Time passed interminably. For an endless stretch of hours Arwa sat behind Jihan and Gulshera as the women wept over the Emperor, as crying gave way to soft-whispered words of comfort, as Masuma gently fed him a tincture of poppies to lull him into an uneasy rest. Finally, the Emperor slept.
Slowly the men beyond the gauze began to drift away, until only the most stubborn courtiers remained. The guardsmen, not having the luxury of choice, continued to maintain their vigil, their gold-armored figures lining the walls.
Masuma rose to her feet, wincing with pain from having too long sat by her brother’s side. Jihan rose as well. With a respectful sweep of her head, Jihan veiled her face and turned to leave. Her women followed her, the briefly formed grand court of women cleaved in two once more.
It was deep night. As they entered Akhtar’s palace, Gulshera touched a hand to Arwa’s shoulder. Arwa drew away from her. She did not want to be comforted.
“I am sorry, Aunt,” said Arwa. “I want to be alone, to… to think.”
She began to walk away.
Arwa heard the rasp of embroidered silk behind her and felt a new hand on her arm, cold-fingered. Not Gulshera’s hand.
“Arwa,” said Jihan. “Come with me. You want to see him, don’t you?”
Jihan’s expression was utterly calm, but her eyes were red, her cheeks drawn. She wondered if Jihan had cried for her father or for Zahir, or for the both of them.
“Princess,” Arwa murmured. She followed in Jihan’s footsteps.
Jihan’s chambers were vast, lushly decorated with the scent of fresh flowers in the air. Usually Arwa would have stared about herself in awe at the beauty of the place, but she could not.
Zahir was standing in a stance Arwa recognized as the one he’d taken in Akhtar’s study: hands together, head slightly lowered and tilted.
He looked at Arwa. Looked at Jihan.
“She was searching for you,” Jihan said, nudging Arwa slightly forward, before sweeping farther into the room herself. “Worrying for you, Zahir.”
His mouth thinned. No doubt he was thinking of the last night they had entered the realm of ash together, just as Arwa was.
“Perhaps,” he said.
“Leave us,” Jihan said to the maidservants tidying the room, the guardswoman at the door. “All of you. Quickly now.”
The servants were gone in a flash.
Jihan’s eyes narrowed. Her voice came out of her suddenly furious, lashing out like a whip.
“Tonight, Zahir. Find the Maha’s ash tonight. Do you understand me?”
“Is my execution so close?” Zahir asked.
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“I am never dramatic,” said Zahir, with that cutting edge of feeling to his voice that Arwa knew so well. “I am being factual.”
“Factual, factual,” Jihan repeated bitterly. “If you spent less time thinking and more time doing, perhaps we would not be in this position.”
“I have done nothing but study, try—”
“Enough.” Her voice quelled him to silence. “Zahir, don’t you see? I have protected you, often at the cost of my own reputation. I have done it for love of you, as the brother I have acknowledged, chosen no matter what others may say. And I have done it because I believe that what you can do—what your mother studied and sought to do—has the power to restore the Empire’s glory.”
Jihan crossed the room. She stood near him; her voice was no longer furious, only fierce, almost pleading.
“I have tried to make Akhtar believe it too. I succeeded for a time. But I can’t make Akhtar protect you now. He no longer thinks you are of use. You are a hindrance. So you must act quickly, Zahir. You must prove yourself the Maha’s heir.”
“Maha’s heir?” Zahir laughed tiredly. “I can’t prove myself to be a thing that I am not.”
“But, Zahir, you could be. Father has named you such.”
“As a death sentence, Jihan.”
“As a test, Zahir. And one at which you can succeed, I’m sure of it. You are no Maha now, but if you find his truth, his secrets, a part of him will live in you, won’t it? A part of you will be him.”
His gaze slid to Arwa. She held it and returned it.
She did not know what he saw in her face. But when he turned back to his sister he said, “We have discovered—something.”
“Tell me.”
“The Maha used the Amrithi to build our Empire,” Zahir said. “He enslaved those with a special form of magic. He used their gifts to compel the Gods. To dream the Empire’s strength and glory.” A beat. “Did you know this, sister?”
Jihan said nothing.
“Ah,” Zahir said finally. “I see. Did you not think that information would be useful in my task?”
