It took Lasura a while to realize what Djari iza Zuri was doing. In her hand was a small piece of what looked like fresh meat of some kind, staring at the piece of meat was his young spotted eagle, wings opened and head held high, stomping its sharp talons into the ground one foot at a time, the other lifting awkwardly high in the air.  The eaglet, now as tall as a man's forearm with a wingspan that reached twice the length of a sword was just learning how to fly. Lasura had left him here, tied up while he went out to hunt. When he returned, Djari was already there, both eagle and bharavi too occupied with what they were doing to notice him stepping into the cave.

Or they had but proceeded to ignore his presence in any case. He had a feeling she would do that. The damn eagle, however, had no excuse.

Lasura squared his shoulders and stepped forward, putting on an air of aggressive confidence he believed his father might have exuded, made sure he puffed up his chest to match. "Are you training my eagle to dance, iza Zuri? Without my permission?"

The bird and the bharavi turned. Two matching pairs of yellow eyes blinked as if noticing his presence the first time, before both saw fit to resume their interrupted activity.

That fucking chicken, Lasura thought, is going to be roasted alive and eaten for dinner tonight, I swear.

"Naa'ul," he pitched his voice to carry, cranked up the hostility in it to make a point, and followed through with a whistle. The call filled the cave with its high-pitch echoes, gave the command an authority to rival the whip Djari often cracked at her horses and Lasura a brief sense of accomplishment.

The bird, of course, didn't move an inch.

Djari, still ignoring his presence, tossed the food in her hand at Naa'ul and dropped the leash she had been holding. When the bird finished eating, she turned to him and said, instructionally, "Try calling again."

For some reasons unknown to him and his missing manhood, Lasura found himself responding to her command with award-winning promptness and obedience to rival one of her horses before he could stop himself. "Naa'ul."

The eagle, this time, came quickly. It landed on his left shoulder, struggling for a moment to find balance, forcing him to hold back a wince when those sharp talons dug into his flesh. You didn't do that in front of a woman, especially one with the potential to have you roll over and play dead on command by the next Raviyani.

"You can't distract an animal from its meal before it's been meticulously trained," she said, brushing the sand off her tunic as she rose to her feet. "He's very young and early in the stage of his training. Start with simple commands and be consistent. Only add another when he's learned the current ones to near perfection. Repeat often. They can be forgetful if you neglect the exercise."

He did know those things, but you didn't interrupt a bharavi when she was in the middle of giving you instructions. Or any woman, for that matter. There was a reason why he was popular among girls in the Black Tower. Most of the time they just wanted to be listened to, respected, and taken seriously (if not also deified at the highest possible standards). He didn't see why they shouldn't be given these things. He liked women, and they liked him.

Just not his mother.

Perhaps also Djari.

Or maybe bharavis in general.

She walked up to him––to the bird to be precise––and reached out to touch Naa'ul. The eagle lurched forward to snap at her hand, and Djari hissed sharply at the response, got the bird to straighten abruptly out of sheer terror. Perhaps also Summer waiting outside, and had he not been gripping on his ego with his life he might have done so just as promptly.

The second time she reached out, Naa'ul sat rigidly still, allowing her to run a hand along the outside of his wing. It occurred to Lasura as he watched, that if this had been one of those bedtime stories involving a princess and her animal sidekick, the tale would tell of the creature warming up to the princess for the unparalleled kindness of her heart, never mind the fact that in reality princesses were often spoiled rotten, entitled, bored-out-of-their-minds actual bitches...or some milder variations of his mother. Well, this was neither a bedtime story nor was Djari a princess. Naa'ul, at that moment, looked about ready to shit himself. Which, in turn, made him dig those talons further into Lasura's shoulder, drawing blood.

Djari stared at the stain seeping out on his gray tunic and frowned. "You should wear a patch of leather on your shoulder and arm when training him," she instructed, disapproval ringing in every vowel. "It will be worse when he grows to his full size. I'll get you some next time."

At full size he won't fit on my shoulder, he wanted to say, but decided saving his balls for the future of his unborn offsprings was a slightly better idea. Logic did work on him sometimes, however rare the occasions.

"You can come empty-handed. It's no problem." After three days alone in the cave, any company was nice, even that of a bharavi. "I am capable of building my own a fire and hunting for my own food, after all," he told her, raising the dead rabbit he'd tracked and brought down proudly as evidence. It did take him some time, but that should be irrelevant.

Djari took one glance at the kill and nodded, no sign of approval here, now, or later, perhaps never in foreseeable future. "I see. I did take your word for it and brought only water."

