'I think I would like to follow you to the end, however far that may be. I would like to live to see it, this dream of a peninsula united under one rule. Your rule.'

He still remembered those words, spoken as if by a pious man to his god. He remembered the slight tug on the hem of his robe, too, as a soldier twice his size and age knelt and folded himself on the ground to bring it to his lips, having just promised a boy barely fifteen a lifetime of servitude. A promise that had been kept through decades of hardships, through deaths, through wars, through every difficult command he'd ever given. A promise that had been broken moments too early, too soon before a promised dream could be realized. Twenty-eight years you've waited, Jarem, and you couldn't wait a little longer. You couldn't trust my judgement, couldn't bring yourself to believe in me, couldn't––

He bit off the rest of those words, crushed them out of existence before they clouded his visions. It didn't matter now. Mistakes had been made, consequences had been carried out, damages had been done. The most important thing was to clean up the mess, move forward, make sure mistakes only happened once. Drowning in what could have, should have, or might have been was a waste of time that never got anyone anywhere.

The rage was still there though, throwing itself against his chest, tossing in his stomach like waves crashing against rocks, constant and continuous, growing in force, in power every time it returned. And standing here, looking at Jarem's mutilated head, being reminded of what had been done to the honor he'd promised a dying man, he could smell the stench of his control rotting like a badly sutured wound without the means to fix it. There was a crack now in the barricade he'd long put up, behind which logic and reasons resided untouched, uncontaminated, and uninfluenced by the human emotions he'd spent a lifetime keeping out of the equation.

They had to be gone, this rage, this guilt, this regret, this weakness that might interfere with the things he must do, goals he must achieve, and dreams he must see realized. They had to be gone, chained and locked up somewhere if he couldn't kill them all. Blindness and senselessness were things he couldn't afford. The clarity of his mind had to be intact, at anytime, any cost.

'There is no place for weakness or humanity here, Ranveer, only preys and predators. What will you be?'

He couldn't remember who'd said it or when. A stranger at Sabha, perhaps. Maybe a prisoner, maybe a guard, maybe someone he'd had to kill in prison. Those words had always been with him, like the scar on his face, the brand on his back, the weight of those blades he inherited. They produced solutions and results, made him all that he was.

No place for weakness or humanity here.

There was no place for it, to be sure. Not in Sabha or the Black Tower, nor here and now that he was back where he'd started. There had been none from the moment he was given a knife to slit his mother's throat. He'd known it, then, had lived by it and survived, and yet he was here, stripped bare of a lifetime of achievements, derailed and driven into blindness, senselessness, over a woman and a bond he knew must be cut but couldn't.

And now a loyal man, an honorable man, an irreplaceable subordinate you needed by your side is dead because of it. How far will you go? How many more lives will you sacrifice, how many goals, how many dreams?

It had to end one way or another. The rot had to be cut, bad limbs had to be removed before the corruption spreaded any further. Killing her was the best solution, the most obvious one.

Only it would also be the end of him.

'I won't live to do it if you die tonight. I won't know how.'

Careless words spoken so thoughtlessly and yet so accurate to the point of having been proven more than once. Still, something had to be done before it was too late. Jarem knew it, and had made the decision for him. When have you gotten so weak, so helpless, your men had to step in to save you? When will you see?

The truth burned like acid on his tongue, gave rise to an unbearable pressure in his gut, and sent a tremor through his core. He clenched his hands into tight fists, crushing it out of existence before the trembling could be seen by the men he knew had been watching––men he would have to lead to do what he must. Indecision, vulnerability, or the slightest hint that you could be broken were things men must not see in their leader.

He stared at the severed head, could almost hear them all again, the lie he'd spoken so easily, so effortlessly out of habit, of need to remain in control. 'I've never trusted anyone, Jarem,' he'd said. 'You, of all people, should know.'

And still, clear as the blue sky after the rain, certain as the weight of the swords strapped to his back, those last words spoken by the man who'd brought him out of Sabha, to peak of the Black Tower, the same man who had fought alongside him at every battle, had been said to slap him awake and place him back on track.