“Once you discovered the Maha’s ash, you would know anyway,” Jihan said. The fire was gone from her voice, which was suddenly, terribly cool. “So I thought. But you haven’t found the Maha’s ash yet, I take it?”
“Do not claim you were testing me,” Zahir shot back. “That is an excuse, and worse, a lie. It makes no sense, Jihan. You have trusted me with so much. Why not this?”
“Because you have a soft heart,” snapped Jihan. “You wept for weeks after your mother’s death.”
“I was a child.”
“You still feel far too much. You have no idea what it is like here at court, Zahir, the dangers I face, the spite my brothers hurl at one another and the world. You crumble when Akhtar shows you the smallest cruelty—you lack the skills to defend yourself. Lady Arwa had to save you last time.”
Arwa bit her tongue hard enough that she tasted iron. That is not what happened, not at all. She must have moved, must have flinched, because Zahir was turning toward her, mouth parted, a furrow between his brows—then Jihan touched his face, and held him still.
“Zahir. Look at me, dear one.” Her voice softened. She clasped his face, ever so gentle. “Ever since your mother passed, I have tried to protect you. I always have, have I not?”
“You have.”
“I have only ever wanted to protect you: from our father, from court, from yourself. In truth, I have kept secrets from you because I am soft too,” she confessed. “I couldn’t bear to see you—hurt. Or burdened. As I am burdened. I wanted to protect you from this as I have always protected you from all things.”
Arwa looked at Jihan’s glistening eyes, the softness of her face.
Oh, the princess was a politician in truth. She lied so very beautifully.
Zahir nodded, once. It was enough. Jihan lowered her hands.
“Besides,” she said. “The knowledge of how the Amrithi were utilized—that secret belongs to select people. The imperial family. The mystics. Our Maha. No one else.”
Zahir did not flinch.
“Not to the Maha’s heir, Jihan?”
“Find his ash, and then you’ll be his heir. I’ll lay all the knowledge you like in your hands, then.”
“I am curious,” Zahir said. Voice smooth as stone. “What if I find the Maha’s ash and discover he had nothing to preserve our Empire but Amrithi magic? What then, Jihan?”
“He knew everything,” she said. “He created the Empire from nothing. The Gods gave him the Amrithi. He was blessed. He will have answers for us, Zahir, you know it must be true. After all, who else is there, who can possibly save us?”
“That, I don’t know,” said Zahir.
“Please just find answers from him in the place beyond. Please.”
“Of course, Jihan. It has always been my goal.” He lowered his head, avoiding her gaze. His brow was still furrowed, jaw tight.
“Will you give your all to save the Empire, Lady Arwa?” Jihan asked.
Ah, you remember me, thought Arwa. But she did not allow herself to be viperous. She lowered her own eyes demurely.
“Princess, I will give everything.”
“Good.”
Jihan did not touch Arwa, but her voice was cold-fingered regardless, and made Arwa shiver as if a chill, proprietary hand had passed over her soul. “You should give everything, Lady Arwa. Your fate and Zahir’s are intertwined now, after all. Whatever befalls him, befalls you.”
It was a threat. And a promise.
Your fates are intertwined.
She should have realized the significance of the easy way Jihan had allowed her to see Akhtar’s furious ugliness, the cracks in his nature; her own drunken mirth; Zahir’s vulnerable throat.
She had never planned for Arwa to leave.
Arwa had not known. She had not considered it, in truth, only thrown herself headlong into her own destruction. Even now she could find nothing inside herself that called her to fear for herself. Instead she felt strangely hysterical, as if grief and horror had carved away what little good sense she had.
“All this time,” murmured Zahir. “All my study, and yet Jihan hid the truth from me. How did she expect me to save the Empire, when I worked with nothing but a shadow of knowledge?”
Arwa laughed. She couldn’t help but laugh.
This, at least, she could answer.
“Because you are a tool, Lord Zahir. A tool does not need to know why it does what it does. It need only—be used.”
Oh, Arwa knew all about being fashioned into a thing that had utility. A good noblewoman had to be useful, or so she had been taught, all her life. And she had embraced her utility, after the hermitage—embraced a soldier’s purpose, one that provided her direction without demanding thought from her.
“Too much knowledge gives a person power,” she added. “Too much knowledge forces people to think. And choose.”
