Bir Nabat, rich mud squelching between his toes, springs bursting through rock to dance through his fingers. Daevabad again—the Citadel on that awful night, the lake looming up through the window …
“Please,” Ali begged. “Not that.”
The corridor outside his father’s office. Darayavahoush charged him, and Ali swung his zulfiqar, but it was like an invisible hand seized it, flinging him back. The Afshin ripped the blade from