Cold, angry rain slammed against the rocks outside the cave like neverending spears of water. In the distance, the darkened sky flashed and rumbled in swift successions, shook the ground underneath her feet, hurling its screams of tantrum against the walls and ceiling. Through the rain, Zahara could see the clouds forming a thick, dark line across the horizon, its rolling mass accumulated like smoke in a room shut tight, collecting size and weight until there was nowhere to go but down.

Leaning against the wall by the entrance half a step away from the rain, the former salar of Rasharwi stood staring at something in the distance, giving off the same annihilating presence as the raging storm outside. Even here, now, weakened by the wounds that had yet to heal and covered in someone else's tattered brown robe, Muradi still looked like a man who owned everything in his surroundings, like he was standing in his chamber in the Black Tower, giving everyone in it an urge to ask for permission to breathe.

Like a catastrophe about to be let loose, Zahara thought. It made her wonder if she had made the right decision to have let him live.

She remembered him laughing when she told him her intention––a strangled, bitter, self-inflicting laugh before he slipped out of consciousness. When he woke up three days later, following her success in removing the arrows and disinfecting the wounds, his mood became so severe that even Ghaul remained at a distance while it lasted. For the whole week thereafter, Muradi spoke to no one besides a few words here and there out of necessity. He'd retreated into a self-imposed solitude, like someone trying to deal with a loss, a mistake too large to leave behind by fencing everyone out of his life.

It might have been an ordinary reaction for any king who had been robbed of his throne, only the usual sense of remorse, disappointment, or hopelessness one would have expected to see hadn't been a part of it. Instead, there had been anger, pain, a sense of hatred and punishment so strong she could almost hear the crack of that imaginary whip he repeatedly casted upon his own back, could see him carve something on his own heart to leave a scar. She remembered then, that Muradi was the kind of man who punished himself mercilessly for mistakes. She also remembered that whenever he did, someone, somewhere, usually died as a result, sooner or later, if not now, and most often more than one.

And then, when Ghaul returned from town a few days ago with supplies and the news of another riot in Rasharwi, one that resulted in the death of two hundred civilians and the execution of ten leaders responsible, his mood began to shift into something she was most uncomfortable with. He became more focused, more calculating, more like his old self when he was given a problem to solve, only there was a new, indescribably sharp edge to him now she hadn't seen before. Muradi used to be calm, logical, reasonable. Now, a disturbing amount of ruthlessness seemed to be driving him at the core.

It made sense, in a way. He had scores to settle now. Those who'd died in the riot were loyal to him, some of them he had known as a prince, some during his time in Sabha. They had reasons to believe their salar had been murdered or driven into hiding by Azram to take the throne––such was the cause of the riot. Someone must have been feeding the truth to the townsfolk to create an unrest, Ghaul had said. Tension seemed to be accumulating in Rasharwi from what she'd made of the news, and tension meant trouble. For Muradi, who could be said to love his city more than his children, it infuriated him enough to give him back that focus, to snap something back into place.

But what had truly changed him, the news that had driven the longest nail into his heart and pinned something permanently in place, was that of Jarem's head being put on display as the man responsible for everything that had happened.

He'd risen to his feet then, slow and steady, to place himself at the entrance of the cave in the exact same spot where he was now, had stood there for some time before coming to a decision.

'Get him out of there,' he'd said without allowing anyone to see his expression. And Ghaul, being who he was, had left immediately without needing further explanations.

He hadn't returned since. That was the problem.

Zahara wondered, watching him now as he stared into the storm, what he would do if Ghaul never returned. Such a useless, dangerous task to be sending his last ally to accomplish, and for a man he had executed with his own hands, she thought. Something most people would never understand. Then again, there were only two people who could claim to understand anything the former salar of Rasharwi did. One of those was dead, the other one might be dead by now, or captured and being tortured for Muradi's whereabouts. She had a feeling she could be the third person who understood him, but that was a line she would not cross, for too many reasons and one more she wasn't willing to name.

Everything was going according to her plans, however. He was suffering, there was that.

As if he could hear her thoughts, Muradi turned from the rain and caught her looking at him. She had an urge to look away, but that would not happen in this life or the next. He knew that too, judging from the faint smile that followed. She seemed to be able to get him to do that, no matter what he had been going through. She might be the only one who could. That was her power.

He walked toward her, taking off the robe and dropped it over her shoulders before proceeding to sit on the opposite side of the small fire. He looked weak, injured, but not tired. He never seemed tired.

"You'll catch a cold." She frowned. "That's more work for me." Healing him had become her job, since they couldn't get anyone else without risking his capture. It was a wonder she remembered her training as a healer at all, but she did remember some, enough to keep him alive at least. 

