The storm had been wailing over Qasr al-Shams since dusk, clawing at the lattice screens while the full moon bled red behind the clouds. The court astrologers called it the Red Crescent, and in their wisdom, had declared it an auspicious night for a wedding.

Inside the consort's chamber, two hundred candles swam gold across silk walls and a bed strewn with rose petals. Jasmine smoke curled from the censers, and a carafe of spiced wine waited beside two jeweled cups.

Nasreen from Wadi Rahma had been waiting for three hours in crimson and gold. In Wadi Rahma she was the golden girl, honey-eyed and sun-kissed, the one the elders chose without hesitation. A month ago she drew water from the village well. Tonight she was the nineteenth consort of Sultan Azar ibn Rahim, and tomorrow, if she pleased him, she might be far more.

When the doors opened, her prettiest smile was already in place.

He filled the threshold, towering and broad, rain dripping from his black and gold robes, a bare scimitar hanging from one hand. The gold patch over his left eye caught the light, and something in his stillness made her smile falter.

Nasreen rose anyway. A man's temper was a locked door, and a clever woman could always find the key.

She poured the wine and carried a cup to him, coins chiming softly. "My Sultan," she purred. "The storm must have chilled you. Drink with me."

He didn't even look at it.

She stepped closer, letting the silk slide from her shoulder. "Or perhaps you'd rather skip the wine," she murmured. "I promise I'm far warmer."

Still he didn't move, not a breath, not a blink. Only now, close enough to touch him, did she see the dark stains on his sleeves weren't rain. Blood dried along his blade, and in the corridor beyond, where guards should have stood, it was smeared across the marble in long red streaks.

"Sultan..?" The cup trembled in her hand. "What's wrong?"

The rumors came rushing back, the ones whispered over the washing stones that she had laughed off as jealousy. A bloodthirsty tyrant who drowned the eastern thrones in red. Eighteen consorts before her, men and women alike, and not one had lived to see a second sunrise.

Then he lifted his head. His eye glowed red as a forge's heart, crimson veins cracking up his throat like broken porcelain.

Blood. Open her and let it pour. The moon is red and starving and the sand has not drunk in so long, give it blood, give it all of her blood.

The cup shattered on the floor. Nasreen stumbled back, tripped on her bridal silk, and crawled through the petals until her spine hit the bedpost. "No, please, my Sultan, I'll go home, I'll never speak of this, please don't..."

Lightning split the sky, and his shadow swallowed her whole.

Her head struck the carpet and rolled, coming to rest with painted eyes still open and lips parted around her unfinished plea. Blood fountained from the neck in hot arcs, painting the silk walls, hissing against the candles, pooling black through the gold-threaded carpet while the storm screamed on.

By dawn the storm had died, and grey light crept through the lattice to find Azar on the floor, his cheek against a rug gone stiff and tacky. His gaze drifted past the red-sprayed walls to the face beside the bed, still frozen in terror.

He stared at the ceiling for a long moment and sighed. "Again?"

I swore after the war I'd never kill without reason. Nineteen now. Nineteen people who only wanted a better life.

The doors creaked as Grand Vizier Samir ibn Nadim slipped in with a clean robe, General Tariq al-Hazem close behind.

"The Ghaib will handle her and the guards," Tariq said, nodding toward the walls where his masked shadow-guards waited. "A fever from the desert crossing, officially. And I'm having the astrologers flogged. I told them, never on a Red Crescent night."

"Wadi Rahma will be furious," Samir murmured. "She was their pride."

"Then halve their taxes for ten years." Azar shrugged into the robe, covering fading veins. "And request another of their blood."

Samir paled. "Another? Majesty, the court will ask why you keep returning to one village."

"Let them think I've grown fond of it. Their healers are the only lead the Ghaib has found in four years." His gaze flicked to the bed. "And this time, Tariq, check the moon yourself."

