There was a pulse deep inside her that relished those visits into the depths of darkness. She was aware each venture could be her last, and though she swore she didn’t fear much, finding herself lost was her biggest fear of all. Yet Zafira returned, day after day, hunt after hunt. Some said it devoured men like vultures on the dead. Its skeleton trees reached with gnarled fingers steeped in swirling shadow. But the Arz was such that it always demanded one last glimpse. Zafira steered Sukkar away from the forest, toward the clearing and deeper into Demenhur. Ways to believe she could tame it, when in reality she could not. He had taught her of ways to use it to her benefit. Baba had taught Zafira that the Arz was, in many ways, simply a forest. It was a curse they’d shared ever since the land had been robbed of magic. Though everyone was a coward when it came to the forest-each of the five caliphates that made up Arawiya were afraid of the Arz, for it rimmed those lands, too. “Dastard,” Zafira said, a smile on her numbing lips. Sukkar didn’t react, content with staring across the distance into the Arz as if an ifrit would leap out and swallow him whole.
“We had a good hunt today,” she said to the horse who hadn’t helped, and swung onto his back. While she made quick work of tying the deer to her stallion’s saddle, he remained still, as sweet as the name she had given him. Sukkar nickered from the rotting post where she had tethered him, blending in with his near-white coat.
She was a bundle of emotions because of the impending wedding, that was all. Paranoia had a way of visiting when he was least desired. A stillness in the earth and in the whispering trees. She dragged the deer carcass along, a trail of steam in her wake, the sullied snow an eerie crimson. Not when she had the curves of a woman, and the voice and gait of one, too. For in a caliphate where a woman’s actions were always in danger of being turned against her, there was nothing easy about pretending to be a man. Sunlight was always faint in the caliphate of Demenhur, because the sun didn’t know what to do with the snow that should be sand.īefore her, the sea of white rolled out smooth and pristine, gifting her a moment’s contentment in her solitude, even as her toes numbed and the air crippled her nose. Travel Insurance in Germany: A Complete Overview
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