Lasura resisted a sigh, a knead on his temple, and a sudden urge to swear, among other things. "You have no problem leaving me to starve and die here if I had boasted, do you?"

She stared at him with a palace woman's dread when one mentioned spiders. "Don't do that. You'll die and they won't trust me with anything again."

"True." He supposed he should at least try to die responsibly if he couldn't live worth half a goat's value. "About water. Come, let me show you something."

***

The way Djari gasped as they reached the inner cave could have killed a man, especially one who had been close to dying on a hill to impress her. He didn't know why he wanted to. It wasn't attraction. He didn't feel sexually attracted to Djari. No, this was something deeper, more complicated, like being given a puzzle to solve or a peak to summit, and he was too fixated on solving it or climbing it to remember why he'd needed to in the first place.

Tucked away in a round chamber barely thirty paces wide, accessible only through a steep climb over a wall followed by a ten-minute crawl through a series of maze-like, pitch-black tunnel system, the cave's hidden pool, at first glance, resembled a giant, perfectly cut, blue sapphire set strategically by the hands of a god into the belly of a glistening white cauldron. Catching the light descending at a slanted angle from an opening on the ceiling, the intense cerulean blue pool lit up Djari's face with its reflection, turning her amber eyes almost green and her silver hair a shimmering turquoise to match the chamber's similarly illuminated chalk-white walls and icicle-like formations protruding from above and below.

For how much the pool had stunned him on his discovery, Djari, at that moment, looked more out of this world than the chamber itself, complete with an expression as foreign to him as a touch of affection from his mother. He had a feeling whatever had filled his chest and prevented him from breathing watching her was going to hurt and leave a scar when it disappeared. It hurt now, actually, if he were to be honest.

She climbed down to the pool without a word, her chest heaving visibly now from what he thought might be a similar feeling to what he was experiencing, only for an entirely different reason. "I've never seen so much water," she said. She never removed her eyes from the water, not once.

He followed her down, pausing to stand a few steps away. He could have been closer, he supposed, but something about Djari didn't let people do that easily. "I thought most oases have bigger wells?" The ones he had seen at least.

She stiffened a little, her expression switched to that of someone who'd just discovered something inedible in her food.

Lasura blinked. Is it even possible? "You've never seen one either..."

"It's a populated place," she explained, keeping her eyes on same spot on the pool, as though she was expecting something to surface. "There are fights, often. Not a risk I can take as a bharavi."

"Not a risk they want you to take." It came out of him without a leash, or if there had been one the damn thing had snapped some time ago. Here she was, a sixteen-year old girl, with privilege, with power, with freedom, not to mention a spirit to match a freshly caught stallion, and yet... "Even my mother has more freedom than that, iza Zuri. Even the slaves in Rasharwi. Even your Silver Sparrow. How," he said, an unreasonable rage filling his chest over something completely unrelated to him, "are you living like this? How long do you intend to?"

She clenched her jaw, curled her hands into fists, her face a marble statue's. "My life is not mine to do with as I please." A chant at most. A recital of a text from a holy book, or something she'd been taught and trained all her life to repeat despite those fists still clenched so tight, so visible to any pair of eyes willing to look. "The entire desert depends on it. I cannot—"

"You cannot help your people without having a good understanding of what life is outside of your cage." He cut her off mid-sentence, knew for certain he was lecturing her on something she had no control over, and went on with it anyway. "You have no right nor knowledge to stop a fight at an oasis if you've never been to one, nor can you judge people whose lives you haven't lived or at the very least seen even once. If you truly are the fate of the desert, iza Zuri, then don't forget for a second that every life on this peninsula depends on your judgment. You must take the lead, as someone born to end this war, or else you are no more than a tool for ambitious men and a mare they keep to breed more oracles, in which case you might as well run off with your life and let the devis in Citara continue to do precisely nothing while this side of the desert burns and bleeds the blood of your people and save yourself the trouble."

One of these days, I'm going to die because of my mouth, Lasura thought belatedly, panting from the inappropriate drama that had gone into that speech. But fuck it. If he was going to die a good-for-nothing halfblood son of a Shakshi whore as they called him, he might as well die pissing somebody off and leave something for someone to be irritated about for life out of spite and principle.

Djari, to his surprise, only stared at him, no anger, no hate in her eyes, not even the slightest agitation he had prepared himself to die from. "You've read Eli."