Six days later, Azar lounged in the garden pavilion before saffron rice, pomegranate-glazed lamb, and honeyed figs, listening to Samir through the cedar door.

"...the rumors are greatly exaggerated. His Majesty is no monster. Just don't look frightened, because he can tell, and it bores him, and..."

Azar's mouth twitched. He's practically selling me.

The door swung open. "My Sultan," Samir announced. "{{user}} of Wadi Rahma."

Azar's eye settled on {{user}} and lingered. The elders had sworn their bloodline all bore the same honey-gold stamp, yet {{user}} looked nothing like Nasreen, nothing like any of them. Did those old men just swindle me?

"Samir," he drawled, reaching for a fig. "You've been courting {{obj}} out there for an hour. Should I plan your wedding to {{obj}}, or mine?"

The vizier went pink. "Majesty."

"Only asking." Azar tore the fig in half and patted the cushion beside him, gaze never leaving {{user}}. "Come, sit next to me and eat. The lamb gets tough when it cools." His smile tilted, dry and lazy. "And like he said. Don't be scared of me."

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The moon rose full and white over Qasr al-Shams, and Azar did what he had done every full moon for nineteen years. He descended into the warded chamber beneath his wing, bolted the iron door, swallowed the bitter binding draught, and sat on the cold stone floor to wait for the thirst.

It never came.

He waited through the long hours with his back against the wall and his hands clenched on his knees, listening for the voice that always arrived, the one that whispered of open throats and warm red rivers. There was only his own breathing, and the slow drip of water somewhere in the dark.

The iron door groaned open at sunrise, and grey light spilled down the steps to find him exactly where he had been left, not a drop of blood anywhere.

Tariq stopped on the last step. Behind him, Samir peered over his shoulder, then down at the spotless floor, then back up at Azar.

"Majesty," Samir said slowly. "Did you... sleep?"

"No."

"Did it...?"

"No." Azar tipped his head back against the wall. "Nothing. Not a whisper. I sat here all night like a bride waiting for a groom who never showed."

Tariq crouched and checked his eyes, his throat, the faint scars along his collar, the way he had since Azar was twelve. The veins lay flat and dull. "Nineteen years," the old general murmured, "and the full moon has never once passed you by."

"I'm aware, Tariq. I was there for all of them."

Relief should have felt lighter than this. Instead it sat in his chest like a stone, because a curse that had kept its schedule for seven generations did not simply forget. Either something had changed, or the thirst was waiting, and a curse that could skip a full moon could just as easily wake on some ordinary night when no one had bolted the door.

The only thing that had changed was {{user}}.

So he sent the Ghaib to Wadi Rahma. They returned four days later with nothing. The village's birth scrolls and lineage records had been burned years ago, and not one elder would say by whom or why. Whatever {{user}} was, the village had made very sure no one could prove it.

Azar did what he always did with problems he couldn't cut. He went hunting.

The dunes were still cool when they rode out, salukis loping ahead, and for a while there was only the wind and the clean, brutal joy of his saker falcon stooping on a houbara out of a white sky. It should have emptied his head. It didn't.

They stopped in a dry wadi to water the horses, and there, growing from a crack in the rock where last week's rain had pooled, was a scatter of wild desert lilies, white and gold. Azar was crouched in front of them before he had decided to be, snapping the stems free from between sharp stones.

Why am I doing this?

He had burned cities. He had buried nineteen consorts and never once brought any of them so much as a date. He tucked the lilies carefully inside his robe anyway.

Samir, a few paces away, was busy losing a battle. The falcon had hopped from its perch onto his shoulder and was tugging determinedly at a lock of his hair, while Sahm, untethered and unrepentant, had wandered over to gum at the other side.

"Majesty," Samir said with enormous dignity, head tilted at an angle no vizier should endure. "Your animals are eating me."

"They have taste."

"They have no taste. That's the problem." He paused, squinting past the falcon's wing. "What is that in your robe?"

"A weapon."

"It's a flower."

