silver shards emerging from his skin in bloody bursts. The silver vapors, Nahri realized. They’d turned to solid metal the instant Ghassan called upon the seal; their misty form must have been magical.
Ghassan had just killed his son trying to save him.
Nahri ran. “Lift the seal!” she shouted. “You’re killing him!” Ali was seizing as he clutched his shredded throat. She dropped beside Hatset, snatching up one of the silver shards and holding it before the terrified queen. “Look for yourself! Did you not just see this change?”
Hatset glanced wildly between the shard and her dying son. She turned on Ghassan. “Lift it!”
The seal was gone in an instant, Nahri’s powers surging back through her. “Help me turn him over!” she shouted as Ali’s companions rushed to join them. She thrust a finger down his throat until he gagged and then pounded his back, black blood mingling with the silver gushing from his mouth. “Get me a board! I need to get him to the infirmary immediate—”
A blade whipped past her face.
Nahri jerked back, but it hadn’t been meant for her. There was a heavy thump and then a muffled scream as the servant who’d served Ali’s juice fell dead at the garden’s entrance, the khanjar belonging to Ali’s female companion buried in his back.
She didn’t have long to dwell on it. Ali’s eyes snapped open as they laid him on a stretched portion of cloth.
They were as black as oil. As black as they’d been when the marid took him.
Hatset clamped a hand over them, a little too fast. “The infirmary,” she agreed in a shaky voice.
It took the rest of the night to save him. Though he’d vomited up most of the poison, what remained was pernicious, racing through his blood to whirl into solid form as it burst through his skin seeking air. Nahri would no sooner lance, clean, and heal a silver boil than another would bloom. By the time she was finished, Ali was a bloody wreck, and silver-soaked rags lay everywhere.
Fighting a wave of exhaustion, Nahri pressed a hand upon his damp brow. She closed her eyes, and that strange sensation rushed back: a deep, impenetrably dark curtain through which she could barely detect the thud of his heart. The scent of salt, of a cold and utterly alien presence.
But no hint of the destructive poison. She sat back, wiping her own brow and taking a deep breath. A violent tremor went through her body. It was a sensation that often overtook her after a particularly terrifying bit of Nahid healing, her nerves catching up only after she was done.
“He is all right?” Ali’s friend—Lubayd, as he’d introduced himself—spoke up. He was the only one in the room with her, her own bedroom. Ghassan had commandeered it, insisting on privacy for his son, and in response, Nahri had kicked both him and Hatset out, declaring that she couldn’t work with Ali’s worried parents hovering over her.
“I think so.” She hoped so anyway. She had dealt with poisonings—both intentional and not—plenty of times since arriving in Daevabad, but nothing that worked with such speed and deadliness. Though it was obvious the silver vapors would have eventually choked him, the way they’d turned to metal shards when Ghassan had used Suleiman’s seal … that was a diabolical bit of cruelty, and Nahri had no idea who might have devised something so vicious.
Looking relieved, Lubayd nodded and retreated to a corner of the room while Nahri returned to her work, leaning closer to Ali to examine one of the wounds on his chest. The poison had burst perilously close to his heart there.
She frowned, catching sight of a bumpy ridge of skin above the wound. A scar. A meandering, savage line as if some sort of spiked vine had crawled across his chest before being ripped away.
Her stomach knotted. Before she could think twice, Nahri yanked close a basin Nisreen had filled with water, dampened a cloth, and wiped away the blood that covered his limbs.
The scars were everywhere.
A ragged line of puncture marks on his shoulder where teeth the size of her thumb had pierced him. The imprint of a fishing hook in his left palm and whirls of ruined flesh that called to mind waterweeds and tentacles. Pocked divots over his stomach, like fish had attempted to feast on him.
She covered her mouth, horrified. The memory of him climbing back onto the boat came to her: his body covered in lake detritus, a crocodile snout