The crowd wanted to see her burned.

Zahara knew this with the same certainty as she knew her own faith in Ravi. The heavy, distinguishable stench of pent up, barely contained need for violence was in the air as they paraded her down the streets of Rasharwi where men, women, and children had gathered to watch in large numbers. Retribution was needed—you could see it in their eyes, in the tightness of their jaws, the sneer on their faces. The riot had killed many citizens. All that loss and rage had to go somewhere. People anywhere needed someone to punish for their pain, someone convenient, someone not of their own if it could be accommodated. It wasn't even hate. It was simply the need to see someone else's suffering so you could live with your own.

Sangi temple and fortress were to the west of the city. The planned procession was to begin at the base of the Black Tower from its northern gate, then proceed via a longer, circular route around the Tower, passing through the eastern and then southern districts before taking the West Bridge across the Madira. They would make another round there, from north, to east, to south, passing through the poorer districts of the city before reaching the ceremonial square of Sangi temple in the west.

The mob they'd planned and paid for was to attack them on the last street before they reached the square as they left the southern districts. It would require the salar to pass through the most number of streets and alleys should he ride out to get to her. She had no idea where the assassins had been placed along the way. There were said to be many, to make sure he doesn't survive once out of the Tower. They were to shoot him from the rooftop with Zyren on the arrowhead. He would die, for certain, and quickly if he were to come out of the Tower. The mob would then keep her safe waiting for things to quiet down before she was released, Lasura would be freed once Azram was made salar.

That plan, however, had been thrown out the window since last night. He wouldn't come for her, now that he'd decided to let her go. Prince Azram, his mother, and Amelia might have already been arrested by now. For all she knew, the mob couldn't have been called off, not unless the Muradi knew about that too. It was a possibility, given who he was, but one so small only fools would count on to survive. She was not one.

In the event that the mob had been called off, her next problem would be at the temple. Zahara didn't know which of those two she was more afraid of. She had seen and heard of Yakim izr Zahat, the High Priest of Sangi, had noticed the way he looked at her in the past. A woman's intuition wasn't always right, but it was rarely wrong, and Zahara's intuition told her that Yakim would have her on his bed before the night was over if she ever reaches the temple. As of that day, she was no longer protected by the Salar of Rasharwi. What would happen before or after the ceremony was something she had to survive on her own. Muradi had left no instructions that she knew of to any of his men. He'd simply said she was never to return.

Something hit her on the shoulder. Zahara looked down and saw an onion at her foot. The guards turned with her toward the direction from where it came. The small boy who'd thrown it ducked quickly behind his mother who then placed her arm protectively in front of him. The mother and son were waved off by the guards with a small warning before they proceeded forward. Zahara turned to look, saw the woman smiling to her son as she congratulated the boy. He beamed back a smile of a celebrated hero. The crowd smiled, too, at the boy and the mother in approval. Good job, they said with their eyes. Brave boy, someone whispered.

Whispers, of course, could travel faster than any procession as long as there were no gaps in the crowd to break them, and if Muradi had been there he would have had both mother and son whipped in front of the crowd until no one was smiling, right where they were. 'You have to be ready to strike at the flint, not to put out the fire,' had been Muradi's reason when he'd ordered someone executed for defying an officer. 'Or you'd be killing thousands when you only needed to kill one.'

He had a point, Zahara had to admit. It wouldn't be long before good job became good Idea, and brave boy became brave people. By then she had crossed the Madira into the poorer districts. The rich and the middle-class inside the ring formed by the canal might hold back for fear of losing something valuable. The poor, with nothing valuable to lose and only satisfaction to be gained, wouldn't hold back if they wanted to stone someone to death.

'An empty stomach makes people stupid and suicidal,'  she remembered Muradi's words, spoken one night when he'd been in the mood to talk. 'Poverty is the greatest threat a nation can have,' he'd also said. The salar knew the problem in Rasharwi, of course. Had known since he was only a prince and been fighting it long before she was captured. She also remembered how the poor had loved him when she first came to Rasharwi. It had made sense then, as it still did now. After all, the prince had been one of their own, the only member of the royal household, in fact, who had mingled with the poor, shared their tables in bars and taverns, gambled, raced, wrestled, even engaged in fistfights here and there without bringing soldiers into it. The fact that they'd wanted him on the throne and had celebrated for the whole month when he ascended was no surprise to anyone.

But for all that he'd tried to solve the problem of poverty in Rasharwi, the steady rise in population ever since the Madira had been built to bring life to the former desert city had been stalling the progress to a crawl. People from everywhere flocked to the city for its comforts and opportunities, and when they didn't make it past the competition they ended up here, on the other side of the Madira, contributing to the population problem and looking for someone to blame for their incompetence, or for the wrong choice they'd made, or both.