“A tool,” he murmured. There was a long silence. She listened to his breath, the tread of his footsteps, as they walked across the gardens. “I suppose that is the price of a—home.”
Arwa laughed again. Soft, almost drunkenly. She felt dizzy with strangeness.
“You live in a tomb. That is not a home.”
“Don’t,” he said. “Please.”
Arwa fell silent. She could not say she was sorry. She wasn’t. She was still uneasy with him, after their last night in the realm of ash. But she had seen the way his father had treated him. She had seen how Jihan loved him. Used him.
You deserve more than this, she wanted to say. But she already knew he would not agree, and there was something brittle about his face and the turn of his head that kept the words from passing her lips.
“Jihan likes to use my tears as evidence of my softness,” said Zahir. “She doesn’t understand that I wept when my mother died not out of grief alone, but because I wanted the Empress to pity me. I needed her to consider me valuable, but I could not make the mistake of my mother and be too strong, you understand? I had to be weak enough to keep. And to love.”
“I understand that very well,” Arwa said.
“Jihan thinks I am soft-natured. Akhtar thinks I am a stain upon his name. My father thinks I am a pretty, troublesome trinket, like my mother was to him. But they do not know my nature as I do.” His voice was low now, almost contemplative. “I am nearly certain I could have found the Maha’s ash long ago, if I had allowed myself to take the logical steps that lay before me. All it would have taken was a handful of unwilling Amrithi. Jihan could have smuggled them in as servants. The bodies of the dead, to be consumed or burned, to build a bridge. Experiment after experiment, until the Maha’s ash was found. It would have been a swifter way, albeit bloodier. But I would have told myself it was for the Empire’s good, and I would have slept well enough in time.”
He looked up at the sky. The dark of it reflected back in his eyes.
“But I kept my theories to myself. I only told Jihan that I would try starvation. She pressed for more. I told her an Amrithi-blooded apprentice, a person trustworthy and clever, would perhaps be of help to me. I told her, if you cannot trust my soul to them, they will not do. And I thought she would find nothing.”
But here I am, thought Arwa. She could not speak. Horror had stoppered her throat.
“You have shown me what the Maha is, Lady Arwa. All my life I have worshipped him, revered him. I thought he was greater than all of us—infinitely wiser in all ways. And now I know better. I fear…” He paused, holding his breath for a moment, as if he did not want to let the words go. “I fear how like him I am, in the precise and cruel part of me that I revile. I fear that in my nature, he and I are the same.”
“You are not,” Arwa said sharply.
He lowered his head and looked at her with an expression that was entirely vulnerable, entirely flayed open, as if he were the gentle child who had wept on his mother’s death, and not the sharp-edged not-prince he was, built for learning the world by paring it down to its bloodied bones.
“You don’t know that. You don’t know my heart.”
“When you indulge in slavery and cannibalism, I’ll rethink my assessment. Evidence, my lord. You know the value of it.”
“Experience of thought and feeling is evidence in its own right.”
“Do you want me to provide you forgiveness for your thoughts? Because I will not. You will need to make peace with your own heart, Lord Zahir. It’s no business of mine.”
Arwa was no stranger to dark thoughts, to fury and viciousness and bloodlust. But his confession should nonetheless have made her flinch. But she could not. She had read books at his side, worn a shawl embroidered by his hands. He had taught her and studied with her and held her when she woke screaming, the dead in her skull. And more than that—more than all of it—he had treated her as an equal. Apprentice, he called her, but in the white-gray expanse of the realm of ash, he had wound his soul’s roots with her own, and in the world of nighttime and lantern light he had listened to her theories with the respect due to a fellow scholar.
Zahir inclined his head, a gesture of acknowledgment. Still, he looked troubled.
“My father has attempted to weave a trap for me,” he said eventually. “He thinks I will fail, that I will prove myself unworthy of the title, and my death will end all rumors surrounding my name. Akhtar will rule without rumors to hound the stability of his throne. Even if I succeed and find the Maha’s ash, it will not be enough. Akhtar will take my knowledge, and ensure I die swiftly. I am a threat that cannot be allowed to remain. To survive, I would need to be—worshipped. Holy. And powerful, drenched in terrible magic, in blood, the leash of faith in my hands. I would need to be the Maha’s heir in truth. Whatever you may say, Lady Arwa, I know what I am capable of. If I wanted to—if I chose to—I could do it. I could prove myself to be his scion. And that, Lady Arwa, I cannot do. I will not. I would rather embrace death.”