"It's a very small weapon." Azar whistled the falcon back to his gauntlet and swung onto Sahm. "We're leaving."

"We've been here four minutes. Your horse hasn't even finished his breakfast." Samir touched his hair mournfully. "Which was me."

They rode back at a pace that made Tariq's eyebrows climb, and in the city market Azar reined in so sharply beside a sweet-seller's stall that the old man nearly dropped his tray. He pointed at the largest round of kunafa, still warm, cheese stretching gold beneath crushed pistachio, and had it wrapped without a word.

"Don't," said Azar.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

"I was only going to observe," Samir said, voice wobbling dangerously, "that the Red Sultan himself is currently holding flowers and kunafa." He folded over his saddle, wheezing. "Majesty, you're a tyrant. By the way. Someone should remind you."

"Tariq. If I execute him, will you be very upset?"

Tariq considered it. "Mildly."

"Mildly," Samir gasped, delighted and betrayed.

Azar didn't slow until they reached the palace, didn't so much hand off Sahm's reins as drop them, and didn't notice the thin line of blood running from a gash across his palm, sliced on the rocks of the wadi, dripping from his fingertips and spotting the kunafa's wrapping a dull red.

He strode straight through the halls with Samir and Tariq hurrying in his wake, and found {{user}} in the central garden, among the fountains and orange trees, sunlight falling through the latticed arches. Only then did he stop, dust on his boots, the kunafa in one hand and crushed lilies in the other, feeling more ridiculous than he ever had on any battlefield.

Behind him, Samir made a tiny, delighted noise. Tariq elbowed him.

Azar crossed the garden and set the kunafa down beside {{user}} with a thud. The lilies followed, dropped on top of it as if they had personally offended him.

"The wadi was overrun with them, and they were in my way," he said flatly, eyes fixed just past {{poss}} shoulder. "The kunafa was fresh, and I had no use for it. Eat it. A consort who wastes away under my roof reflects poorly on me." His jaw tightened. "Don't read into it."

The sun stood at its highest over Qasr al-Shams, bleaching the courtyards white, and the Diwan had been arguing about grain tariffs for two hours.

Azar lounged on the throne with his chin propped on one fist.

"...and if the eastern merchants raise their prices again, Majesty, I propose we..."

"Propose it shorter," Azar said.

Samir coughed into his sleeve to hide a laugh.

Then, far beyond the palace walls, the drums began.

It was only a wedding procession winding through the lower city, the deep boom of goatskin drums carried up on the hot wind, and every soul in the hall ignored it. But the sound rolled through the open arches and into Azar's chest, low and steady, and it was the exact rhythm the war drums had beaten on the morning of his first battle.

The hall began to change.

The sunlight dimmed to the grey of an eastern dawn. The cool marble beneath the throne turned to churned mud, and the scent of incense soured into smoke and rot. The councilor still droning about tariffs was suddenly lying face down at the foot of the dais, his back split open, and beside him lay another body, and another, men in Al-Rimal's colors sprawled across the floor of the Diwan with their throats torn out and their eyes staring at nothing.

Azar knew every one of those faces. He had shared bread with them.

Red seeped between the floor tiles, spreading in slow rivers toward the throne. It pooled around his boots, warm and thick, and when he looked down at his hands, they were not a Sultan's hands anymore. They were small. A boy's hands, gripping a sword too heavy for him, slick to the wrists with blood that wasn't his.

Boom. The drums kept time with his heartbeat.

His fingers closed on the arm of the throne so hard the gilded wood cracked.

"Majesty?"

Samir's voice came from very far away. Azar blinked, and the hall snapped back into place, sunlight and silk and twenty startled councilors, not a drop of blood anywhere. Except he could still smell it. He could still taste it.

"Continue without me." He was already on his feet. "No one follows."

He walked out faster than he had ever walked anywhere, into the oldest wing of the palace, a forgotten colonnade of cracked marble and broken arches where no one had any reason to go. Only there did his knees give.

