He likened the sultan’s voice to a snake, softly creeping into his veins and penetrating his heart with venom. He climbed a stack of aging crates and leaped from awning to awning of the surrounding structures, balancing on jutting stones, his ears still ringing with orders from the Sultan of Arawiya. She was his mother’s horse, named after her favorite of the Six Sisters of Old. She nickered a reply, and he tethered her beside a sleepy-eyed camel. “Looks like I’ll be taking the long route,” he murmured, rubbing a hand across Afya’s flank. He had no need for a skirmish with a horde of lowborn men. Nasir studied the sentries and slid from his mare’s back with a heavy sigh. A gust of desert air carried the musky odor of hot sands, along with the chatter of children and their scolding elders. Billowing sirwal, instead of tighter-fitting pants, hung low across their hips, vain muscled arms glistened bronze. Three stood guard at the entrance to the walled city. Leil, the capital of Sarasin, was crawling with armed men in turbans of azure. Though he had never lived here, it was the caliphate of his lineage, and it felt familiar and strange at once. Nasir’s missions to Sarasin always gave him a sense of nostalgia he never could understand. The combination of desert heat and the wayward cold rattled Nasir’s bones, yet here he was, far from his home in Sultan’s Keep, the small portion of land from which the sultan ruled Arawiya’s five caliphates. There had been a particularly strong blizzard in the neighboring caliphate of Demenhur three nights ago, and Sarasin was chillier because of it. And if that was the only way to carry forward in this life, then so be it.
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