Exhaustion set in, allowing Soraya to sleep before Azad’s return. She woke to the scent of cooked meat, and found that the fruit on the table had been replaced by a plate of skewers and warm bread. It unnerved her to know that someone had come and gone without her knowledge, but she still ate ravenously, assured now that Azad didn’t plan to starve her into submission.
She didn’t know how much longer it would be until his return, but in the time she had, she formed a plan. She couldn’t ask Azad directly about the feather without making him suspicious, and so she would have to approach the topic from a different path.
Pacing around the room, she rehearsed the words in her mind, until finally she heard a rap at the door. How courteous of him, she thought dryly.
As soon as he entered—as himself, not human—he frowned at her. “Your dress,” he said.
Soraya looked down at the pale turquoise gown she had first put on the morning of the wedding. By now, it was filthy—the hemline ragged and completely black, the arms and torso stained and torn in places. Her hair was probably a nightmare too. She would have changed before he’d arrived if she’d had the option, but as it was, she didn’t think he would suspect the grime came from the forest instead of the mountain. She faced him boldly and said, “I don’t know what you expected. You’ve given me no opportunity to change or bathe since stealing me away.”
He was draped in a robe of purple brocade himself, stolen from the royal wardrobe she had no doubt, and the contrast between his splendor and her disheveled appearance apparently disturbed him. “I’ll remedy this,” he promised. “For now, though, I’ve assured your mother that you’re alive and in my care.”
Soraya didn’t know if he meant this as a kindness or a taunt, but her heart sank a little imagining her mother’s reaction to that news. Every choice Tahmineh had made, misguided or not, had been for the purpose of keeping Soraya away from the Shahmar, and now she would think it had all come to nothing. She wanted to tell him what a monster he was, to wound him in some way in return for her own pain, but she reminded herself of her plan to gain his trust, and she held her tongue—she had plenty of practice doing so.
But still, she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “And my brother?”
He crossed his arms and said, begrudgingly, “Still alive. For now.”
“Thank you,” she said, her relief audible. “Truly, I’m thankful, and … I’m relieved to see you again.”
He smiled, but there was a spark of suspicion in his eye. “Are you?”
“You knew I would be,” she said. “You left me here with no company, no occupation, except to think of you and wish for your return.”
He took a step closer to her. “And have you thought of me?” he asked, his voice a low rumble.
Soraya ducked her head and nodded. Was I this easily fooled as well? she wondered. She was thankful now for the lesson he had taught her in those early days together—that if you told people what they most wanted to hear, they would almost certainly believe you.
“I keep remembering what you said to me before—that there isn’t much difference between who you are now and the young man you once were. The young man I knew.” She glanced up at him shyly, thinking of the way he had been so hesitant in those early days, feeding her lies while making her think she was drawing them out of him. “I want to know more about him,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.
He was watching her warily, eyes slightly narrowed, as if trying to determine whether she was leading him into a trap. But then he simply said, “Come with me,” and turned for the door.
She followed at once, remaining close to his side as he led her back out into the tunnels. It was too much to assume that he would take her to the feather at once, but if she could keep him on the topic of his lost humanity, she hoped he would mention the feather himself in time.
As he led her down the winding path through the mountain, he said, “I forgot to ask you something. Do you remember the div that was locked up in the dungeon at the palace?”
Soraya’s step faltered only slightly. “Of course I remember. You planted her there, didn’t you?”
“I did, but when I went back to retrieve her, she was missing. When did you see her last?”
She tried to push away the memory of Parvaneh’s hair shining in the moonlight, of her lips brushing the corner of Soraya’s mouth, as if Azad might somehow be able to read her thoughts. “The night we went to the dakhmeh,” she answered. “She must have escaped after I … after the fire went out.”
“Yes, I would have assumed the same, except for the esfand burning in the dungeon.”
Soraya kept pace with his stride and said nothing.
“And you’re sure you haven’t seen her since before the fire went out?”
Soraya nodded.
“How interesting,” Azad continued in a voice like silk. “Then either the pariks have found a way to resist the effects of esfand, or they have a human helping them.”
Soraya abruptly halted, forcing Azad to stop and look back at her. “Are you accusing me of something? Please let me know what it is you think I’ve been able to do while tucked away in the room you put me in, unable to leave without fear of losing my life.” The words came out harsher than she intended, but the only way she could think to avoid his suspicion was to face it directly.