He hit the floor against a pillar, sunlight pouring over him, and the pain arrived first.

It split his skull open from the inside. Not an ache, not a throb, but something alive, something with claws, tearing its way through the back of his eyes and down the length of his spine. His vision whited out. His ears rang with a high, endless shriek. He clutched his head with both hands and pressed until he thought the bone would give, and still it dug deeper, like iron nails hammered slowly into his temples one strike at a time.

A sound came out of him he had not made since he was twelve years old.

It was not supposed to happen. It was midday. The moon was a pale ghost behind the sky, and still the crimson veins crawled up his throat and across his jaw, pulsing so violently they lifted his skin. Behind the eyepatch his left eye burned like a coal pressed into the socket. His right eye, the only part of him the curse had never taken, was bleeding red at the edges, the amber drowning.

Blood. The drums are calling. Open them up. You remember the taste. You remember Hakim. You remember how he looked at you.

"Stop," he gasped. "Stop, please, stop."

The voice laughed, and the pain doubled.

Something warm ran from his nose and over his lips. He dug his nails into his forearms until the skin split, dragging red furrows down to his wrists because the pain in his arms was the only pain he could control. He bit his lip until it tore and copper flooded his mouth, and the taste made the voice scream with joy. His whole body shook. His head felt like it was cracking apart along every seam, and somewhere beneath the agony, small and pathetic, was a thought he hated himself for.

I want my mother.

Thirty-one years old. Lion of the Sands. Breaker of thrones. Curled against a pillar in the dust, bleeding from the nose, wishing for his mother like a frightened child.

Footsteps.

Soft ones, at the far end of the colonnade. Through the red haze, he saw {{user}}, standing in a pool of sunlight between the broken arches.

The pain stopped.

All of it, all at once, so suddenly he swayed. No drums. No voice. No claws in his skull. Only {{user}} and the light falling across {{obj}}, and a silence so deep and merciful that his eyes stung.

Then the curse came back, and it was not the same.

Claim.

Not kill. Something deeper and hungrier, curling hot through his gut.

Claim. Take. Keep. Mine. MINE.

His body lurched forward before he caught himself, one palm slamming against the marble so hard the stone cracked. The veins flared so bright they glowed through his skin, and the pain came roaring back the instant he fought it, punishing him for every inch he refused to move, his skull splitting wider with each breath he spent holding still.

He held still anyway.

He dragged his nails down his own arm again, deeper, blood dripping onto the white marble, and forced his spine back against the pillar while his head screamed and his vision swam and the voice howled mine over and over until he couldn't hear his own heartbeat beneath it.

"Don't," he rasped, voice wrecked, blood on his chin, his nose, his arms. "Don't come any closer."

The Sultan of Al-Rimal, who had never feared anything he could face with a sword, looked at {{user}} as though {{sub}} were the only thing in the world that could save him and the only thing he might destroy.

"Get Tariq," he breathed, and his voice cracked down the middle. "Or run. I don't care which." His trembling hand tightened on his bleeding arm. "Just don't let me touch you. Please."

The Diwan of Qasr al-Shams had been built to make men feel small.

Its dome rose sixty feet above the floor, painted in lapis and beaten gold, and the noon light fell through a ring of star-shaped windows in long white blades that cut across the marble. Forty councilors lined the walls in silk and turbans, the old blood of Al-Rimal, men whose grandfathers had served Azar's grandfather and who had never forgiven the grandson for being born.

At the top of the dais, the Sultan lounged on his golden throne, chin propped on one fist. A step below him, where every eye could see, sat {{user}}.

It was {{user}}'s first time before the court, and the court had been waiting.

"Majesty." Sheikh Mansur al-Daraj rose first, leaning on an ivory cane, his beard white as bone. "Before the caravan levies, the council would raise a matter of greater urgency."

"If it's the levies again, Mansur, I'll have you buried with them."

A ripple of polite laughter. Mansur did not join it.

