And then there were the books themselves. The shelves soared out of sight to meet the dizzyingly high ceiling; Ali—who seemed utterly delighted by her interest in the library—had told her that its vast inventory contained copies of just about every work ever written, both human and djinn. Apparently there was an entire class of djinn who spent their lives traveling from human library to human library, meticulously copying its works and sending them back to be archived in Daevabad.
The shelves were also crowded with glittering tools and instruments, murky preservation jars, and dusty artifacts. Ali warned her away from the majority; apparently small explosions were not uncommon. The djinn had a propensity for exploring the properties of fire in every form.
“A lock.” Ali’s words pulled her attention back. The prince sounded disappointed. Two library attendants flew through the air behind him on carpets the size of prayer rugs, retrieving books for the scholars below.
“Efl,” she corrected his Arabic. “Not qefl.”
He frowned, pulling over a piece of parchment from the stack they’d been using to practice letters. “But it is written like this.” He wrote out the word and pointed to its first letter. “Qaf, no?”
Nahri shrugged. “My people say efl.”
“Efl,” he repeated carefully. “Efl.”
“There. Now you sound like a proper Egyptian.” She smiled at Ali’s serious expression as he turned the lock over in his hands. “The djinn don’t use locks?”
“Not really. We find curses to be a better deterrent.”
Nahri made a face. “That sounds unpleasant.”
“But effective. After all . . .” He met her gaze, a slight challenge in his gray eyes. “A former maidservant just picked one rather easily.”
Nahri cursed herself for the slip. “I had a lot of cupboards to open. Cleaning supplies and such.”
Ali laughed, a warm sound she rarely heard that always took her a bit by surprise. “Are brooms so valuable among humans?”
She shrugged. “My mistress was stingy.”
He smiled, peering into the lock’s exposed keyhole. “I think I should like to learn to do this.”
“Pick a lock?” She laughed. “Are you planning a future as a criminal in the human world?”
“I like to keep my options open.”
Nahri snorted. “Then you’ll need to work on your accent. Your Arabic sounds like something spoken by scholars in the ancient courts of Baghdad.”
He took the jab in stride, returning it with a compliment. “I suppose I’m not making as much progress as you in our respective studies,” he confessed. “Your writing has truly come a long way. You should start thinking about what language you’d like to tackle next.”
“Divasti.” There was no question. “Then I can read the Nahid texts myself instead of listening to Nisreen drone on.”
Ali’s face fell. “I fear you’ll need another tutor for that. I barely speak it.”
“Truly?” When he nodded, she narrowed her eyes. “You told me once that you know five different languages . . . and yet you couldn’t find time to learn that of Daevabad’s original people?”
The prince winced. “When you put it that way . . .”
“What about your father?”
“He’s fluent.” Ali replied. “My father is very . . . taken with Daeva culture. Muntadhir, as well.”
Interesting. Nahri filed that information away. “Well, that settles it. You’ll join me when I start. There’s no reason for you not to learn.”
“I look forward to being outmatched,” Ali said. Just then, a servant approached bearing a large covered platter, and the prince’s face lit up. “Salaams, brother, thank you.” He smiled at Nahri. “I have a surprise for you.”
She raised her eyebrows. “More human artifacts to identify?”
“Not exactly.”
The servant pulled away the top of the platter, and the rich smell of sizzling sugar and buttery dough wafted past her. Several triangles of flaky sweet bread sprinkled with raisins, coconut, and sugar were stacked on a plate, the aroma and sight immediately familiar.
“Is that . . . feteer?” she asked, her stomach immediately grumbling at the delicious scent. “How did you get this?”
Ali looked delighted. “I heard there was a shafit man from Cairo working in the kitchen and requested that he prepare a treat from your home. He made this as well.” He nodded at a chilled carafe of bloodred liquid.
Karkade. The servant poured her a cup of the cold hibiscus tea, and she took a long sip, savoring its sweetened tang before tearing off a strip of the buttery pastry and popping it in her mouth. It tasted exactly like she remembered. Like home.
This is my home now, she reminded herself. Nahri took another bite of feteer. “Try some,” she urged. “It’s delicious.”
He helped himself while she sipped her karkade. Though she was enjoying the snack, there was something about the combination that was troubling her . . . and then it hit her. This was the same meal she’d eaten in the coffeehouse before she entered the cemetery in Cairo. Before her life was abruptly upended.
Before she met Dara.
Her appetite vanished, and her heart gave its usual lurch, whether from worry or longing she didn’t know and had given up trying to sort out. Dara had been gone for two months—longer than their original journey together—and yet she woke every morning still half-expecting to see him. She missed him: his sly grin, his unexpected sweetness, even his constant grumbling—not to mention the occasional, accidental press of his body against hers.
Nahri pushed away the food, but the call to sunset prayer sounded out before Alizayd noticed. “Is it maghrib already?” she asked as she wiped the sugar off her fingers; the time always seemed to fly when she was with the prince. “Nisreen is going to kill me. I told her I’d be back hours ago.” Her assistant—although she occasionally felt more like a disapproving schoolmistress or scolding aunt to Nahri—had made her distaste for both Prince Alizayd and these tutoring sessions quite clear.
Ali waited until the call to prayer was complete to respond. “Do you have a patient?”
“No one new, but Nisreen wanted—” She paused as Ali reached for one of his books, the sleeve of his pale robe falling back to reveal a badly swollen wrist. “What happened to you?”
“It’s nothing.” He pulled his sleeve down. “Just a training accident from the other day.”
Nahri frowned. The djinn recovered quickly from nonmagical injuries; it must have been a hard blow to still look like that. “Would you like me to heal you? It looks painful.”
He shook his head as he stood, although she noticed now that he was carrying his supplies with his left arm. “It’s not that bad,” he said, averting his eyes as she readjusted her chador. “And it was well earned. I made a stupid mistake.” He scowled. “Several, actually.”
She shrugged, accustomed by now to the prince’s stubbornness. “If you insist.”
Ali placed the lock in a velvet box and handed it back to the attendant. “A lock,” he mused again. “Daevabad’s most esteemed scholars have themselves convinced this thing can calculate the number of stars in the sky.”