and then tossed a carved wooden chest to the cobblestone street with enough force to break it. Coins and uncut jewels spilled out, glittering on the wet ground.
Nahri leapt from the litter without a second thought. “What in God’s name is going on here?” she demanded.
“Banu Nahida!” Relief lit in the woman’s wet eyes. “They’re accusing my husband and his brother of treason and trying to take my son!” She choked back a sob, switching to Divasti. “It’s a lie! All they did was hold a meeting to discuss the new land tax on Daeva properties. The king heard of it and now’s he’s punishing them for telling the truth!”
Anger surged through Nahri, hot and dangerous. “Where are your orders?” she demanded, turning to the soldiers. “I can’t imagine they gave you permission to loot this home.”
The officers looked unimpressed by her attempt at authority. “New rules,” one replied brusquely. “The Guard now gets a fifth of whatever is confiscated from unbelievers—and that would be you Daevas.” His expression darkened. “Strange how everyone in this city is suffering save the fire worshippers.”
The Daeva woman dropped to her knees in front of Nahri. “Banu Nahida, please! I told them they could have whatever money and jewelry they want, but don’t let them take my family! I’ll never see them again once they’re in that dungeon.”
Jamshid came to their side. “Your family isn’t going anywhere,” he assured her. He turned to the soldiers, his voice steely. “Send one of your men to the emir. I don’t want another hand laid on these people until he’s here.”
The djinn officer snorted. “I take my orders from the king. Not from the emir and certainly not from some useless Afshin pretender.” Cruelty edged his voice as he nodded at Jamshid’s cane. “Your new bow isn’t quite as intimidating as your old one, Pramukh.”
Jamshid jerked back like he’d been slapped, and Nahri stepped forward, enraged on his behalf. “How dare you speak so disrespectfully? He is the grand wazir’s son!”
In the blink of an eye, the soldier had his zulfiqar drawn. “His father is not here and neither is your bloody Scourge.” He gave Nahri a cold look. “Do not try me, Nahid. The king made his orders clear, and believe me when I say I have little patience for the fire worshipper who loosed her Afshin on my fellows.” He raised his zulfiqar, bringing it dangerously close to Jamshid’s throat. “So, unless you’d like me to start executing Daeva men, I suggest you return to your palanquin.”
Nahri froze at the threat—and the implication that accompanied its open hostility. Ghassan had an iron grip on Daevabad: if his soldiers felt comfortable intimidating two of the most powerful Daevas in the city, it was because they weren’t worried about being punished.
Jamshid stepped back first, reaching for Nahri’s hand. His was cold. “Let’s go,” he said softly in Divasti. “The sooner we’re gone, the sooner I can get word of this to Muntadhir.”
Heartsick, Nahri could barely look at the woman. In that moment, though she hated the memory of the warrior Dara, she couldn’t help but wish he was here, bringing shedu statues to life and drawing his bow against those who would hurt their people. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, cursing her inability to do anything more. “We’ll talk to the emir, I promise.”
The woman was weeping. “Why bother?” she asked, bitter despair lacing into her voice. The words she spoke next cut Nahri to the core. “If you can’t protect yourself, how can you possibly protect the rest of us?”
In the deep quiet of a snowy night, Dara made his way through a black forest.
He did so in complete silence, moving stealthily alongside the five young Daeva men mirroring his every action. They had bound their boots in cloth to muffle their steps and smeared their woolen coats with ash and dirt to mimic the pattern of the skeletal trees and rocky ground. There were magical ways—better ways—to conceal oneself, but what they were doing tonight was as much test as it was mission, and Dara wanted to challenge his young recruits.
He stopped at the next tree, raising a hand to signal his men to do the same. He narrowed his eyes and studied their targets, his breath steaming against the cloth that covered the lower part of his face.
Two Geziri scouts from the Royal Guard, exactly as rumored. Gossip in this desolate part of northern Daevastana had been buzzing with news of them. They had apparently been sent to survey the northern border; his sources had told him it was normal, a routine visit completed every half-century or so to harass the locals about their taxes and remind them of King Ghassan’s reach. But Dara had been suspicious of the timing and thus quietly relieved when Banu Manizheh ordered him to bring them to her.
“Would it not be easier to kill them?” had been his only protest. Contrary to the rumors he knew surrounded him, Dara did not relish killing. But neither did he like the prospect of two Geziris learning of his and Manizheh’s existence. “This is a dangerous land. I can make it look as though they were attacked by beasts.”
Manizheh had shaken her head. “I need them alive.” Her expression had grown stern, his Banu Nahida perhaps coming to know him a bit too well in the few years he’d served her. “Alive, Darayavahoush. That’s nonnegotiable.”
Which is why they were here now. It had taken them two weeks to find the scouts, and two days to quietly drive them off course, his men shifting the boundary stones in waves to send the Geziris off the established path to the village of Sugdam and deep into the thick forest that belted the nearby mountains.
The scouts looked miserable, wrapped in furs and felt blankets and huddled together under a hastily erected tarp. Their fire was a weak one, slowly losing the battle against the steady snowfall. The older scout was smoking a pipe, the sweet smell of smoldering qat scenting the air.
But it wasn’t pipes Dara was concerned with, nor the khanjar daggers tucked in their belts. After a moment of scanning the camp, he spotted the zulfiqars he’d been looking for on a bed of raised stones just behind the scouts. Their leather scabbards had been wrapped in a layer of felt to protect the blades from the snow, but Dara could see a hilt poking free.
He silently cursed. Skilled zulfiqaris were treasured, and he’d been holding out hope that the king hadn’t bothered sending such valuable warriors on what should have been a rather dull mission. Invented during the war against the Nahid Council—or stolen from the angels who guarded Paradise, as the more fanciful stories went—the zulfiqar at first appeared to be a normal scimitar, its copper construction and two-pronged end a bit unusual but otherwise unremarkable.
But well-trained Geziris—and only Geziris—could learn to conjure poisoned flames from the zulfiqar’s deadly edge. A single nick of the skin meant death; there was no healing from the wounds, not even by the hand of a Nahid. It was the weapon that had turned the war and ended the rule of his blessed and beloved Nahid Council, killing an untold number of Daevas in the process.
Dara glanced at the warrior nearest him. Mardoniye, one of his youngest. He’d been a member of the Daeva Brigade, the small contingent of Daeva soldiers once allowed to serve in the Royal Guard. They’d been run out of the Citadel after Dara’s death on the boat, ordered from their barracks by djinn officers they considered comrades and sent into the Grand Bazaar with only
