Chapter 25
I stared at Raksh for a very long time after he had finished speaking, trying to formulate a coherent response.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I finally replied. “This man could manifest as a beam of celestial light, and he chose to use
that power to spy on a naked woman?”
“Are you surprised?”
Honestly, no. The details might have been fantastical, but strangely I bought this lunar aspect being a pervert. Men...
useless, the vast lot of them, celestial and mortal.
“No,” I confessed. “Just disappointed.” I paced across the sand, avoiding a driftwood log covered in bubbling yellow barnacles—I
trusted nothing on this cursed island. “But the rest of what you’re saying about people being able to control the Moon of
Saba and use al-Dabaran to unleash all this violence... this is true ?”
Raksh looked like he might vomit with genuine fear—if creatures such as him could vomit. “It is rare, but yes,” he replied.
“And with the eclipse coming, there could hardly be a worse time.”
“Why? What does the eclipse have to do with any of this?”
“It has always been easier to access the lunar spirits during such events. The unseen realm is heavily influenced by celestial happenings, and an eclipse is a momentous occasion, one that can bring great calamity.” Raksh touched his heart.
“I can feel this one approaching like a hungry wave. Falco is an idiot, but if there was ever a time even he could blunder into this—” My husband abruptly dropped to the sand, his head falling into his hands. “I can’t go through that
again. I won’t.”
I exhaled. What Raksh was saying sounded ludicrous. But Falco had chased me on a beast out of legend. His magic had brutally
killed the agent who’d betrayed him from across the sea. The war against God of which the Frank had spoken, the scorching
of the old world to build a new—if Falco got access to even a fraction of the power Raksh was implying...
“Surely there is a way to stop him,” I urged. “Eclipses do not last long. If we return to Socotra...”
Raksh didn’t look up from his storm of self-pity. “We would never catch up in time. We don’t even have a way off the island.”
“We’ll never catch up if you sit here wasting time feeling sorry for yourself! You think you are the only one affected? He
has my crew! He wants to burn down my world!”
“ My crew, my world .” Raksh glanced up and rolled his eyes. “Please, I am sure your little friends will do fine as slaves. They only have what,
a couple decades left in them?”
It was everything I had not to put my dagger through whatever burnt piece of charcoal passed for his heart. “You’ll forgive
the impulse to save my people from a horrific fate. I know you care about none save yourself, so it’s impossible to—” Then
I paused, taking in Raksh’s palpable despair. “Wait, you do care only about yourself. So why are you so upset about the possibility of Falco gaining control of al-Dabaran?”
Raksh hesitated. “It’s complicated.”
“How?” When he didn’t respond, I kicked him in the shin, and he hissed in pain. “ How? ” I demanded again. “Asshole, it’s only you and me right now. I need to know all the angles.”
Raksh sniffed in disdain. “I do not see what you could do to solve anything, but I am technically one of them.”
“One of what?”
“A being of discord.”
I blinked. That both explained nothing and made perfect sense. “You are a ‘being of discord’?”
“Yes.”
“And that means ...”
Raksh spat, clearly annoyed to be pulled from his spiral of doom. “It means that discord is the purpose of my existence. When al-Dabaran used to be in ascendance, it was like being drunk. But everything
changed when that lunar idiot got himself trapped. Most of the time, he is asleep and I feel nothing. But when the rare human
takes control of the Moon...” Raksh shuddered. “It is like having my soul and body ripped apart and fed to flames. We are
like a power source, understand? Like oil for a lamp. So we burn. We burn and we burn and we burn. You fear your hellfire?
I fear this. It is constant torment until whoever is possessing the Moon of Saba dies.”
We burn and we burn and we burn . All too well I saw Asif in my mind, heard him screaming as fire consumed him. I gazed at my husband, at this demon who had
known me intimately, who had known things about my desires and ambitions not even I had been willing to admit, and then utterly
betrayed me.
“You once called my people prey,” I reminded him coldly. “What’s wrong, Raksh? Do you not like being hunted? Will you not
be well sated on Falco’s ambitions when you are devoured?”
I rarely got through to Raksh; his soul was too alien, too incomprehensibly selfish to truly hurt his feelings. But from the
flash of anger in his face, it was clear my words had struck.
“And the rest of us, Amina?” he challenged. “You worship a God you call the Most Merciful? Will He be proud to hear you cheering
the burning of innocents?”
I refused to flinch. “What innocents ?”
“Not all spirits of discord are like me. Love causes discord, the birth of a child causes discord, the sudden discovery of some new cure for a deadly disease causes discord.” Raksh glared at me.
“There are those among my cousins who have far, far less blood on their hands than you. And not all of us merely burn when the Moon of Saba is possessed. The weakest succumb.”
Everything inside me went still. Not because I was moved by his rather poetic, evocative discussion of love and newness and
strife, nor hurt by the jab about my violent history. Only one word was ringing in my head.
No. He could not possibly be implying... “What do you mean by cousins ?”