He held her gaze, then shook his head and kept walking. When Soraya was at his side again, he said, “No, I suppose you couldn’t have done anything. But if you see her or if she comes to you, let me know at once.”
She didn’t respond, hoping he would take her silence as agreement.
“Turn left here,” he said after they had continued a little longer. They went down a different passage and stopped at a door in the wall. But unlike the door to her room, this one was pure metal, with no space between the edges of the door and the wall. The door also had a keyhole, which Azad used the tip of one claw to unlock.
The security of this room gave Soraya hope—perhaps he was going to take her to the feather now after all.
But when the two of them stepped inside, all thought of the feather briefly fled Soraya’s mind. Everywhere Soraya looked were relics of the past—vases and painted jars, goblets and gold-rimmed dishes, tapestries and piles of coins. And all of them bore the image of the same man—Azad, before his transformation.
She walked up to a tapestry hanging on the wall to study the image of a young man hunting. She recognized him from the profile that she had found so beautiful, her eyes tracing the curve of his neck up to his face. He was riding a horse, a bow pulled taut in his hands, with a fierce look in his eye—a hunter tracking his prey. She knew that look. She had seen it on that first day, when he had spotted her on the roof.
When she turned to face him again, he was watching her. And even though he was as monstrous as ever, he seemed pathetic to her then, standing in the middle of this shrine to his lost humanity.
“Look around you,” he said. “What do you see?”
“You.”
“What else?”
She walked around the cavern, eyes glancing over the hoard of useless treasure, at the image of Azad engraved and carved and painted on each relic. She found a plate on the ground, chipped around the edges, but with a clear image of Azad in the center, and she picked it up, frowning. It was a garden scene, etched in gold. Azad was seated on a rug, under the shade of the pavilion, and all around the pavilion were rosebushes. She brushed one of the roses with her thumb, and the indentations of the petals felt like a spiral.
What else?
I see a selfish child who betrayed his family.
I see a demon in the making.
Soraya’s hands clenched tighter over the plate. She had the urge to throw it to the ground or dash it against the wall. She wanted to destroy everything in this room, not stopping until the images were unrecognizable and there were no longer any surfaces in which to see her reflection.
She didn’t hear Azad coming nearer, but he was suddenly in front of her, prying the gold plate from her grip as if he sensed what she wanted to do to it. “You’d like to know more about who I am, who I used to be? You already know him. You are him.”
“Why did you do it?” she asked, looking up at him. It was one of the questions she had planned to ask to guide the conversation, but now she found that she truly, desperately wanted to know the answer. “What made you decide to destroy your family?”
He sighed and turned away from her, moving toward a pile of rolled-up rugs and tapestries. He knocked the pile down with one wave of his arm and picked up the tapestry at the very bottom. He gestured for Soraya to come see, and unrolled the tapestry along the ground.
Soraya came to his side and looked down at the woven image before her. A shah, middle-aged and full-bearded, sat in a throne at the center of the tapestry. Surrounding him were five younger men of different heights and ages. Soraya looked at each one in turn, but none of them resembled Azad. All along the edge of the tapestry were dark singe marks, as if someone had decided to burn it but then changed his mind, several times.
“Are … are those…?” Soraya couldn’t finish the question, unsure of what reaction it would draw from him.
“My father and brothers,” Azad said.
“Was this before you were born?”
He snorted. “No,” he said. “I was the youngest, still a child, but that’s not why I’m missing. All five of my brothers were destined to rule—the eldest as shah, the younger four as satraps of rich provinces. But I was born under bad stars. The astrologist told my father that if I ever ruled even the smallest province, dire consequences would follow. My father took this advice very seriously. While I watched my brothers become the princes they were meant to be, I was allowed no battle training, no education in affairs of state, no sense of my future at all.” He kicked the tapestry aside, letting the edges curl up over his dead brothers’ faces. “I wanted so much to prove the stars wrong. I used to stay up through the night and read in secret or practice on the training grounds on my own, desperate for any opportunity to impress my father. He was never cruel to me, but I knew how he must have seen me. I knew that I was…”
He trailed off, unable to find the words, and so Soraya provided them: “You were your family’s shame.” No wonder he had found her so easily at Golvahar. He knew where to look for someone who felt unwanted.
Something strange happened then. Perhaps Soraya only imagined it, but for a moment, Azad’s eyes changed—no longer cold and yellow, but the rich brown she remembered. And in that brief time, she saw in them the kind of self-loathing that seemed exclusively human. Once more, she became aware of the patches of skin showing through the scales, the pieces of Azad that refused to be swallowed up by the demon. She wondered if his transformation was even complete, or if he still woke sometimes to find another patch of skin covered in scales, another piece of himself gone.
