blade.
Vizaresh hadn’t moved to follow Dara’s command. He looked between them now, his wary yellow eyes taking in the two warriors.
Then he shook his head. “No, Darayavahoush. You fight this one on your own. I will not quarrel with one the marid have chosen to bless so.” Without another word, he vanished in a crack of thunder.
Ali rushed forward. As Nahri cried out, he raised his zulfiqar …
And then he fell back, as though he’d smashed into an invisible barrier. He stumbled, looking stunned, but without hesitation, gathered himself and sprang forward again.
This time, the barrier knocked him back completely.
Dara hissed. “Yes, your marid masters couldn’t do that either.” He lunged at the prince, ripping the zulfiqar from Ali’s hands. The flames soaring as if he were a Geziri man himself, Dara swung it up. Nahri screamed again, writhing against the smoky binds as the magic of the palace built in her blood.
Muntadhir hurled himself between Ali and the zulfiqar.
There was the smell of blood and burning flesh. A flash of pain in her husband’s eyes and then a wail from Ali, a sound so raw it didn’t seem real.
Rage ripped through her. And just like that, her magic was there. The smoky binds that had dared to confine her—her, in her own damned palace—abruptly burst apart, and Nahri inhaled, suddenly aware of every brick and stone and mote of dust in the building around her. The walls erected by her ancestors, the floors that had run black with their blood.
The corridor shook, hard enough to send the plaster crumbling from the ceiling. Flames twisted around her fingers, smoke curling past her collar. Her clothes flapping madly in the hot breeze spinning out from her body, she raised her hands.
Dara turned to her. She could both see him and sense him, standing bright and furious on the edge of her magic.
Nahri threw him across the corridor.
He hit the wall hard enough to leave a dent in the stone and crumpled to the floor. A piece of her heart broke at the sight, still traitorously linked to the man who kept finding new ways to shatter it.
And then Dara got back up.
Their gazes met. Dara looked stunned. Betrayed. And yet, still grimly determined, a warrior committed. He touched the golden blood dripping down his face and then threw his hand out, a wave of black smoke wrapping his body. There was a glimmer of scales and flash of teeth as it doubled in size.
In an explosion of plaster and stone, Nahri brought the ceiling down on him.
She collapsed as the dust rose around her, the magic draining.
Ali’s screams brought her back. Pushing aside the grief threatening to tear her open, Nahri staggered to her feet. Muntadhir had fallen to his knees, leaning against his brother. Blood was spreading across his dishdasha.
Nahri ran to him, ripping open the cloth. Tears sprang to her eyes. Had he been attacked with anything but a zulfiqar, Nahri would have breathed a sigh of relief; it was a clean gash stretching across his stomach, and though it was bloody, it wasn’t deep.
But none of that mattered. Because the skin around the wound was already a sick blackish green, the color of some awful storm. And it was spreading, delicate tendrils tracing the lines of veins and nerves.
Muntadhir let out a dismayed sound. “Oh,” he whispered, his hands shaking as he touched the wound. “Suppose that’s ironic.”
“No. No, no, no,” Ali stammered the word as if the whispered denial would undo the awful scene before them. “Why did you do that? Dhiru, why did you do that?”
Muntadhir reached out to touch his brother’s face, the blood from his hands staining Ali’s skin. “I’m sorry, akhi,” he replied weakly. “I couldn’t watch him kill you. Not again.”
Tears ran down Ali’s face. “It’s going to be okay,” he stammered. “N-Nahri will heal you.”
Muntadhir shook his head. “Don’t,” he said, clenching his jaw as she reached for him. “We all know you’ll be wasting time.”
“Would you let me at least try?” she begged, her voice breaking on the word.
Muntadhir bit his lip, looking like he was struggling to hide his own fear. He nodded, a small motion.
Nahri instantly spread her hands, concentrating on the pulse and heat of her husband’s body, and yet she’d no sooner done so than she realized the futility of it. She couldn’t heal his torn flesh and poisoned blood, because she couldn’t sense the wound. His body seemed to end where the darkening flesh began,