5
Nahri
“Don’t fall asleep, little thief. We’re landing soon.”
Nahri’s eyelids were as heavy as a sack of dirhams, but she wasn’t asleep. There was no way she could be, with only a scrap of fabric preventing her from plummeting to her death. She rolled over on the carpet, a chilly wind caressing her face as they flew. The dawn sky blushed at the approach of the sun, the dark of night giving way to light pinks and blues as the stars winked out. She stared at the sky. Exactly one week ago, she’d been looking at another dawn in Cairo, waiting for the basha, unaware of how drastically her life was about to change.
The djinn—no, the daeva, she corrected herself; Dara had a tendency to fly into a rage when she called him a djinn—sat beside her, the smoky heat from his robe tickling her nose. His shoulders were slumped, and his emerald eyes were dim and focused on something in the distance.
My captor looks particularly tired this morning. Nahri didn’t blame him; it had been the most bizarre, challenging week of her life, and though Dara appeared to be softening toward her, she sensed they were both thoroughly exhausted. The haughty daeva warrior and scheming human thief were not the most natural of pairings; at times, Dara could be as chatty as a girlhood friend, asking a hundred questions about her life, from her favorite color to what types of cloth they sold in the Cairo bazaars. Then, with little warning, he’d turn sullen and hostile, perhaps disgusted to find himself enjoying a conversation with a mixed-blood.
On Nahri’s part, she was largely forced to check her own curiosity; asking Dara anything about the magical world immediately put him in a bad mood. “You can bother the djinn in Daevabad with all your questions,” he’d dismiss her, returning to polishing his weapons.
But he was wrong.
She couldn’t do that. Because she was definitely not going to Daevabad.
One week with Dara was enough for her to know there was no way she was trapping herself in a city filled with more ill-tempered djinn. She would be better off on her own. Surely she could find a way to avoid the ifrit; they couldn’t possibly search the entire human world, and there was no way in hell she’d ever perform a zar again.
And so, eager to escape, she’d kept an eye out for an opportunity—but there’d been nowhere to flee in the vast, unbroken monolith of desert they traveled, all moonlit sands by night and shady oases by day. Yet as she sat up now and caught a glimpse of the ground below, hope bloomed in her chest.
The sun had broken across the horizon to illuminate a changed landscape. Instead of desert, limestone hills melted into a wide, dark river that twisted southeast as far as the eye could see. White clusters of buildings and cooking fires hugged its banks. The arid plains directly below were rocky, broken up by scrub and slender, conical trees.
She scanned the ground, growing alert. “Where are we?”
“Hierapolis.”
“Where?” She and Dara might speak the same language, but they were centuries apart in geography. He knew everything by a different name, rivers, cities, even the stars in the sky. The words he used were entirely unknown, and the stories he told to describe such places even more bizarre.
“Hierapolis.” The carpet swept toward the ground, Dara directing it with one hand. “It has been too long since I’ve been back. When I was young, Hierapolis was home to a very . . . spiritual people. Very devoted to their rituals. Though I suppose anyone would be devoted, considering they worshipped phalluses and fish and preferred orgies to prayer.” He sighed, his eyes creasing in pleasure. “Humans can be so delightfully inventive.”
“I thought you hated humans.”
“Not at all. Humans in their world, and my people in ours. That is the best way of things,” he said firmly. “It is when we cross that trouble arises.”
Nahri rolled her eyes, knowing he believed her to be the result of such a crossing. “What river is that?”
“The Ufratu.”
Ufratu . . . She rolled the word in her mind. “Ufratu . . . el-Furat . . . that’s the Euphrates?” She was stunned. They were much farther east than she expected.
Dara took her dismay the wrong way. “Yes. Don’t worry, it’s too massive to cross here.”
Nahri frowned. “What do you mean? We’re flying over it anyway, aren’t we?”
She would swear that he blushed, a hint of embarrassment in his bright eyes. “I . . . I don’t like flying over that much water,” he finally confessed. “Especially when I’m tired. We’ll rest, then fly farther north to find a better spot. We can get horses on the other side. If Khayzur was right about the enchantment I used on the rug being easy to track, I don’t want to fly much farther on it.”
Nahri barely heard what he said about the rug, her mind racing as she appraised the dark river. This is my chance, she realized. Dara might refuse to talk about himself, but Nahri had studied him all the same, and his confession about flying over the river confirmed her suspicion.
The daeva was terrified of water.
He’d refused to put even a toe in the shady pools of the oases they visited and seemed convinced she was going to drown in the shallowest of ponds, declaring her enjoyment of water unnatural, a shafit perversion. He wouldn’t dare cross the mighty Euphrates without the carpet; he probably wouldn’t even go near its banks.
I just need to get to the river. Nahri would swim its whole damn length if that was the only way to freedom.
They landed on the rocky ground, and her knee slammed into a hard lump. She cursed, rubbing it as she climbed to her feet to look around. Her mouth dropped open. “When did you say you last visited?”
They hadn’t landed on rocky ground; they’d landed on a flattened building. Broken and bare marble columns lined the avenues, most of which were missing sections of paving stones. The buildings were destroyed, though the height of a few remaining yellowed walls hinted at previous glory. There were grand arched entrances that led to nothing, and blackened weeds and brush growing between the stonework and snaking up the columns. Across from the rug, an enormous stone pillar the color of washed sky lay smashed on the ground. Carved into its side were the grimy contours of a veiled woman with a fish tail.
Nahri moved away from the rug and startled a dust-colored fox. It vanished behind a crumbling wall. She glanced back at Dara. He looked equally stunned, his green eyes wide with shock. He caught her glance and forced a small smile.
“Well, it has been some time . . .”