For what must have been the fifteenth time, Soraya drew her shawl more tightly around her face, hoping that the shawl and the steadily dimming light would make her appear little more than a shadow. She could have been any young woman sneaking off with a handsome soldier—or so she hoped.
Her own personal handsome soldier was waiting for her outside the walls of the golestan, as they had arranged. As soon as she left behind those familiar walls, he was at her side, taking her arm.
“Are you ready?” Azad whispered to her.
She pretended not to hear. It wasn’t even the thought of the dakhmeh that scared her most—simply leaving the palace where she had spent her entire life was enough to send her heart racing. She was about to step off the edge of the world she had always known. Could anyone ever be ready for that?
Their timing was convenient, she supposed. The garden was alive with music and celebration tonight, the night before the shah’s wedding. The crowd wasn’t as large as the one on Nog Roz, since only members of court were attending, but it was large enough to let Soraya and Azad blend in as they made their escape.
Soraya gripped his arm tightly as they walked through the garden, trying not to flinch every time someone passed by them. She kept looking around her, sure that her mother would appear, or that someone would collide with her and accidentally touch her skin. She almost felt like she was walking through a painting or a tableau on a tapestry—like she was intruding in a world where she didn’t belong and didn’t quite fit, and it was only a matter of time before someone noticed her. But Azad confidently steered her around the celebrants as they danced or laughed or ate together, and no one paid the two of them much notice.
Finally, they neared the palace gates, and Azad told her to wait as he approached the guards standing watch there. She knew why he didn’t want her to hear him—she could tell what Azad must be saying from the knowing smirks on the guards’ faces. But whatever Azad had said evidently worked, because soon he was waving her forward, and she was hurrying past the guards to join him.
And then they were through, looking down the steps cut into the small hill that would take them into the center of the city. It really did feel like stepping off the edge of the world. Or was it the other way around? Was she finally stepping into the world? Soraya turned her eyes above, to the stars that were beginning faintly to appear. Looking out at the city made her feel disoriented and exposed, but when she looked up, she could imagine herself swimming in the stars, sinking beneath the surface of the sky to some hidden depth. Maybe in a world turned upside down, she wouldn’t be poisonous anymore.
Azad was standing motionless a few steps ahead of her, and she tore her eyes away from the sky to see what was occupying his attention. But it was her—he was watching her, his eyes brighter than the stars. She returned his gaze, and her fingertips tingled through her gloves.
“Are you ready?” he asked for the second time, and reached slowly for her hand.
She closed the gap, letting her gloved fingers entwine with his. “I am now.”
Azad led her into the emptying streets. The city was beginning to quiet down for the night, but there were still enough people out to make Soraya cautious—though not so many to overwhelm her, as on Nog Roz. And as they neared the city square, the streets widened, and she began to breathe more freely.
It was when they reached the square that it struck her how strange it was to be inside this space that she had only seen from above and afar for so long. Here were the block-shaped homes and buildings whose roofs had lit up for Suri, and there were the archways that led into and out of the square. Everything was both familiar and foreign, both known and unknown.
Azad must have noticed the way she was looking up and around, and he paused to point out a tall, imposing building. “That’s the courthouse,” he whispered to her. “We’re about to go through the bazaar now.”
Soraya peered down the long avenue at the people closing down their stalls and shops, imagining how it must look and sound during the day with bustling crowds and merchants calling out to potential customers. Only the scents of the bazaar lingered; she thought she caught a hint of rose water in the air, and a little while later, the coppery tang of blood mixed with leather.
“Is this where the tanning bazaar is?” she asked Azad, and he looked at her in surprise.
“The butchers and the tanners are down there,” he said, pointing to a set of steps that led to a narrower alley. “This is where the rug bazaar would be.”
These stalls were all empty now, but she imagined this street lined with rugs and tapestries—the bright colors of the dyes, the sound of looms clacking as they turned bolts of raw silk imported from the east into the beautiful patterns of the rugs Atashar was famous for.