'May all your dreams be realized, my lord salar.'

He closed his eyes to the ugliness that resurfaced, to the question that came to mind over and over again since that day.

Did you know it, Jarem, before you died? In the end, did you ever figure out the lie?

Something stirred the trees above him. He looked up, felt a gentle breeze that seemed to have come out of nowhere circling where he stood, rustling the leaves as it rose slowly to the higher branches and the ones above them before disappearing into the cool morning air. Beyond the forest, the sun was rising just above the mountain range up ahead. A crisp bandlight made way through the trees, drawing a straight line of warm yellow path toward where the severed head of Jarem izr Sa'id had been placed. For a moment, he thought he saw those bruised, cracked lips smile, and suddenly realized he already knew the reply to that question.

Of course, you did. You knew things to the last digit. You always had.

From the distance, the men around camp drew a circle with their hands, touched their forehead with a fist, and mumbled a prayer to Rashar. The bandlight did that, made it look like Jarem had been blessed by the god, which, of course, was the perfect opportunity for men to ask for help or a blessing of some kind. It was what the gods were for. To grant lesser men an illusion that life could be fixed with some divine intervention, kept them moving forward when hope was scarce.

A waste of time and effort, to be sure. No prayers had ever rescued him from anything, no gods had ever come down to interfere out of mercy. What good was a blessing from the gods to a dead man in any case? Jarem was dead, and nothing was going to fix it.

Still, he made the same gesture and said a prayer that meant nothing to him. It meant something to the men and to Jarem who had been a pious man when he lived. That mattered. You didn't act on personal ideals that created factions among people you must lead and protect if you were a good leader. You changed it, gradually, by first making sure they saw you as one of them. Some things had to be sacrificed for bigger things to happen, be it your own ideals or something closer to heart.

"You saw it too, didn't you?" He turned to Ghaul who had been standing quietly a short distance away, giving him the silence and the space he needed. "You knew it was a problem. That's why you hate her."

Ghaul turned away for a moment, as if looking for someone who might be listening to the conversation before returning his attention to Jarem's head. "From the first day, my lord."

A smile tugged on his lips but failed to materialize. "That obvious?"

"Jarem told me it reminded him of when he brought you back to the Tower, when you looked at those blades." Ghaul made a gesture at the twin obsidian swords now strapped to his back and shrugged. "Said it's a waste of time to talk you out of keeping her."

A truth he wanted to deny but couldn't. Still... "You might have tried."

"Jarem died trying, my lord. Have you listened?" Ghaul asked pointedly. He didn't do that often––voice his disagreement with an edge to this tone. Ghaul followed his command, most of the time obediently, sometimes grudgingly, but usually without question. When he did, it meant that limits had been reached.

You'll lose him too if this goes on. "I'm listening, Ghaul."

"Then you already know what to do."

That he did. He had for a long time. "I can't kill her."

"With all due respect, my lord, I think the entire peninsula knows that by now, which makes her that much more dangerous as a tool to be used against you," Ghaul replied, each word rasped like the sound of someone sharpening a blade despite the mask of obedience. "She must go. Send her away, my lord, somewhere safe if it will ease your mind, but she cannot be in your life. She'll get in the way, interfere with your plans, given that she doesn't betray us before we even begin."

Send her away. He had thought of that, too. Had never made it very far to see it done. Now he was running out of options, of excuses, perhaps even ti––

"That," Zahara said as she stepped out from behind the trees, eyes blazing golden as she addressed them both, "is neither his nor your choice to make."

She drew herself up as they watched, made the torn and tattered dress she wore look like something fit for a queen and the trees her subjects in attendance. "I'm not your prisoner or some helpless old cow either of you get send away for convenience. Try it, and you will have more than someone who interferes with your plans and betrays you before you even talk about beginning whatever it is you're planning to do. Now leave us." She turned to him, dismissing Ghaul in the process. "I will speak with my husband, alone."

