“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Perhaps you were born while they were still traveling, but I cannot imagine how you survived, let alone wound up in a human city on the other side of the world.” He raised his hands. “We might never have those answers. I only pray that your mother’s final moments may have been lightened by the knowledge that her daughter lived.”
“Someone must have saved her,” Dara pointed out.
The king raised his hands. “Your guess is as good as mine. The curse affecting her appearance is a strong one . . . it might not have been cast by a djinn.”
Dara glanced down at her, something briefly unreadable in his bright eyes before he turned back to the king. “She truly doesn’t appear a shafit to you?” Nahri could hear a hint of relief in his voice. And it hurt, there was no denying it. Clearly, for all their growing “closeness,” blood purity was still important to him.
Ghassan shook his head. “She looks as Daeva as you do. And if she’s truly the daughter of Banu Manizheh . . .” He hesitated, and something flickered in his face; it was replaced by his calm mask in a moment, but she was good at reading people, and she noticed.
It was fear.
Dara prodded him. “If she is . . . then what?”
Kaveh answered first, his black eyes meeting hers. Nahri suspected the grand wazir—a fellow Daeva—didn’t want the king massaging this answer. “Banu Manizheh was the most talented healer born to the Nahids in the last millennium. If you are her daughter . . .” His voice turned reverent—and a little defiant. “The Creator has smiled upon us.”
The king shot the other man an annoyed look. “My grand wazir is easily excited, but yes, your arrival in Daevabad might prove quite the blessing.” His eyes slid to Dara. “Yours, on the other hand . . . you said you were an Afshin, but you’ve not yet offered your name.”
“It must have slipped my mind,” Dara replied, his voice cool.
“Why don’t you share it now?”
Dara lifted his chin slightly and then spoke. “Darayavahoush e-Afshin.”
He might as well have drawn a blade. Muntadhir’s eyes went wide, and Kaveh paled. The younger prince dropped his hand to his sword again, stepping closer to his family.
Even the implacable king now looked tense. “Just to be clear: are you the Darayavahoush who led the Daeva rebellion against Zaydi al Qahtani?”
The what? Nahri whirled on Dara, but he wasn’t looking at her. His attention was locked on Ghassan al Qahtani. A small smile—the same dangerous smile he’d flashed at the shafit in the plaza—played around his mouth.
“Ah . . . so your people remember that?”
“Quite well,” Ghassan said coolly. “Our history has a lot to say about you, Darayavahoush e-Afshin.” He crossed his arms over his black robe. “Though I could have sworn one of my ancestors beheaded you at Isbanir.”
It was a trick, Nahri knew, a slight to his honor meant to pull a better answer from the Afshin.
Dara, of course, rushed right into it. “Your ancestor did no such thing,” he said acidly. “I never made it to Isbanir—you would not be sitting on that throne if I had.” He held up his hand, and the emerald winked. “I was captured by the ifrit while battling Zaydi’s forces in the Dasht-e Loot. Surely you can work out the rest.”
“That doesn’t explain how you stand before us now,” Ghassan said pointedly. “You would have needed a Nahid to break the ifrit’s slave curse, no?”
Though Nahri’s head was swimming with new information, she noticed Dara hesitate before answering.
“I don’t know,” he finally confessed. “I thought the same . . . but it was the peri, Khayzur—the one who saved us at the river—who freed me. He said he found my ring on the body of a human traveler in his lands. His people don’t typically intervene in our matters, but . . .” She heard Dara’s throat catch. “He took mercy on me.”
Something twisted in Nahri’s heart. Khayzur had freed him from slavery and saved their lives at the Gozan? The sudden image of the peri alone and in pain, awaiting death from his fellows in the sky, played through her mind.
But Ghassan certainly didn’t seem worried over the fate of a peri he’d never met. “When was this?”
“About a decade ago,” Dara replied easily.
Ghassan looked taken aback again. “A decade? Surely you don’t mean to say you spent the past fourteen centuries as an ifrit slave?”
“That’s exactly what I mean to say.”
The king pressed his fingers together, looking down his long nose. “Forgive me for speaking plainly, but I’ve known hardened warriors driven to gibbering madness by less than three centuries of slavery. What you’re suggesting . . . no man could survive it.”
What? Ghassan’s dark words sent ice flooding into her veins. Dara’s life as a slave was the one thing she hadn’t pressed him on; he didn’t want to talk about it, and she didn’t want to think about the bloody memories she’d been forced to relive alongside him.
“I didn’t say I survived it,” Dara corrected, his voice curt. “I remember almost nothing of my time as a slave. It’s difficult to be driven insane by memories you don’t have.”
“Convenient,” Muntadhir muttered.
“Quite,” Dara shot back. “For surely a—what did you say, a gibbering madman?—would have little patience for all this.”
“And your life before you were a slave?”
Nahri startled at the sound of a new voice. The younger prince, she realized; Alizayd, the one she’d mistaken for a guard.
“Do you remember the war, Afshin?” he asked, in one of the coldest voices Nahri had ever heard. “The villages in Manzadar and Bayt Qadr?” Alizayd stared at Dara with open hostility, with a hatred that rivaled how Dara himself had looked upon the ifrit. “Do you remember Qui-zi?”
At her side, Dara tensed. “I remember what your namesake did to my city when he took it.”
“And we’ll leave it at that,” Ghassan cut in, throwing his youngest son a warning look. “The war is over, and our peoples are at peace. A thing you must have known, Afshin, to willingly bring a Nahid here.”
“I assumed it was the safest place for her,” Dara said coolly. “Until I arrived to find an armed mob of shafit preparing to sack the Daeva Quarter.”
“An internal matter,” Ghassan assured him. “Believe me, your people were never in any danger. Those arrested today will be thrown in the lake by week’s end.”
Dara snorted, but the king remained impassive. Impressively so—Nahri sensed it took a lot to rattle Ghassan al Qahtani. She was not sure whether or not to be pleased by such a thing but decided to match his frankness. “What do you want?”
He smiled—a true smile. “Loyalty. Pledge yourselves to me and swear to preserve the peace between our tribes.”
“And in return?” Nahri asked, before Dara could speak.
“I will declare you Banu Manizheh’s pureblooded daughter. Shafit appearance or not, none in Daevabad will dare question your origin once I speak on such a thing. You’ll have a home in the palace—your every material desire granted—and take your rightful place as Banu Nahida.” The king inclined his head toward Dara. “I will formally pardon your Afshin and grant him a pension and position commensurate with his rank. He may even continue to serve you should you wish.”