“I wish I could see it,” she whispered into the night.
The night didn’t respond, but Azad did. “You will. I’ll show it to you when your curse is gone.”
He led her down another set of streets, past flat-topped houses with walled orchards. She heard the sound of children laughing from behind one of them.
“We’re almost at the city walls,” Azad said. His grip on Soraya’s hand was tight, his gaze focused ahead, his gait steady and quick. Soraya’s heart lurched. It had been easy to forget their real destination—that they were leaving this hub of life and light for a place of death and shadows.
But Soraya wasn’t capable of fear right now. She had been afraid to come into the city at all, but this outing had quickened her blood and quieted her fears. She was here, outside the palace, in the world, and she had harmed no one. She could live without someone or something dying for it.
“You’re not tired, are you?” Azad asked her, his pace slowing slightly.
“No,” she said. “I’ve never felt less tired in my life.”
She thought she saw a flash of a smile, and they continued on.
They moved toward the setting sun, and by the time they reached the large wooden door set into the eastern wall of the city, that sun had nearly dipped below the horizon. The night guard took a glance at Azad’s red tunic and let them pass without question.
It would be another hour’s walk to reach the dakhmeh, which stood alone on a low hill, a safe distance from the living. Azad had brought a lantern with them, and as the sun disappeared, he lit and raised it to light their way. The light didn’t extend to the dakhmeh, however, and so all it did was illuminate the dry, cracked ground around them.
Soraya had thought moving through the city would be the hardest part of this journey, but with each step that took her farther away from the city walls, her breathing became more and more labored, as if a weight were pressing down on her chest. She tried to look back to see how far they had come, but the city was lost to the night now. Outside the lantern’s wavering ring of light, there was only darkness all around them, stretching on without end.
On the roof, the whole world had been laid out in front of her, and she had been able to map the distance from the city to the dakhmeh easily. But now that she was no longer watching from above, she felt like she had shrunk down to the size of one of the insects in her garden, walking an impossibly long trail in a world that was too big for her. Had she found the boundaries of her room and her garden suffocating before? Had she felt she couldn’t breathe in the passages behind her walls? She could have laughed at herself—first it was not enough, and now it was too much.
Azad must have heard her increasingly ragged breathing, because his voice broke through the silence and the darkness, saying only, “Tell me a story.”
His words brought her out of her head, and she looked at his profile, lit softly by the lantern light. He was trying to distract her, to make the journey shorter, and she was grateful to him for it.
And so she told him the story of the princess who let down her hair for her lover to climb, and when it was over, Azad asked for another. This time she told the story of a brave hero stronger than ten men who bested dragons and rescued a foolish shah from the hands of divs.
She waited to hear him ask for yet another story, but this time he said, “Tell me your favorite story. The one you’ve read over and over again.”
Soraya wanted to protest that the first story she’d told had been her favorite—but it wasn’t the one she’d revisited the most over the years. It wasn’t the one that haunted her dreams night after night. It wasn’t the one that she felt was a part of her, so much so that she hesitated now, in case it would reveal too much of herself.
But as always, once the Shahmar entered her mind, she couldn’t think of anything else.
“There was and there was not,” she began, in a voice that seemed both hers and not hers, “a prince who was what every young man should be. He was handsome and courteous and brave, but he was also proud and curious. One day, the prince captured a div, but he didn’t vanquish it. Instead, he kept it locked up in a cave, and visited it every day, demanding the secrets of its knowledge.”
She paused, knowing both of them must be thinking of Soraya’s visit to the div locked away in the dungeon.
“Before long, the div convinced the prince that he would make a better ruler than his father or his elder brothers. And the young man agreed—after all, didn’t he know even the secrets of the divs? And so the prince slew his father and brothers, and took the crown for himself.