Ghaul parted his lips to protest. He raised a hand and demanded silence. "You heard my wife," he said without removing his eyes from the woman who could always speed up his pulse and snatch the air from his lungs for just standing there. "Go," he told Ghaul. "Take Jarem. Bury him well. Mark his grave. I should like to visit him sometimes."

Ghaul snapped his feet together in obedience and proceeded as commanded. He did so without another word spoken, eyeing, from time to time, the statue-like figures of the man and woman who stood face to face with no more than five paces between them but somehow appeared worlds apart. It always felt like this with Zahara. No matter how close we are, you're always on the other side.

When Ghaul was gone, he nodded and gave her leave to commence, "Speak, Zahara."

She raised her chin at the tone, lifted her hand and speared a finger at a rock nearby, back straight as a rod made for beating someone to death. "Sit," she said, the authority in her voice matching his if not exceeding it when she pronounced his name, "Muradi. Or is it Ranveer Borkhan? If there's another name I should be calling you I don't already know about you will speak now before we go any further."

It went straight to his groin, brought something to life in his stomach, however inappropriate the circumstance. He wondered if she realized what hearing his names––all three, in fact––spoken by those lips for the first time in two decades was doing to him. He had a feeling she did.

"You can call me anything you like, love. Prick and Scumbag included," he told her, tried to sort out the rhythm of his breaths she'd managed to stir into a huge mess and found himself failing at the task. "But for the sake of disguise, Ranveer will do. It was the name given to me in Sabha. I would have told you had you thought to ask." He paused for a moment, and decided to try it on for size, words he'd left unspoken too many times. "But you never wanted to know, did you, Zahara?"

She drew a breath and clenched her hands in to fists, as if whatever she had to say was a prized possession she didn't want to let go but had forced herself to. "I'm asking now," she said, for the first time, with a trace of regret in her tone.

"Why now, Zahara?" he asked. "What are you planning to do?" Is it not enough that you took Jarem from me, or my throne?

She stepped toward him, seizing her steps at an arm's reach away, to look levelly into his eyes. "You told me you would negotiate and bend for truce if I'm willing to do the same," she said, holding his gaze as if at knifepoint. "Here is your chance. I'm listening. Convince me."

There was change in the air, in the weight he'd carried in his lungs, on his shoulders. Something shifted in the atmosphere and snapped into place, like a missing piece of a puzzle being found after years and years of searching. He found himself staring at her, at what she'd laid before him, unable to think or breathe. Nineteen years, and now the door creaked opened. "You're offering me truce?"

"I said I will listen," she forced out the words, as if they might make her bleed.

It would have to be enough, this chance he was being given. He knew the journey, the impossibility of it, the pain it would have brought her, the magnitude of what she had to throw away to do this. There was no way, no way at all for him to not take the offered hand. "Then ask me, Zahara," he said, catching his breath in between. "Ask me, and I will tell you everything you want to know."

She stilled for a moment and said, "Sit down." The gesture was milder this time, so was her tone. "I'll redress your wound. The bandage needs change."

He allowed himself to be led to the rock and seated himself as she asked. It was a good place away from the prying eyes of the men, a place for some privacy they needed for the conversation. She sat down in front of him and began to undo his robe, peeling it off to get to the bandage. Her cool fingers touched his skin here and there as she worked, made every breath an agony as the nearness of her brought back memories he could no longer re-enact. He wondered if she sensed it. She answered with a look and a forceful tug on the bandage that she did.

"Did you mean it," she asked, "when you said you would put Lasura on the throne?"

Did he? It was just an idea, a hypothesis he knew could never be accomplished. Not all solutions that made sense could be put into action. "If it would bring an end to the war and spare the lives of thousands, yes, I would. But it would take your people to accept him as their own. I don't see how that can happen."

She thought for a moment, taking more time to unwrap the dressing than necessary. "Not unless Citara accepts him."

"And break their own laws?"

"Laws and codes can be changed. The devis can be made to agree."