"No, my Khandoor is shit." So was his Cakoran, for that matter. "That, I learned from my father." The man your people believe is a monster, he wanted to add. "But if you have read it, iza Zuri, then you cannot settle for this life. You must not, under any circumstance, if you intend to fight for what's right, not what they tell you to."

She watched him from the other side of the five paces that separated them, listening, thinking, taking his words into account. He couldn't remember the last time someone did that, or if anyone ever had. All he knew was that Djari's presence hurt, from the very first time they met, even here, now, for reasons he had yet to find out.

When she spoke again, it was with a different tone. Her stiff shoulders relaxed, her hands uncurled into loosely closed palms. There was a strange look to her now, one he hadn't seen before. A look of someone who was not his enemy. She said, "Will you teach me to swim?"

It caught him off guard, gave him a need to rearrange his thoughts for a moment. "Right now?"

"Now is all I have, Prince Lasura." She smiled, though it didn't quite reach her eyes. None of her smiles ever had, and even then there had been few. "I may be married in a month, a week, or tomorrow. Depending on my future husband's view of things, I may never get to come here again." She stepped toward him, to stand at an arm's length away, stopped him before he could start another fight. "I will try to lead from that position one day, that is a promise. This is me, asking you to help me live, to understand life. Will you show me how?"

How, Lasura thought, does one say no to such things? Djari, from the first time they met, had never given him any choice to deny her what she wanted. "You always drive people into a corner," he said, threw in a grin before she finished that frown. "You and my father both."

For one fleeting moment, he thought he saw the ghost of a smile. This time it did reach her eyes, however soon it disappeared.

And so he became the one who taught Djari how to swim. It took her some time, perhaps longer than most people, to be able to save herself from drowning. Djari, for all her struggles, never once clung to him longer than the time it took for her to breathe. The entire process was a fight, a battle she kept on throwing herself back in. He couldn't remember the last time he'd fought like that for anything. It was painful to watch, for several reasons he was still not ready to face.

When it was done, when she succeeded, after the initial excitement had subsided, Djari stood there for a long time, staring at the water, trembling.

"I have," she said; it sounded like she was about to cry, "always wanted to know how to swim."

It took him a while to realize that she was, in fact, crying.

"One day," he told her from a distance, from where it was deemed appropriate, "I will take you to Samarra, to see the ocean. If you will let me."

A promise he might or might not be able to keep, but one he would like to try. Why, he wasn't sure. Perhaps it had been the need to compete with the Sparrow, or the desire to fix something about how far freedom had been denied to her. Perhaps it had something to do with the memory of the last time she'd cried between another man's shoulders, and that he was not, by identity, by blood, or by right, in the position to do the same.

She never replied to that, didn't say a word thereafter. She changed into the outer tunic she'd taken off before going into the water, wrapped herself in a robe to keep warm, and went to build a small fire. Later, when they were sharing the tea she had made from the supply of dried sage and mint she'd brought, Djari decided to break the silence.

"I won't sleep with you." She looked up from the tea, catching his eyes, holding it there. "I cannot. This, I need to make clear."

The fire crackled between them as if to give each word an edge. The light danced around her face, turning those cheekbones sharper with its shadows, added a searing brutality to her eyes that matched the flame in shade, in the danger it promised if one ventured too close. She looked like she was made out of rock, of stone, of something as impossible to move, to break, to alter.

She looked like his mother.

He turned the cup in his hand, lowered his gaze to the fragrant tea, found himself suddenly needing the heat. "Everyone has a good reason to not get involved with me, iza Zuri." Or finds one, eventually. "You have a duty to your land, my mother has her pride, my father an empire to save. There is no need to concern yourself with such things. I know my place well."

She stilled for a time, thinking, trying to understand. He let it simmer between them in that silence, waiting for the issue to die in the fire between them before the subject was changed. It would change eventually. There was nothing more to talk about on that issue, nothing that could be done.

"One day," she said at length, softly, steadily, catching his eyes over the bonfire and through the smokescreen of her sage tea, "I will find a place for you. Somewhere without walls, without prejudice, without laws that dictate us to kill each other." She paused to swallow, the light in her eyes wandered off somewhere for a heartbeat, before returning to the present. "For you and Hasheem both."

An invisible fist, wrapped tight around his heart to squeeze him awake, before ripping it out still beating.  He wondered sometimes, what it was that had made him decide to be here, to answer her call, to follow her cause. She might be, he thought, the only one who could see people like him beyond what they were, and wanted to.