Zahir might have thought his father had set him a trap, but Arwa could only think of the whispers of the nobility and the gossip of the widows, the fears the people of the Empire suffered, in the void left by the Maha’s death. Their faith needed a focus. They needed someone to believe in—something to hold at bay the terrors of the curse that lay upon the Empire.
Zahir did not see it, perhaps. He had not walked the political realm as Arwa had. Even now, he did not see his own family, the beating heart of imperial politics, with eyes unclouded by hunger and love.
The Emperor had named Zahir Maha’s heir, and now no other claimants would be able to rise and seize the faith and power the Maha had once commanded. Whether Zahir failed or succeeded, they would use him all the same: make a hollow puppet of him, a symbol and a tool to support their power. They would hold the tale—and the flesh—of the Maha’s heir in their chains.
Arwa swallowed. Her chest felt very tight.
“Then what,” she said, “will you do now?”
They walked into his workroom together.
“Lady Arwa.” Zahir’s own voice was careful. “Your father. Would you return to him, if you could?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I am not—entirely without resources,” he said. “I could arrange—that is. The possibility of you returning home. Despite appearances, I have not always been enclosed here. When my mother was the Emperor’s mistress, I was raised among her own people. Until the Maha’s death, and her own, I lived outside the palace.”
He turned to her. The lamps were guttered. She could not see his face any longer and that was… strange.
“I am admitting something to you that even Jihan does not know,” he told her. “From time to time I still communicate with my mother’s people. The Hidden Ones. There is a servant who…” He shook his head, suddenly guarded once more. “No matter. But if you wish to leave, if you wish to survive—as I hope you do—it can be arranged.”
“A kind offer, I think,” said Arwa. She tried not to think of her father. Her mother. “But my father has already paid the price, once, for protecting an Amrithi-blooded daughter. I won’t ask him to do so again.”
“Lady Arwa.” A released breath. “If you will not return to your father, I can still arrange for you to leave. You deserve to survive.”
Would she die, if she remained? She had no worth in the tale of the Maha’s heir. No worth beyond her use as a resource: a vessel of blood. A lever to ensure Zahir’s compliance.
Perhaps, then. Perhaps.
“I hope you wish to survive too, Lord Zahir,” she said. “If you have the means to leave here, you should.”
“I may be no more than a tool, after all,” he said, voice soft, “but I am needed here. I have a job to do. I still believe in its worth.”
“Still?”
“Still.”
“Well. You cannot do the job without me. Unless your family have a secret store of Amrithi blood to utilize?”
“As far as I know, they do not.” A faint laugh, sharp at the edges. “But of course, I know very little.”
She heard him move away from her. She saw the silhouette of his body in the murky night darkness as he moved to light the lanterns around the room.
“You wish to do this, even believing your brothers will see you dead for it?”
He lit the rest of the lanterns, one by one, without answering her. Then he leaned back against the wall, head bowed, heavy with exhaustion.
“Yes,” he said finally. “But it is my choice.”
She nodded, although he was not looking at her.
“I keep thinking of the Amrithi,” she said. “My ancestors. And I have wondered, since then… I’ve wondered what to do.” She curled and uncurled her scarred palm. “I have worshipped the Maha all my life. And yet…”
She thought of the Amrithi. The feel of Nazrin’s tears clogging her throat. She thought of her own sister, dead. Her own father, poisoned by loss, and her mother poisoned by disappointment, never quite the same again.
She thought of Kamran. Of Darez Fort. Of fear burrowing into her skin, the slick terror of a walking nightmare.
She thought of two worlds, feeding on one another’s tragedy.
The Empire was corrupt, but it was home. The bitter knowledge of bloodied foundations and bloodied consequences swam through her skull.
“Then this is my choice, my lord: I will not leave.”
His head rose, finally.
“You have given me the opportunity to see the realm of ash,” he said. “For that, Lady Arwa, I am grateful. More grateful than I can say. But now, I may have chosen this path but—you. No.” He shook his head. “You do not deserve to die, Lady Arwa. You can still live.”