"You're hanging on the hope that six women with immense power will subject themselves under the command of a man they don't know who was also born on the wrong side of the desert, not to mention his father had spent a lifetime being their enemy," he reminded her. "This is not just a council of six women, but six bharavis who were brought up as direct descendants of a goddess and had been voted into power by how far they believe it to be true, the last time I checked."

She frowned. "They all answer to the ma'adevi."

"I have six wives who answer to me, Zahara," he quipped. "I sleep with a knife by my bed for a reason." Almost died because of one, for that matter. He decided to not give her the satisfaction by saying that out loud.

"Then it takes a stronger leader to make them agree."

A jab at his pride, to be sure, and on purpose to boot. "Persaps. Who do you have in mind?" It would have to be someone willing to listen, someone who trusted Lasura to sit the throne, someone...

It dawned on him a little too late, where the conversation had been heading. "...You can't be serious."

"You're not the only one who can climb your way to the throne, " she said with the calmness of a woman whose decision had already been made.

Something twisted inside of him as the picture of that future materialized in his mind. A vision of Zahara in white, standing above the council of devis and high oracles.  "You don't have the support of a khagan..."  It came out of him before he he'd finished the thought, before he could rope back the pathetic excuse he knew held no weight nor ground, one he wasn't even sure he could convince himself with.

"I can marry for one," she replied readily, without pause.

"You have been married." He breathed, or he didn't, he was no longer sure. "To the Salar of Rasharwi."

"The Salar of Rasharwi," she pronounced, made sure there was to be no mistake which one she was referring to, "is dead."

Sometimes he really wanted to grab that neck and squeeze. "I'm sitting right here, Zahara."

"As Ranveer Borkhan, and that is who you will be until I find a kha'a to marry, until I produce an oracle or a bharavi to win the votes," she proclaimed with precision, as if she'd been writing down those words and not just say them. "I am a bharavi, they will take me back. You said so yourself."

"In the case that I die, Zahara." It wasn't the first time he'd heard it––this plan, this future of a life with someone else, somewhere else. He had cast it aside then, had assumed it would never happen in this lifetime. Now it was staring at him in the face, and on top of it she intended for him to be alive while she did this. "You are my wife. It's not going to fucking happen, not for as long as I live, not until you bury me six feet underground, not––"

"It's the only way," she slammed it down before he finished the sentence, staring at him with the presence of a rock, of a tree growing roots, making sure he understood no ground was about to be given at any cost. "You were right. My people will never live under your rule. We will not bend to a Rashai, not in this generation. If we are to form an alliance, it has to be under someone from both sides of the desert. It has to be Lasura. This has to be done." She paused to breathe, to steel herself further, to deliver her next words with the sharpness and precision of a surgical knife made entirely of obsidian. "You told me you wanted peace, that you would unite this peninsula for it. You asked me to bend and negotiate and here I am. I'm willing to sacrifice my pride and lay down my hatred. Now is your turn to sacrifice, to prove to me you are the man––the bigger man you have proposed yourself to be––to bring an end to this war."

It caught him off guard, stuffed whatever words of protest he had back down his throat. She saw it, and gave him no chance to recover.

"Ghaul is right, and so was Jarem. For this dream to be realized you must make the necessary sacrifice. I'm not going to be put aside and kept safe like a prize you've won through your conquests. I will be a part of this, not as your prisoner or your wife, but as your equal, in life, in death, or whatever scheme or crime we agree to commit from here on. You will take back Rasharwi and I will bring you Citara. Lasura will rule both the Salasar and the White Desert. One peninsula, under one rule. That is the truce I offer. Will you take it, Ranveer Borkhan, or will you continue to be the Muradi I know and despise? Will you take this chance to start over, and talk to me again as you once did," she said, pausing to catch her breath and his eyes, to remind him of a night so long ago, a night neither of them could seem to wipe from memories, "man to man?"