"So will you," he said as-a-matter-of-fact-ly, "and I need you well enough to heal me."

"You would have healed by now if you'd stopped trying to lift a sword before you were ready." He had been doing that every morning––checking for the return of his strength as if he couldn't waste a day to begin training again. It was a miracle that he'd survived at all, truly. For some reasons, those arrows had not been dipped in Zyren, and while he had been wearing gambeson, it was the fact that both shafts had been miraculously stopped from puncturing his lungs by his own ribs that he was still living. Moreover, the arrows had been tipped with obsidian, which made a cleaner cut and gave the wounds less chance of being infected. The one on his arm, on the contrary, had turned out to be more problematic. That arrow had torn through a part of a tendon, which would take many months to a year for the arm to function normally, if at all.

That seemed to bother him the most, which, of course, translated to him having ignored her warnings for the past few weeks.

Muradi took the last piece of wood Ghaul had gathered for them before he left, pausing a short moment as though taking a mental note of yet another problem at hand, and then jabbed it into the fire. "I need to be able to fight."

"Not yet," she said. "Not until you're ready."

"Life never gives you time to be ready, Zahara."

True, but she had been taught differently. "It always offers a way out."

"A way out?" He jerked his head toward the section of the cave to her right. "Do you see those stains on the walls, the ceiling?"

She looked up and around, saw the dark, uneven patches on the stones for the first time. They didn't look natural.

"That's smoke," he said, turning back to the fire. "Someone made fire in here, many times. The soot is new in some places. The trees along the path leading here show signs of being cut. The ground is packed tight. It would take many men, coming here, frequently. Who do you think hides in an isolated cave more than once, Zahara?"

She had an answer to that question, didn't want to say it.

"Thieves and robbers. Criminals. Bandits. Fugitives, like us," Muradi continued easily, as if he'd familiarized himself with that fact for some time. "They'll come back, sooner or later. What do you think they'll do when they find a woman here, alone with an injured man who can't fight?"

She knew the answer to that too, and felt the need to wrap the robe tighter around her.

"There will be many," he explained in a tone as calm as someone telling children bedtime stories. "They'll take turns. They may kill you, or they'll keep you if it's convenient. They may never get tired." A pause to look at her reaction. She gave him none. He said, "Men, Zahara, would rather put their cocks inside an overused cunt or something similar than having to use their hands. What do you think will be your way out then?"

Zahara resisted the urge to swallow at the reality she couldn't deny. By then, she was too old to believe life had any interest in being merciful, or kind. The way he'd said it didn't help either. There was a bitterness to his tone that sounded like a lingering bad taste from something experienced long ago as opposed to a mere speculation, which made the entire situation more real in the process. What happened at Sabha? she wanted to ask, but she didn't think he would ever answer that for as long as he lived. She said, instead, "I survived you, haven't I?"

He parted his lips to speak but paused suddenly as he turned toward the entrance, staring out through the spearing rain as if trying to make out something. A few seconds later, a rabbit hopped hurriedly out of the shadow and disappeared back into the night. He kept his eyes out there for a while, scanning the area outside before easing back into comfort. She reminded herself then, that this was the man who had caught her every time she tried to kill him in his sleep. 'Don't even think about it, Mother,' Lasura had warned her on his return from an extended hunting trip with Muradi. 'Father could catch a bee before it lands on him while he sleeps.' She didn't doubt it. By then she'd stopped trying anyway.

"You survived the best of me," he said, picking up the conversation.

She snorted at that. "The best of you?"

"People," he said smoothly, "are most dangerous when they're desperate. You have only seen me with power, never deprived."

Until now, the words manifested in her mind, gave her a chill that lingered on her skin. What happens when a man like Muradi becomes desperate? When someone pushes him to the limit? She didn't want to know the answers to those questions.

"If you should ever be captured, always choose to fall in the hands of one with the most power, never the desperate," he added.

Like you. She smiled. "For when the bandits come?"

He nodded. "You fuck the chief, for when the bandits come," Muradi replied. He wasn't smiling, not anymore. She realized then that he wasn't trying to scare her. This was a threat, something he had been preparing for and worried about, and perhaps now that Ghaul had yet to return, it was making him more tense than ever. "I am trying to not let it come to that. We can't stay here. Not for long."

It explained why he was in a hurry to get his strength back. They had to get moving as soon as possible. "Where will you go?" she asked. He hadn't talked about plans, but the Muradi she knew was never without one. "You don't exactly have an ally you can trust."

"There is no such thing as an ally you can trust, only people with like interests, and interests change, Zahara."