The question came out in a growl, and Raksh frowned, looking baffled. “What do you not understand about it? The other spirits
of discord are my kin— aye! ”
I didn’t recall drawing my khanjar. Didn’t recall crossing the distance between Raksh and myself. But I was suddenly there,
my blade at his throat. “You have a family ?”
His eyes were bright with shock. “Not quite in the human sense but—yes! Okay, yes!” he yelled when I pressed the dagger harder.
“And if Falco gets control of the Moon...” Oh, God, I could scarcely say this. “He will be able to enslave all of you?
All of your kin?”
“ Yes . Why are you being so inquisitive?” Suspicion twisted Raksh’s expression. “Are you planning to seize control of the Moon?”
I barely heard the accusation, rocking back on my heels. The insinuation of what he was saying punctured me like a spear.
All of his kin... did that mean Marjana ?
My Marjana?
My sweet child, the daughter I had left safe and hidden away from all this, believing her secure with my family. Except no
matter how much I hated it, we weren’t her only family.
She had ties—blood ties, kin ties—Raksh was suggesting might enslave her.
Might turn her into the tool of a man who wanted to war against God.
For a moment, I saw Marjana whisked from our home under a spell she didn’t understand.
I saw her sobbing, heard her screaming my name as she burned and burned. ..
The weakest succumb . I felt as though I’d been hurled back into the churning sea, like a brick wall had collapsed over my head.
But I was not the only one affected.
Raksh exhaled noisily, looking overwhelmed, drunk, on the emotions he must have felt coursing through my blood.
“What is this?” he whispered. Heedless of the khanjar still at his neck, he reached out to touch my cheek and the crimson
line in his pupils brightened. “No... you do not want the Moon of Saba for yourself. It is something different. Some one different—”
I wrenched his hand away. “You will get me to Falco.”
Raksh swayed at the abrupt severance of physical contact, like a man attempting to shake off one of Dalila’s knockout gases.
“I-I cannot,” he said clumsily. “It is beyond me.”
Wary of touching his skin with my bare hands, I thrust the khanjar harder against his throat, drawing Raksh’s blood with a
weapon for the first time since he had crossed my path.
“ You will get me to Falco . We will stop him, or I swear to my Creator what you suffer during the Moon of Saba’s possession is nothing compared to what
I will do to you.” I shoved him back, breathing hard. “We are on a magical island full of magical beasts. I watched a ship
fly away like a kite! There must be a way off.”
Raksh snarled. “Do you think I want to be enslaved, Amina? I know all too well the agony that awaits me if the Moon is possessed,
and it’s enough to make me almost wish I had been eaten by the marid instead.”
“Then help me!”
“ I don’t know how! ” Raksh aimed a frustrated kick at the barnacle-covered driftwood log, and the log got up on centipede-like feet to scramble off.
“I am no hero out of your human stories; I cannot summon a ship to sail us away nor wrestle a rukh into submission. I am a spirit of discord on an island whose very court despises anything that disrupts their precious balance.”
“There must be something we can do!” I turned his words over in my head, desperate to find a way out of this. It was bad enough the Frank had my crew
and my friends; on top of that my fear for Marjana was like an arrow to my heart.
Balance . I spun around. “What sort of balance?”
My husband flapped a dismissive hand. “The supposed ‘balance of power’ between the elemental races. They believe in keeping
magic away from humans and guarding the boundaries between our realms. The feathery bastards think interaction between the
different worlds brings chaos and disorder, and there is nothing they loathe more.”
I took that all in. “It doesn’t sound like they would be pleased to see a human get their hands on something as magically
disruptive as the Moon of Saba.”
Raksh was already shaking his head. “They don’t interfere. It is their strictest law. Unless it suits them, of course,” he
said sarcastically. “ Then they manage to find a loophole.”
“A loophole like putting us in a position to stop Falco?”
We stared at each other.
“That... is a terrible idea,” Raksh marveled. “They might execute us simply for being on their island. And yet—”
“And yet what choice do we have? I’m not particularly inclined to throw my lot in with more magical creatures, but we won’t
make it to Socotra in a week without supernatural assistance. Surely if you explained—”
“Not me.” Raksh appeared to be thinking fast. “I am an anathema to them. It would have to be you.”
“ Me? ”
“Yes, you are weaker than them. They may be reluctant to murder you without cause.”
It was a judgment on our current circumstances that a reluctance to murder me without cause sounded promising. “All right. How do we do that?”
“We petition the court.” Raksh’s gaze turned brutally appraising, and his mouth puckered as though he’d sucked on a lemon.
“But not looking like you do now. They already think poorly of mortals, and you appear barely capable of standing, let alone
facing the Frank.”
“You’ll have to forgive me,” I said acidly. “I was stranded at sea for two weeks. If only I’d had my dunij.” Raksh gave me
a quizzical look, and I sighed. “What do you suggest?”
He drew up like he had accepted some sort of challenge. “Grant me a day, wife. We shall get you ready to impress.”