It came back to him in a flood, like something that had happened only yesterday, their first night in the flickering lights of the hurricane lamps, their first conversation, the day it all began, how fate had brought them together, torn them apart, made enemies of two people who could have been allies, tied them together by the wrong chains, made by the wrong words spoken. And here was his chance to redo all of it, to see those words, those crimes committed out of pride, of hatred, of rash decisions made too blindly and too soon turn a different direction.

"That means something else too, doesn't it?" This is the price you ask for, to start over, to forgive what I've done? "That I have to let you go. To give you up as my wife?" It would be permanent. This could never be undone. He would lose her, for good, for life.

She reached out a hand and traced the scar on his cheek, her fingers cool and light against his skin, like a mother's touch. "To have me as an ally, as someone on the same side. We can see this done, you and I. Perhaps that is why we're here, why we've met, what we were supposed to be doing all along." She paused to smile. A smile she once reserved for someone else, somewhere else on the other side of the desert. "To rewrite the fate of this peninsula."

Something settled onto his heart then, soft as a feather, and yet burning like acid, like poison where it landed. It ate away his heart, leaving a hole, red, raw, and permanent, at the same time something else materialized to seal the damage, wrapping around it like a wall of steel, like an armor that shielded him during a fight...

... like the hands of his mother before she died, pressing the knife deeper into his palm.

They came back to him now, as if the fog behind which they had been hiding was being lifted all at once, those words long forgotten he'd been trying to recall after all these years. His mother's last words to him, her last wish that had sealed his fate, his path, his future, and made him the man and the monster he had become.

'Live, my son. Live and rewrite the fate of this peninsula. That is who you are and what you were born to do.'

He released a breath he didn't know he was holding, and with it came a sense of cleansing that washed over him like a flood, clearing the path before him once more from the carcasses that had piled up until he could no longer see.

That is who you are and what you were born to do.

And there were, oh there were, more things left to be done, more sacrifices to be made for that change to be accomplished. You cannot hold on to anything for life. Not yet. Not now.

"This is what you want, Zahara? To become the next ma'adevi? To unite the peninsular this way?"

"It is," she replied. "Or do you believe I will fail?"

He took her hand from his face, brought it to his lips and kissed it twice, had a feeling she could feel the tremble in his touch. Didn't care.

"Do I think you will fail?" He smiled in exhaustion, in defeat. "You have taken from me what I'm not willing to give, ruined everything I have hoped to achieve, forced me to make decisions that cost me my throne. You've made me your prisoner for life when you should have been mine." She stirred a little from those words. He gripped her hand tighter, and pressed it harder against his lips. "You've never failed at taking things you're not supposed to have, Zahara, my heart included. No, I don't believe you'll fail."

The world came to a pause as it listened, the arms of silence wrapped tight around them, leaving only the sounds of their breathing that seemed to have merged into one.

"Then we agree?" she asked, breathlessly. "I can trust you to give up the throne to our son?"

"Does it even matter?" He shrugged in earnest. "I never agreed to give up my throne. It never stopped you from taking it from me."

"Should be easier the second time," she said.

"Should be easier the second time," he said half a breath behind.

It made her laugh. He couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed in his presence. Maybe it never happened. Maybe it would happen more this time, in this new beginning of their lives.

A life he might no longer be a part of.

"There is just one problem." And it was a problem, he wasn't going to lie.

"What problem?"

"I'd want to kill the man you marry," he told her. "I might find a way to succeed. You can't stop me."

Zahara smiled. "Oh I don't know," she said. "You may not be the only husband I want to see dead, when the time comes."

***

A/N: Who wants to place a bet on how long Dear Muradi can keep his short sword away from Zahara and his long sword from hacking off the poor kha'a whose life has just been fucked before he even knows it? XDDDD (Don't ask me who, I have yet to identify said victim LOL)

What I want to know is if Zahara will ever have to outbid Djari for a husband and what catastrophic shit will happen if that happens LOL Also, the future Raviyani hunt might no longer be for gazelles. XDDDDD (Ignore me, I'm fangirling over my own damn book. It's a disease.)