“And then I met the div,” he continued, his voice hardening. “It’s much as you once told me—one night, when I went out riding in secret, I caught a div. But I didn’t want to take her to the palace with me yet. Instead, I kept the div trapped in a cave, and I returned every night to learn her secrets, hoping that I would discover something invaluable to present to my father. But you know as well as I do that when you learn a div’s secrets, the div learns your secrets, too. The div became my most constant companion, and so when she began to tell me that I would be a better ruler than my father or any of my brothers, I believed her. When she told me how furious I must be at my treatment, I became furious. She made me question whether the astrologist’s warning was even true, or if my father was lying to me for his own purposes.” He took a halting breath before continuing. “And so I approached a faction of powerful nobles and soldiers opposed to my father’s rule, and suggested they should help me replace him. I had decided that if I could not rule with the blessing of my father or the stars, I would defy them all, no matter whose blood I had to spill.”
Soraya didn’t know where to look—everywhere, she saw Azad, and so everywhere, she saw herself. She shut her eyes, but in the darkness behind her eyelids, she saw the young man she had known with blood on his hands, slaughtering everyone in his path to the throne. She tore her mind away from the image, reminding herself of her plan to find the feather.
She opened her eyes and asked, “And how did you … When did you become…?”
He hesitated, and when he spoke, his voice was hushed, like that of a child telling a secret. “I asked for this,” he said. “After my father’s and brothers’ deaths, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep control of Atashar. I had so little education on the subject, so I asked the div what I should do. She told me to tear out the heart of a div, and to bathe in the blood from that heart. I didn’t want to kill the div I had, and so I hunted down another, one with scales and claws and wings. I didn’t realize what would happen. I didn’t know…” He looked down at his hands—clawed and scaled, gnarled and bloodstained—and then looked up at Soraya, eyes pleading for understanding.
And she did understand, of course. It was so easy to imagine their places switched. She knew, too, why he had been so affected on the night of the dakhmeh, when she told him his story. Because it was not just his story that he heard, but his fears, his own strangled heartbeat, echoing back to him from someone else for the first time.
“You appeared as a human to me,” she said, returning to her plan. “Why don’t you do so all the time? Why would you choose to live as a div instead of a human?”
From the way Azad avoided her eye, she could tell he didn’t want her to know the answer. “I tried, for a time,” he said. “But the effect is temporary, and the price is not always easy to obtain.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“The blood from a div’s heart made me a div. I thought, then, that the opposite might be true as well.”
“The opposite—?” Soraya’s eyes widened in understanding. “Blood from a human heart?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “And it did work, but as I said, only for a short time. Little more than a month before I would need to repeat the process.”
Soraya grimaced and covered her mouth with her hand, remembering one of the more gruesome parts of the Shahmar’s story—that he would demand the sacrifice of two men every month, seemingly for no reason. And in a strange way, Soraya was grateful for the knowledge. The image of the ill-omened boy had become too strong and too familiar in her mind. She needed a reminder of his blood-soaked reign.
But then an even more unsavory truth occurred to her. “That means that before you returned to Golvahar, before I first saw you, you must have…”
He nodded. “I can still change form, but it will wear off soon.” He had been avoiding her eye, but now he looked at her, and he bristled at the revulsion on her face. “Besides, to live as a human would mean living as no one, as nothing, the way I once was. If that’s a human life, then I prefer to live as I am. As the Shahmar, I have the power to command a shah to his knees.”
The image of Sorush kneeling before him sent a welcome burst of anger through her, and before she could stop herself, she said, “And as the Shahmar, you lost your throne.”
One of his hands clenched and unclenched at his side. In a cold voice, he said, “There’s something you haven’t asked me yet, Soraya.”
Soraya’s pulse quickened. Had he seen through her line of questioning? Did he know she was going to ask about the feather next? “What question is that?”
“Ask me for the name of the div who turned me into the Shahmar.”
If Soraya felt a prickle of foreboding at his words, she ignored it in favor of relief that he didn’t know her true purpose. “Fine, then. What’s the name of the div who turned you into the Shahmar?”
His mouth twisted into a thin, cruel smile as he pronounced the name that Soraya should have expected, because it was the only name that would have meant anything to her, the name that would hurt her most:
“Parvaneh.”