“The prince—now the shah—ruled for a time in peace, despite his bloody coronation. But he still visited the div, and over time, the prince noticed that he was changing. His bones shifted, his skin grew scaly and rough, and his heart grew violent. He hungered for war, for destruction, and he began to rule by terror and force, demanding the senseless sacrifice of two men every month to quench his desire for bloodshed. The act of murder that had made him king had now also twisted him into a div himself—”
Her voice broke, and she froze where she was, trying to collect herself, her throat burning as she tried to hold back angry tears. From beside her, she heard Azad say, “I’ve heard the rest. You don’t have to go on.”
The rest of the story was about her ancestor, the adopted son of the simorgh, who had led a rebellion against the Shahmar and chased him off into exile, where he was either killed by other divs or lived long enough to take his revenge against the simorgh, depending on which version you believed. And yet, even though that was her family’s origin, that wasn’t the part of the story Soraya felt most connected to.
“Why does that story affect you so?” Azad asked her, his voice gentle.
She didn’t want to answer, but she wouldn’t have begun the story at all if she hadn’t been prepared to face this question.
She held her arms out to him, pulling back her sleeves so they both could see the dark green veins running down her wrists. “Do you have to ask?” she whispered. “Doesn’t it sound familiar to you?” She pulled her sleeves back down. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve wondered if the same thing would happen to me—if the poison was only the beginning, if I was going to grow more and more dangerous until I wasn’t human anymore.” She had thought she would have to fight to get the words out, but she found now that it was easy to say them. They were less frightening aloud than they were in her mind.
“And so I told myself,” she continued, “that as long as I was good, never angry or envious, I wouldn’t become a monster like the Shahmar.”
Azad swallowed, his eyes moving over the veins on her face and neck. “And have you been successful?”
She lowered her head, looking for reassurance from the cracks in the earth. But the way they branched out reminded her too much of her veins and the poison inside them. “I don’t know,” she said. She thought of all the dead insects in her garden, of the night she had been tempted to hurt Ramin, of amber eyes staring in the dark. “I try to hold myself back from doing any real harm, but sometimes I feel like my thoughts are steeped in poison, and that it’s only a matter of time before I lose control over them … or over myself. I dream about it sometimes—I see myself transforming into something else, and the Shahmar stands over me, laughing—” She shut her eyes, but in doing so, she only conjured up the image of the Shahmar.
She hadn’t realized she’d been plucking at her gloves until Azad put his hand over hers, stilling her anxious movements. “Look at me, Soraya.”
Her eyes opened, and instead of the Shahmar’s triumphant face, she saw only Azad. His gaze was focused on her with an intensity that made her breath catch, the flame from the lantern flickering in his eyes in a way that reminded her of Parvaneh. The furrow in his brow made him seem almost angry, and she tried to look away, but his hand tightened over hers and she held still. “Stories lie,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “You’re not a monster.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know me,” she said, even though he knew her better than most by now. “I must seem so small to you, so insignificant, hiding behind walls and layers of fabric, more a story than a person. But there are parts of me you don’t know, parts you haven’t seen.”
“I don’t think you’re small or insignificant,” he said. His gaze softened, solemn rather than fierce. “I think you have so much power within you that it scares you, and that you make yourself small on purpose because you don’t know what you’ll become if you ever stop.”
He let go of her hands, and neither of them spoke as they continued on toward the dakhmeh. Their trek was almost over, and before long, Soraya saw the shadowy cylinder on a hill up ahead. The sight of it should have filled her with dread or disgust, but she barely paid it notice. She was repeating Azad’s words to herself over and over again until their cadence matched her heartbeat.
It was only when they had come to a stop at the foot of the hill that Azad’s words lost their enchantment. The dakhmeh loomed over them, and Soraya’s stomach lurched in revulsion. The wrongness of being here—of being here alive—settled over her, coating her skin like fine grains of sand. She was breathing shallowly, not wanting to inhale the contamination of death in the air.