“I am not afraid,” Arwa said.
“I know,” said Zahir, a strange twist of a smile upon his face. “I wish you were.”
She could not understand his expression—she only knew that it made her heart flutter in an unwanted fashion. So she clenched her hands to fists and said, “You are not the only one allowed to make terrible choices, Lord Zahir. Do not deny me my right to be a fool.”
“You do not need to sacrifice yourself. You could be—you are—so much more.”
“So are you, Lord Zahir. And yet here we are.”
He closed his eyes, fierce furrow in his brow. Then he looked at her once more. Said, “If you change your mind. If you want to go, if you doubt even for a moment…”
“I will tell you,” said Arwa. “I promise.”
“Then,” he said, “I suppose all we can do is continue to try.”
The both of them did the only thing they could, now that they had made the choice to face their fate. They entered the realm of ash.
Again, Arwa felt the tug of the realm—the yawning, breath-stealing deep of it—before the tea was drunk or the fire lit and blooded. The ash in her head loomed large. But she said nothing to Zahir, only followed the parameters of the ritual, and entered sleep.
They moved through the realm of ash, from Arwa’s storm to Zahir’s forest of great trees and shadows. They moved from forest to desert, over broken bodies, limbs smooth as stone. They moved farther than they ever had before. In the swirling storm, Arwa thought she saw her sister once more, a distant silhouette wreathed in shadow with a familiar braid flung over its shoulder. Brown, living skin. Head turning, as if to the sound of a voice. Arwa’s heart twisted with hurt, a terrible knot. She looked away.
She could not indulge her grief. Not now.
Abruptly, Zahir stopped.
“I cannot go farther,” he said.
“Can’t or won’t?” asked Arwa.
“Can’t.” He held his hand before him. Around the blood roots, his hand had faded; light poured through shattered facets of flesh that barely resembled the shape of fingers, of a wrist, of a palm. “This feels,” he said, “like an end.”
He stared into the distance.
Then: “Your blood, the fire built from the dust of Irinah—none of it is enough. We cannot do it.”
“Pull back with me,” she said softly. “Let the roots take you home.”
They returned to the waking world. Rose to their feet. Arwa grabbed the water carafe as Zahir rubbed his knuckles over his closed eyes, frowning and thoughtful.
When she offered him the water—after drinking some herself—he said, “We need to go to Irinah. Nothing else will work. Nothing else will be swift enough for our need.”
“And you think,” Arwa said, all even disbelief, “that anyone is going to allow you or me to visit Irinah? To leave the palace, after what the Emperor said of you?”
“I can ask Jihan,” he said.
“She has no more power than she did before, my lord.”
“She is now the head of the household of the Emperor’s heir,” Zahir replied. “And there is no other way to reach the Maha’s ash. I can only ask. And hope.”
He did not sound convinced. Arwa was not either.
“I will talk to her,” he said. “Don’t worry, Lady Arwa.”
Of course she worried.
She went to the dovecote tower to watch the dawn. She saw no bird-spirits there this time: only pale light rising in the distance, and the city of Jah Ambha spread out before her, beyond the expanse of water surrounding the sprawl of the imperial palace.
When she returned to her own room she thought unceasingly of the realm of ash, of the defeated slump of Zahir’s shoulders, of Ushan and Nazrin and all the ghosts within her still, their ash in her skull and soul. She thought of her sister’s ghost, a thing so horribly alive that it filled her gut with poisonously false hope.
Zahir had told her the dangers of the realm of ash, of breaking away from the protection of shared blood roots. Well, Arwa was now reaping the consequences of her own foolishness. She had broken away from him, felt the ash of her broken ancestors, and carried it with her now. She could not shake it. Sometimes, in truth, the world of the ash—of Ushan and Nazrin, of her sister smiling and alive—felt more real than Arwa’s own mortal life.
What the ash had done to her was no different from the way Zahir could now embroider, could shape familiar stars. And yet it was entirely different. Traumatic. A colder, more difficult burden.
What would it be like holding the Maha in his skin? Worse. To know what it was to be Amrithi was to know family and love, and persecution and fear, rites of worship and magic in the blood. To know what it was to be the Maha…
A shudder ran through her at the thought. The ash rose within her too. She felt its shadow steal through her veins. