that no one will ever know I’m a shafit?”
“On our family’s honor. I swear.”
Nahri bit her lip. “Not even Dara?”
Manizheh’s face softened slightly, with both sadness and a little relief. “I’ll do my best, child. I have no desire to cause you further pain. Either of you,” she added, looking as genuinely moved as Nahri had yet seen her. “Indeed, nothing would please me more than to see you find some happiness together.”
Nahri let the words slide past her. That would never happen. “Then take it,” she said, tossing the ring at her mother’s feet.
Manizheh was as good as her word. The ring had no sooner left Nahri’s hand than the khanjar dropped from Ali’s throat. Nahri fell to his side as he gasped for breath.
“Why did you do that?” he wheezed.
“Because she was going to kill you.” As Manizheh bent to retrieve the ring, Nahri swiftly moved as though to embrace him, taking the opportunity to shove his weapons back in his belt. “Are you sure the curse is off the lake?” she whispered in his ear.
Ali stiffened in her arms. “I … yes?”
She pulled him to his feet, keeping her hand on his arm. “Then forgive me, my friend.”
Manizheh was straightening up with the ring in her hand. She frowned, studying the emerald. “This is the seal ring?”
“Of course it is,” Nahri said airily, pulling the second ring—Suleiman’s ring—from her pocket. “Who would lie to their mother?” She shoved the ring onto one of Ali’s fingers.
Ali tried to jerk free, but Nahri was fast. Her heart gave a single lurch of regret, and then—just as Manizheh glanced up—she felt the ancient band vanish beneath her fingers.
Shocked betrayal blossomed in her mother’s eyes—ah, so Manizheh had emotions after all. But Nahri was not waiting for a response. She grabbed Ali’s hand and jumped off the wall.
She heard Manizheh cry her name, but it was too late. The cold night air lashed at her face as they fell, the dark water looking a lot farther away than she remembered. She tried to steel herself, all too aware that she was in for a great deal of pain and some temporarily broken bones.
Indeed, she hit hard, the crash of the water against her body a cold, painful thrust like a thousand sharp knives. Her arms flew out, tangling in Ali’s as she submerged.
She shuddered with pain, with shock, as the memory Manizheh had triggered came briefly again. The smell of burning papyrus, the screams of a young girl.
The sight of a pair of warm brown eyes just before muddy water closed over her head.
Nahri never broke the surface. Darkness whirled around her, the smell of silt and the sensation of being seized.
There was a single whisper of magic and then everything went black.
Dara was not going to last another minute with Muntadhir al Qahtani.
For an actively dying man, the emir was running his mouth at remarkable speed, gasping out an unending stream of barbs obviously calculated to goad Dara into killing him.
“And our wedding night,” Muntadhir continued. “Well … nights. I mean, they all started to blend together after—”
Dara abruptly pressed his knife to the other man’s throat. It was the tenth time he’d done so. “If you do not stop talking,” he hissed. “I’m going to start cutting pieces off of you.”
Muntadhir blinked, his eyes a dark shadow against his wan face. He’d paled to the color of parchment, ash crumbling on his skin, and the green-black lines of the zulfiqar poisoning—creeping, curling marks—had spread to his throat. He opened his mouth and then winced, falling back against the carpet Dara had enchanted to speed them to Manizheh, a flash of pain in his eyes perhaps stealing whatever obnoxious response he had planned.
No matter—Dara’s attention had been captured by a far stranger sight: water was gushing through the corridor they flew down, the unnatural stream growing deeper and wilder the closer they came to the library. He’d raced to the infirmary only to be told that a panicked, rambling Kaveh e-Pramukh had intercepted Manizheh and sent her here.
They soared through the doors, and Dara blinked in alarm. Water was pouring through a jagged hole near the ceiling, crashing against the now flooded library floor. Broken furniture and smoldering books—not to mention the bodies of at least a dozen djinn—lay scattered. Manizheh was nowhere to be seen, but he spotted across the room a knot of the warriors who’d been accompanying her.
Dara was there in seconds, landing the rug as gently