On a daily basis, if not by the hour, for that matter. She was a living proof of one. A month ago she had wanted him dead, now she was trying to keep him alive. "People with like interests, then." But what interests? What do you want? "Where will you find them? What do you have to offer in return?" She couldn't see it. What does a king without a throne have to give?

He shifted his gaze to the fire, left the questions hanging between them like a kill being slow-roasted in a circle of hungry men.

"What about you?" he asked instead. " What was your plan, Zahara? When you are free of me? You must have thought about it many times. You can't go back to the White Desert. You don't exactly strike me as someone who'd spend the rest of her life in a small village raising goats and camels."

She knew he was going to do that––shift the focus toward something else. Even now, with his life at her mercy, he would never share some things with her, or anyone. "I am a bharavi, in case you forget," she said. "As long as I can still breed, someone will want my womb." She didn't know if she could still breed, if she were to be honest. She'd been taking those remedies for so long to not give him another child. Sometimes the effects became permanent, but no one would know that for years, would they?

It stilled him for a moment. Something flashed in his eyes, or perhaps it had been the lightning outside that gave her the illusion. It disappeared as quickly as one, that much was true. He drew a breath, slowly––a difficult task with those fractured ribs, maybe also because of something else. "You will sell yourself to another man? That is your plan?"

An opening for her to wield a blade, one she took without a second thought. "What was it that you said?" She drew herself up and delivered it. "Ah, yes. Fuck the chief. There are plenty of kha'as or khumars who will welcome a bharavi into his bed, even one my age. It shouldn't be difficult."

He didn't laugh, or smile, or let slip a reaction she was hoping for. Muradi stared at her from across the fire, as if he was mentally writing down every word she'd spoken or was about to speak. "And then?"

The sky flashed, flooded the cave with its blinding white light. The rumble followed immediately after, reminding her of that night not so long ago when his hands had been around her throat, her body trapped underneath his weight, her life hanging by a thin line. The line I am the one holding now.

"Have his children," she said, looking levelly at him, "breed more bharavis and oracles." She paused, watched him drag in another breath, and pushed the knife in further. "Find more allies, raise an army," she continued, slow and precise, like sliding a whetstone across a sword, coming off the tip with a clink, "bring down the Salasar."

It took her breath away for a moment to hear her own conviction spoken out loud. She hadn't known she was going to say these things. Had never truly planned that far into the future. Somehow, he could always make her say and do things she never thought she would, driving her toward an action she never knew she could accomplish. But now that she had said them, those words seemed to have carved themselves in stone, filling her with a sense of purpose she had lost somewhere so long ago. For the first time in years, she was both afraid and excited at the future that lay ahead of her. This must be what freedom feels like, she thought, feeling her heart pick up in speed, in how heavily it was beating.

He took it all in, as always, everything that was written on her face, in her words. He said, in a tone too calm, too resolute, too real for her liking, "You could have had it all."

With me, was the missing part of the sentence. She knew what he meant, nonetheless. For two people who had been married for nearly two decades, not all things needed to be said.

"Could I?" She picked up another mental knife, twisted the blade as it went in. "You don't even have the right blood to seed the right children."

Something snapped in him at that moment, so suddenly she nearly jolted when he lashed back at her. "The right children, Zahara?" he said, each word sharp enough to draw blood. "Lasura is your son."

The subject triggered something within her, made her rasp a reply without thinking. "He is my son, and that is why he still lives." It came out of her in a torrent, in strings of words she couldn't stop. "I would have killed him long ago for being your flesh and blood, for the hour of his birth, perhaps even for the mere fact that you love him the most. It is precisely because he is my son that I haven't done it."

She was panting now, trying to put a chain back on a monster she'd let loose. He stared at her quietly, giving himself––or her––the time to calm. When he spoke again, it was with calm and coldness that made her regret, once more, the decision to have let him live. "This is how far you will go, then?" he said at length, made it sound like a recitation of terms at a duel being proposed than to spite. A duel he was about to accept. "To hate me? To hurt?"

"Don't flatter yourself," she said, stepping into the ring with him already in it. Couldn't stop herself if she tried. Didn't even try, to be honest. "This is how far I will go to save my land and my people. With you, I haven't even started."

That last sentence seemed to shift something within him, bringing forth a small chuckle she hadn't anticipated.

"What?"

"I'm thinking," he said, lowering himself carefully down on the floor, minding his wounds, "that the poor man you intend to choose as your new husband must have done some unimaginable shits to deserve us coming his way."

A part of her wanted to laugh at that, but something in the way he'd ended the sentence stopped her. "Us?"

He turned away from her, resting his head on his uninjured arm to arrange himself in a sleeping position. "Nobody steals from me, Zahara," he said. "Never without consequences."