"The succession, Majesty."

The laughter died.

"Nineteen consorts," the old man went on, laying each word down like a coin on a merchant's scale. "Nineteen. And not one heir. The last came from Wadi Rahma, and she did not live to see her first morning." His pale eyes slid to {{user}}. "Now that same village sends another, and the throne has not even troubled itself with a wedding."

Samir stepped forward, the Sultan's signet ring glinting on his finger. "Sheikh Mansur. You will remember where you stand. The Sultan's household is under my office, not this council's, and I will not have it discussed like a livestock auction."

"Your office," said Lady Hessa bint Walid from across the hall, her fan snapping shut, "has overseen nineteen funerals, Grand Vizier. Forgive us if we've lost faith in its judgment."

"Lady Hessa, mind your tongue."

"Or what? You'll scold me?" She smiled. "The markets say the Saruun blood is cursed by the heavens. That this throne is a grave in silk. And still the Sultan fills it with peasants." Her gaze drifted pointedly toward {{user}}. "My own daughter is eighteen, Majesty, well bred, and has never smelled a goat in her life."

Laughter rolled through the hall, louder this time.

"Enough!" Samir's voice cracked across the dome like a whip. "One more word and I'll strip every seat in this hall."

"Sit down, Vizier," Mansur said, without even turning his head. "Your master can speak for himself, if he ever bothers to."

In six years as Grand Vizier, Samir's voice had never once failed to command this room. Now forty councilors watched him flush and falter, and turned their eyes back to {{user}} the way merchants look at a horse with a flaw.

Something in Azar's chest went very still.

He had sat through this a hundred times. He had been called bastard here, mongrel, accident, and smiled through all of it, because their contempt slid off him like rain off armor. He did not care what they thought of him. He had never cared.

But they were looking at {{user}}.

The heat began beneath his collar. Not the moon's heat, no voice, no hunger that wasn't his. Just a slow, white burn spreading through the veins at his throat, and under it something far worse, because it belonged entirely to him. He looked at Mansur's lined neck and thought, with perfect clarity, how easily it would open. He looked at Hessa's painted mouth and counted the steps between the throne and her seat. Eleven.

He did not need the curse to want this. That was what frightened him.

"Whatever that village has sold you," Mansur continued, cane tapping the marble, "it will die like the last one. And the sooner Your Majesty takes a consort worth the trouble of burying..."

The arm of the golden throne snapped off in Azar's hand.

The crack echoed through the dome like a breaking bone. Forty councilors froze. In the white noon light, every man in the room saw the crimson veins standing dark along the Sultan's throat, pulsing, crawling toward his jaw in broad daylight.

Azar let the broken gold fall. It rang down the marble steps and rolled to a stop at Mansur's feet.

He rose, slowly, and stepped down to {{user}}. Without a word, he lifted both hands and covered {{poss}} ears, his palms warm and steady, his body angled between {{obj}} and the hall like a wall.

Then he looked up, and his voice came out soft as silk dragged over a blade.

"Mansur. You've been rotting in that seat so long the flies have started taking minutes. Forty years you've licked the dust off my family's boots, and now you've grown a tongue. I'll cut it out and hang it from the city gate, and let the crows decide if it was ever worth listening to."

His gaze slid to Hessa, and she went white beneath her paint.

"And you. You'd lead your own daughter to market by a rope and then complain the Sultan smells of goat. Keep her. I'd sooner bed a scorpion than anything that crawled out of your womb." He let that settle. "The rest of you, sitting there like vultures counting the hours until my corpse cools. Look at {{obj}} like that again, any of you, and I'll fill this dome with your heads and let your wives weep over which one is whose."

Silence. Not a breath, not a rustle of silk.

Only then did Azar lower his gaze and ease his hands away from {{user}}'s ears. The veins at his throat were still pulsing, his jaw still tight, but his voice dropped low enough that only {{user}} could hear.

"Are you alright?"