As they neared the top of the hill, Soraya saw a pale orange light glowing from inside the dakhmeh. I was right, she thought. She supposed it could be a different yatu, someone other than the false priest, but she couldn’t help feeling that whoever was inside had been waiting for her all along.
She kept expecting Azad to tell her she could turn back, that she didn’t have to go through with this, but he didn’t, and she wasn’t sure she wanted him to. Instead, to her surprise, she was the one who offered a way out. “You should wait here.”
Azad shook his head. “I can’t do that. We both go in or we both go back.”
There was the excuse she’d been waiting for to turn back, but Soraya knew she couldn’t take it, not when they had come this far. “My curse will protect me,” she argued. “I want to go in alone.” As soon as she said it, she knew it was true. There was an intimacy to this unraveling of her life that she didn’t want to share with anyone else.
He frowned at her, but he must have believed the resolve in her voice, because eventually he nodded. “I’ll stay close. If you need me, call for me.”
Soraya agreed, and after taking one last breath of the cool night air, she continued onward. She had never seen the inside of a dakhmeh, of course—only the corpse-bearers came inside—and so she walked in expecting the worst. Would there be corpses laid out, decayed or half eaten by scavenger birds? Would a yatu be committing some unholy ritual with parts of the dead? Every story meant to scare children away from the dakhmeh swam through her mind. If you step into the dakhmeh, or if you linger too long around a dead body, then the corpse div Nasu will find you and make you fall ill.
But as soon as Soraya stepped inside the dakhmeh, she no longer felt any terror or disgust—the only sensation was one of overwhelming emptiness.
The dakhmeh had two layers, she discovered, and she was standing on the top one, a jutting platform that formed a ring around the dakhmeh’s perimeter. And all along the platform were rectangular indentations, the right size for a grave. To her intense relief, each of the shallow graves was empty. There was no roof, of course, in order to grant access to the birds, and so the air was not as stale and foul as she had expected, and the stars still shone overhead.
The platform gently inclined downward to a pit at the center of the dakhmeh. Soraya carefully made her way down the footpath between the graves. There were three rows of them, and when she passed the third row, with the smallest graves, she realized these must be for children.
At the end of the platform, she hesitated. She saw a fire burning in the pit below, the source of the light they had seen from outside. But otherwise, she saw nothing and no one, and she began to regret telling Azad to stay behind.
Why should you ever be afraid of anyone? she heard Parvaneh’s voice asking her. And she was right, wasn’t she? Soraya was always the most dangerous person in any room. With this surge of confidence, Soraya sat on the edge of the platform and slid forward to land on the ground below.
A fine white powder rose up from the ground with the impact of her landing, and now Soraya knew what happened to the bones once the vultures finished their meal.
In the firelight, Soraya could make out the shapes of grates set into the wall—drains, she supposed, for rainwater. She went closer to the fire and found a waterskin and an empty bowl with the remains of some kind of stew. As Soraya began to wonder where the owner of these objects was, she heard a voice, like stone scraping against stone, from behind her.
“Who are you?” came the voice—a voice she recognized. “What are you doing here?”
Soraya turned at once to face it. In the shadow under the platform was a grizzled man, his gray hair and beard unkempt, his eyes red. He was not as tall as she remembered, but still, the sight of him made her want to shrink back, to escape the judgment of both him and the Creator. Why should you ever be afraid of anyone? she reminded herself again, and her fists clenched at her sides, grounding her.
“Do you remember me?” she asked him in a steady voice.
He stared at her blankly at first, but then he sucked in a breath and said, “Show me your face.” He came toward her. “Show me if you are who I think you are.”
Fear returned to her, but still she turned toward the firelight, removed her shawl with shaking hands, and pulled her hair away from her face to show the old man the rivers of poison under her skin, made visible by her rapidly beating heart.
His eyes shone when he saw her face, and he nodded slowly. “I remember you, shahzadeh,” he said. “I remember that night.” He snickered. “I frightened you, didn’t I?”