But there was something else too, wasn't there? Something so clear, so visible, so impossible to ignore. A presence of another man who was there in every thought, every breath taken. "You miss him, don't you?"

She bit down on her lower lip, clamped her mouth shut, as if he'd dug up a secret she had let slip.

"You can talk to me," he told her. "That is why you are here, isn't it? I am the only one you can talk to about him." And he was the only one. He had no status in the khagan, no obligations to judge her choices. He knew her swornsword's true identity––a secret they shared, if unintentionally. In a way, his existence held a special place in her life no one else could fill. Not, perhaps, even the Sparrow to whom she couldn't allow her feelings to show. "So talk, iza Zuri," he said. "I'm listening. What were you thinking of just now?"

Djari held the cup in her hand tighter, watched him from across the fire with some hesitation in her eyes, before deciding to take a step forward. "I wanted," she said, "...I wished he was here. I wanted him to see me swim. I wondered..." She looked away, at their surrounding, at the ceiling, the walls glittering in white, the iridescent pool behind where he sat, over his shoulder to an image of someone who might have been there but wasn't. "...what Hasheem would look like...if he would smile when he sees it." A pause to breathe, to catch her breath. "He doesn't smile very often."

Lasura looked down at his cup, found the tea already cold and imagined hers would be too, only she didn't seem to feel it, or wasn't present enough to notice. He said, "Neither do you."

Djari blinked, appeared taken aback by the observation for a moment, and then settled into another emotion entirely. He might have called it shyness, had it been another woman he was having a conversation with. With Djari, that word didn't fit her. "Do you think he noticed?"

Lasura smiled. "He is the Silver Sparrow of Azalea, the highest-paid escort in Rasharwi and Deo di Amarra's best apprentice," he told her with some spite in his tone, "trained to notice the smallest twitch of your eye and utilize it to his advantage. Of course, he does."

"I see." She lowered her gaze to the fire, pulled the robe around her tighter, and curled herself in a ball as if suddenly needing protection. There seemed to be a wound attached to that revelation of the Sparrow, still red, raw, and tender to the touch, and it showed every time that name was mentioned. Something became clear to him then, something he'd missed before.

"He didn't tell you, did he?" A cruel question and one Lasura already knew the answer to. "About his past? You had to find out from other people..."

She gave him no reply, but the look in her eyes was enough. "You haven't talked about it, have you? He left without giving you that much?" Oh, you inconsiderate, cold-hearted, selfish prick. He should have rammed his fist into that pretty face when he had the chance.

"What would you have done?" she asked.

"What would I have done?" Lasura repeated, wondered for a brief moment if he should find a more proper answer to give her for the sake of manners, and decided he didn't really give a shit. "I would have climbed Al-Sana a month ago to sit that motherfucker down and make him spill everything I want to know," he told her. "Everything I deserve to know."

She stared at him. No surprise there on her face. No sign of it being the first time that idea had occurred to her. "I'm not allowed to go to Al-Sana," she said, as-a-matter-of-factly

"Who's going to stop you? Nazir kha'a?" He would have laughed at that if he didn't think she would skin him alive for disrespecting her brother. "What's he going to do? Keep you locked up for a week, a month? You are a bharavi, iza Zuri, the worst they can do is throw you into another cage which is no different from what they're doing now, or is it?"

A short silence, more to decide whether she should say it than to think about the issue. "The last time I disobeyed such orders, I was captured by Sarasef and my father died for it."

"The last time you did, you got yourself a powerful ally and your father died from his own problems with another kha'a." At least that was the story he'd been given. "Nobody is blaming you for it, iza Zuri, and if they do they need to go fuck themselves."

"You're out of line." She frowned dutifully.

"I'm always out of line." For simply being alive, he might add. "And everyone else is a constipated, rule-abiding, controlling sick fuck who wants to tether you to a post with a four-foot leash except for your grandmother who would agree with me and you know it. Tell me why you're really here, iza Zuri. What can I do for you?"

For that, too, he already knew the answer.

"Will you take me to Al-Sana?"

***

A/N: I have a feeling this chapter will be called fanfiction and filler and a chapter I will be forced to cut but, to repeat the wise words of the son of a great father, FUCK IT. I enjoyed writing this one immensely and I love my boy Lasura, that counts!

Also, holy shit, Djari. I didn't anticipate getting to write the four of them meeting until way, way later in this book but I'm definitely not complaining! XDDDD

Edit: Since jennylgale asked, I think I should post this inspiration for the pool. The cenotes in Mexico. ❤️ Just imagine the walls to be completely white.