We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Ara） - Hafsah Faizal Page 0,2
tried, tried, tried not to acknowledge the way it welcomed her, elated whispers brushing her ears. A surge in her bloodstream. Hunger in her veins.
Dark trees stood eerie and unyielding, leaves sharp and glinting. Distantly, she heard the gallop of hooves as the Sarasins shouted and followed. Vines crunched beneath Sukkar’s hooves, and Zafira’s sight fell to near blindness.
Except for his panicked breathing, Sukkar was mercifully quiet as Zafira listened for the men, her own heart an echoing thud. Despite their fear, they had followed, for pride was a dangerous thing.
Yet only silence drummed at her ears—like the moment after a blade’s unsheathing. The halt after the first howl of wind.
They were gone.
For once she appreciated the fearsome, incalculable strangeness of the Arz that made the men disappear. The two Sarasins could be leagues away, and neither she nor they would ever know it. Such was the Arz. This was why so many people who entered never returned—they couldn’t find their way back.
A soft hiss sounded from the east, and she and Sukkar froze. She could see little of his white coat, but years of returning again and again had sharpened her hearing better than any blade. She saw with her ears in the Arz. Footsteps echoed, and the temperature careened downward.
“Time to go home,” Zafira murmured, and Sukkar shivered as he edged forward, guided by her hand, by that rushing whisper in her heart. Sated only when she moved.
The darkness ebbed away to a soft blue sky and the distant throb of the sun. At once, she felt a yawning emptiness as the cold stung her nostrils, scented with metal and a hint of amber.
The Sarasins, it seemed, hadn’t been so lucky. How long ago had the three of them ridden into the Arz? It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes, but the position of the sun claimed it had been at least an hour.
Zafira didn’t want to know whether the sultan had really sent for her. Or, if so, why. It was the why that caused Sukkar to snort beneath her, ever aware. One thing at a time, he seemed to say.
Where the war horses had stood, the snow was now smooth and—
She yanked on Sukkar’s reins.
A woman stood against the plains of white.
A heavy cloak of gray, no, shimmering silver sat on her slender shoulders above a sweeping red gown. Her raised hood barely covered the top of her stark hair, as white as the snow. Her lips were crimson, a curve of blood.
Zafira swore the woman hadn’t been there a moment ago. A gallop began in her chest.
The Arz depraves an idle mind.
“Who knew you could kill so swiftly,” the woman said in a voice of silk.
Did the Arz conjure voices to its illusions, too?
“I am no assassin. I only evaded them,” Zafira said, realizing a beat later that she shouldn’t respond to an illusion. She hadn’t killed those men—had she?
“Clever.” The woman smiled after a pause. “You truly do emerge sane and in one piece.” A gust billowed her cloak. Her dark eyes drifted across the first line of the Arz trees with an odd mix of awe and—skies—adoration.
The woman wavered and solidified. Real and not.
“It’s a lot like Sharr, isn’t it?” Then she shook her head, every movement deliberate.
Fear simmered beneath Zafira’s skin at the mention of Sharr.
“Oh, how could I ask such a tease of a question?” she continued. “You haven’t been to the island yet.”
Are you real? Zafira wanted to ask. She demanded instead, “Who are you?”
The woman fixed her with that glittering gaze, bare hands clasped. Did she not feel the sting of the cold? Zafira tightened her fingers around Sukkar’s reins.
“Tell me, why do you hunt?”
“For my people. To feed them,” Zafira said. Her back ached and the deer was beginning to smell.
The woman clucked her tongue with a slight frown, and Sukkar trembled. “No one can be that pure.”
Zafira must have blinked, for the woman was suddenly closer. Another blink, despite her best efforts, and the woman had moved away again.
“Do you hear the roar of the lion? Do you heed its call?”
Where did this loon crawl from? “The tavern is in the sooq, if you’re looking for more arak.” But Zafira’s usual candor was hindered by the tightening in her throat.
The woman laughed, a tinkling that stilled the air. Then Zafira’s vision wavered, and the snow was suddenly clothed in shadow. Black bled into the white, tendrils reaching for Zafira’s ankles.