It fell, of course, upon her people and their land to solve the problem. An expansion was needed, and conquering the White Desert—and Makena—could fix it. The Rashais believed it. They believed if the salar took the White Desert, all problems would be solved. They believed if a bharavi bowed to their god they'd win the war. They believed she'd bewitched the salar and kept him from achieving that goal, that if they shamed her and stoned her to death their sufferings would be gone. People would believe anything most convenient to them, they'd hate anyone most convenient to hate with the least consequences.

The people of Rasharwi called her the Witch of the Black Tower. She remembered Muradi laughing then, telling her it had to be the understatement of the long, suffering history of the Salasar and has simply waved it off. In many ways, she had been a threat to his reign ever since he'd taken her here. And yet for eighteen years, Muradi had kept her alive and protected with all his power despite the number of people who'd wanted to see her dead. That protection, Zahara realized with a bad feeling in her stomach, was no longer there now.

She looked up at the Black Tower looming behind them, imagined a figure dressed in black standing at its peak and a sudden, unexpected, unwelcoming sense of nostalgia flooded through her. Somehow, a part of her felt missing, left behind in the chamber at the top of that mountain of obsidian, and in its place was a void she had yet to find a way to fill. 

Someone threw an object at her. Another vegetable flung by an angry-looking middle-aged woman. The guards didn't see it, only Kiara did and was looking at her with a half worried, half furious expression. Zahara shook her head and gave a small hand signal for her handmaiden to stand down. In that kind of situation, it was better not to anger the people further. They were near the southern district now and if she could get past that without a major incident, it meant that Muradi had dealt with the mob and Yakim would be her only problem. This mob, if formed, would be real. They would see the Witch of the Black Tower burned if it could be done.

It could, of course, be done.

And Fate, as always, had her own plans in these things.

What happened after that was a series of events that toppled atop one another, too fast and too chaotic for anyone to grasp or say for sure what exactly had started it.

She was still in the eastern district when the next object was thrown at her, this time accompanied by a curse that did alert the guards. Sensing a more serious threat than before, two guards dispatched from the procession to deal with the man. At the same time, another vegetable landed on her exposed collarbone, made a loud popping sound that drew the attention of the guards on the other side. She looked down, saw a smear of red liquid on her chest, and before she could tell Kiara it had only been a tomato, her handmaiden had leaped in front of the sedan chair with a dagger she'd produced out of nowhere. The guards rushed in to surround Kiara, believing it to be an escape attempt, stopping the procession as they did. Somewhere nearby, someone was yelling something. It was repeated by more people down the streets in front of and behind them, before escalating into a roar that could be heard two streets down.

Zahara, seeing a new group of people running out of the nearby alley to join the current crowd, wheeled and saw that the path behind her had already been blocked by hundreds of people who had gathered to see the commotion. As the roar grew louder and louder, more things were being thrown at her from every direction. Some of them hit the guards and the sedan bearer, and before she knew what was happening, the chair tilted to the side, throwing her off the seat onto the ground.

Behind her, Kiara shouted something amid the now deafening roar of the mob as she fought her way through both the guards and the crowd toward Zahara. A man snatched her arm and dragged her out of the way before she could get close to the sedan. Zahara, rising to her feet, looked around for where the largest number of the guards had congregated and decided to run toward them. They had orders to protect her and were, therefore, her best chance to survive.

The salar's men had formed a somewhat broken circle around the back of the procession, trying to keep the crowd away with their shields. To her relief, they seemed to be managing it to a point and was beginning to gain back some grounds between the sedan and the crowd.

And then she saw it—how everything went wrong in a blink of an eye.

One man near front line took something out of his pocket, and before anyone saw what it was, a guard stepped in and, out of sheer instinct or panic, slashed the man with his sword in a single stroke from shoulder to hip. The man went down, crashing into the ground face-first, twitched a few times and died within seconds.

There was a moment of stunned silence around the dead man—silence Zahara knew was going to be that calm before a storm. The first blood had been spilled, the flint had been struck, and now a raging fire was going to claim the city.

The mob closed in on them with a roar that could drown out thunder, filling up the streets from every corner like swarms of bees from ten different fallen hives coming together and aiming for one single target: her. She paused in the middle of her planned direction, realized the number of guards was nowhere near sufficient to control this crowd and decided to turn to the nearest building to get out of the street, taking her chances at hiding in it.

She might have made it there in the middle of that chaos, might have even been able to slip through the crowd as they fought each other by simply covering up her silver hair, if only she hadn't been the only one wearing the red robe of the priestess in the three-block radius.

It didn't take long for them to grab her. It took even less time for them to bind her hands and feet and put her back on the sedan chair. The procession, one could say, resumed on the same path to the same destination it had been heading to, only now she was being carried and escorted by the people of Rasharwi instead of Muradi's men toward the altar in front of Sangi. 

To be burned.

***