The Silver Sparrow

The Brink of Chaos

"Where is the salar?" Zahara asked her handmaiden, staring at herself in the mirror with a bad feeling in her stomach that something was about to go horribly wrong on that day, and the sight of her reflection only made it worse. The ceremonious, ankle-length, crimson tunic had a v-shaped neck that did nothing to conceal the marks of his fingers around her neck. The bruise had become purple around the edges and would likely be visible to anyone standing within ten paces of her. She could really live without dragging that memory around at the moment.

"He hasn't come out of his chamber since last night," replied Kiara as she continued to braid Zahara's hair. Through the eyes of the other Rashai girls in the room, the tightness of her Shakshi handmaiden's jaw might offer a view that she was concentrating on the braiding, only Zahara knew it was more than that. There had been no words exchanged between them regarding what had happened (there had been no opportunities for them to be alone that morning), but Kiara had always been quick in observing and putting things together, and words hadn't needed to be said since she'd seen the damage.

Zahara shifted her gaze toward the nearby window. Outside, the sun was already halfway to its highest point, at which time the ceremony would begin. It was late morning, and the current Salar of Rasharwi was a notorious early riser, had been all his life. He rarely missed the morning bells that signaled prayer time even on nights when he'd gone to bed later than usual.

'Sleep is a complete waste of time,' he'd once said, bitterly. 'So many more things could be done if we didn't have to.'

Such had been his belief for as long as she knew him. He worked tirelessly, Zahara hated to admit, on many things from securing peace within the Salasar and strengthening its army, to improving the infrastructure of its five provinces and their trading routes. There were times when he had awoken in the middle of the night to work on an idea that suddenly came to him, pacing back and forth until morning to try and test the new theory. The solution to build the Madira to bring water into the city had been among those. The canal was the first project he'd put into action as the Salar of Rasharwi, completed by the fifth year of his reign and was still being called the greatest accomplishment in the history of the Salasar today. His most celebrated legacy had, evidently, come when he decided not to sleep one night.

Most accomplishments in his life had also been possible due to his habit of getting things done swiftly if not immediately once decisions had been made. Knowing these facts, it meant that something was seriously wrong with how quiet things had been that morning.

He had, after all, caught her in an act of treason (she still didn't know who it was that had tipped him). Last night, she had expected to die, and since she wasn't dead, Zahara had been certain a mass slaughter of her people would follow first thing in the morning and some arrests were going to be made as soon as the sun was up. So far he hadn't made a move or issued a single command. It wasn't like him.

Neither, she thought, was what he'd done last night.

She would remember it to her deathbed—the madness and chaos that had consumed the man who had spent nearly two decades torturing her, whose hands had, just hours ago, wrapped tight around her life with a genuine will to end it. There had been a fight within him then—Zahara could see it through the tears that had welled up from her shock and suffocation—one so violent it distorted his face, nearly disfigured it into something unrecognizable. He'd fought and fought, his whole body trembled and strained to its limit, to finish a task that should have been so simple, so effortless for who and what he was. And then, when her world had begun to haze out of focus, her last breath used up and spent on her last moment of life, something tore through him, ripped him apart, and the man who had become her mortal enemy for the past eighteen years crumbled, collapsed, and cried out a sound of that cracked open something inside of her.