Her face burned with anger. I could reach out and touch him right now, she thought, and then see which one of us is more frightened. But no, she couldn’t harm him. She still needed him. “Have you been hiding away here all this time?” she said. “I thought yatu were more powerful than that. Can’t you use your magic to help you escape?”
His smile turned sour. “Why do you think no one has ever found me here?” He spread his arms wide. “I lay a spell on the dakhmeh’s boundaries, to keep away those who mean to do me harm.” His arms fell. “But without my books, I can do little else but cast petty curses on the villagers using the remains of their relatives.”
The word curses echoed in her mind like the hissing of a snake, reminding her of her purpose. “I could find your books for you, if they haven’t been burned,” she said.
He let out a skeptical snort. “I assume you want something in return,” he said.
“As high priest, you would have known the location of the simorgh’s feather. Tell me where it is.”
If her request surprised him, he didn’t show it. He only briefly considered her offer before nodding. “The simorgh’s feather is the heart of the Royal Fire,” he said.
“It’s inside the fire?” Soraya thought of the iron grate shielding the fire, of the priests who stood guard day and night to ensure no one extinguished it. If she could find a way to be in the fire temple alone, then perhaps Soraya could use some tool to take the feather from the fire. Parvaneh had said she would be able to return the feather once she was finished with it—Soraya could discreetly replace it once she knew the answer to lifting her curse. She could be free without betraying her family. Something like joy was beginning to ripple through her.
But as if he could hear the direction of her thoughts, the yatu was shaking his head. “You don’t understand. The feather is not inside the fire. It’s part of the fire. In any other fire, the feather would simply burn, but in the Royal Fire, it becomes part of the flames, giving the fire the power to protect the shah.”
Soraya frowned. “The fire protects the shah?”
The yatu nodded. “As long as the feather is part of it.”
Already her joy was fading away, replaced by a cold, creeping dread making its way through her limbs, her body understanding before her mind did. “And so the only way to take the feather…”
The yatu said what she could not: “… is to put out the fire.”
Those words extinguished Soraya’s last hope. Even if she replaced the feather, it wouldn’t matter. The feather alone couldn’t protect her brother, and the fire, with its many ritual sources, couldn’t be rebuilt immediately, leaving her brother vulnerable to attack for a dangerously indefinite period of time. The only way she could learn how to lift her curse was by endangering her brother and committing a crime the yatu had been sentenced to death for attempting.
The yatu was watching her. “Ah,” he said with mocking pity. “I didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear. Does that mean you won’t search for my books after all, shahzadeh?”
“Maybe you can still earn them,” Soraya answered, her voice hard. She had almost forgotten her distant hope that the yatu would know a way to lift her curse. If he knew the answer, then she wouldn’t need the feather after all. “Tell me how to lift the curse that makes me poisonous.”
This time, her request surprised him. He shook his head. “I thought you knew, shahzadeh. The feather is the way to lift your curse.”
Soraya thought she had misheard, her anxiety over the feather twisting the yatu’s words. But then the yatu continued: “The simorgh’s feather has restorative powers. In your case, you need the tip of the simorgh’s feather to break your skin. A prick of the finger would do.”
Soraya shut her eyes, her blood churning. “Thank you,” she murmured tonelessly, turning her back on the yatu. Something had gone numb within her. She was barely aware of her surroundings, the world blurring around her as if it were all an indistinct dream. No more thoughts tonight, she decided. No more hopes, either.
“Wait, shahzadeh,” the yatu’s gravelly voice called out behind her. “I give nothing for free. You owe me for the information I’ve given you.”
She waved a hand listlessly in his direction, saying, “I’ll search for your books and bring them to you if I find them, as promised.”
“I think you can offer me something better than that.”
She started to turn toward him to ask him what he meant, and then all she saw was something blurry from the corner of her eye—all she heard was the thud of an impact—
And as she tumbled to the dirty, bone-littered ground, all she felt was pain.