“I-I need some air.” She turned toward the doors leading to the gardens.
Nisreen stepped in front of her. “Banu Nahida . . .” Her voice was calm, but didn’t mask the alarm in her eyes. “You can’t just leave. The lady is under your care.”
Nahri pushed past Nisreen. “Not anymore. Send her away.”
She took the stone steps leading down to the garden two at a time. She hurried through the manicured plots of healing plants, startling two gardeners, and then beyond, following a narrow path into the royal garden’s wild interior.
She gave little thought to where she was going, her mind spinning. I had no business touching that woman. Who was she kidding? Nahri was no healer. She was a thief, a con artist who occasionally got lucky. She’d taken her healing abilities for granted in Cairo where they were as effortless as breathing.
She stopped at the edge of the canal and leaned against the crumbling remains of a stone bridge. A pair of dragonflies glistened above the rushing water. She watched them dart and dip under a fallen tree trunk whose dark branches pushed out of the water like a man trying not to drown. She envied their freedom.
I was free in Cairo. A wave of homesickness swept over her. She longed for Cairo’s bustling streets and familiar aromas, her clients with their love problems, and her afternoons of pounding poultices with Yaqub. She’d often felt like a foreigner there, but now knew it wasn’t true. It took leaving Egypt to realize it was home.
And I’ll never see it again. Nahri wasn’t naive; behind Ghassan’s polite words, she suspected that she was more prisoner than guest in Daevabad. With Dara gone, there was no one she could turn to for help. And it was clear she was expected to start producing results as a healer.
She chewed the inside of her cheek as she studied the water. That a patient had appeared in her infirmary barely two weeks after her arrival in Daevabad was not an encouraging sign, and she couldn’t help but wonder how Ghassan might punish her incompetence should it continue. Would her privileges—the private apartment, the fine clothes and jewels, the servants and the fancy foods—start disappearing with each failure?
The king might be pleased to see me fail. Nahri hadn’t forgotten the way the Qahtanis had received her: Alizayd’s open hostility, Zaynab’s attempt to humiliate her . . . not to mention that flicker of fear in Ghassan’s face.
Movement caught her eye, and she glanced up, welcoming any distraction from her grim thoughts. Through a screen of purple dappled leaves, she could see a clearing up ahead where the canal widened. A pair of dark arms splashed through the water’s surface.
Nahri frowned. Was someone . . . swimming? She assumed all djinn were as wary of water as Dara.
A little concerned, Nahri picked her way over the bridge. Her eyes went wide when she entered the clearing.
The canal rose up straight in the air.
It was like a waterfall in reverse, the canal rushing from the jungle to pool against the palace wall before cascading up and over the palace. It was a beautiful, if not entirely bizarre sight that utterly captivated her before another splash from the misty pool drew her eye. She raced over, spotting someone struggling in the water.
“Hold on!” After the tumultuous Gozan, this little pool was nothing. She charged right in and grabbed the closest flailing arm, pulling hard to bring whoever it was to the surface.
“You?” Nahri made a disgusted sound as she recognized a very bewildered Alizayd al Qahtani. She immediately let go of his arm, and the prince fell back with a splash, the water briefly closing over his head again before he straightened up, coughing and spitting water.
He wiped his eyes and squinted as if not quite believing who he saw. “Banu Nahri? What are you doing here?”
“I thought you were drowning!”
He drew up, every bit the arrogant royal even when wet and confused. “I was not drowning,” he huffed. “I was swimming.”
“Swimming?” she asked, incredulous. “What kind of djinn swim?”
A flicker of embarrassment crossed his face. “It’s an Ayaanle custom,” he mumbled, snatching a neatly folded shawl from the canal’s tiled edge. “Do you mind?”
Nahri rolled her eyes but turned around. On a sunny patch of grass ahead, a woven rug was laid out, crowded with books, a sheaf of notes, and a charcoal pencil.
She’d no sooner heard him splash out than he marched past her toward the rug. The shawl was wrapped around his upper body with the same fastidiousness Nahri had seen shy new brides cover their hair. Water dripped from his soaked waist-wrap.
Alizayd retrieved a skullcap from the rug and pulled it over his wet head. “What are you doing here?” he demanded over his shoulder. “Did my father send you?”
Why would the king send me to you? But Nahri didn’t ask; she had little desire to continue talking to the obnoxious Qahtani prince. “It doesn’t matter. I’m leaving . . .”
She trailed off as her eyes alighted on one of the open books on the rug. An illustration covered half the page, a stylized shedu wing crossed with a scythe-ended arrow.
An Afshin mark.
Nahri immediately went for the book. Alizayd got there first. He snatched it up, but she seized another, twisting away when he tried to grab it.
“Give that back!”
She ducked under his arm and quickly flipped through the book, searching for any more illustrations. She came upon a series of figures drawn on one of the pages. A half-dozen djinn, their arms exposed to show black tattoos spiraling up their wrists, and on some, spreading across their bare shoulders. Tiny lines, like rungs in an unsupported ladder.
Like Dara’s.
Nahri had not given his tattoos much thought, assuming they had to do with his lineage. But as she stared at the illustration, a finger of cold traced her spine. The figures appeared to be from various tribes, and all had expressions of pure anguish drawn on their faces. One woman had her eyes lifted to some invisible sky, her arms outstretched and her mouth open in a wordless scream.
Alizayd grabbed the book back, taking advantage of her distraction.
“Interesting subject you’re studying,” she said, her voice biting. “What is that? Those figures . . . that mark on their arms?”
“You don’t know?” When she shook her head, a dark look crossed his face, but he offered no further explanation. He tucked the books under his arm. “It doesn’t matter. Come on. I’ll take you back to the infirmary.”
Nahri didn’t move. “What are the marks?” she asked again.
Alizayd paused, his gray eyes seemingly sizing her up. “It’s a record,” he finally said. “Part of the ifrit curse.”
“A record of what?”
Dara would have lied. Nisreen would have deflected and changed the subject. But Alizayd just pressed his mouth in a thin line and answered, “Lives.”
“What lives?”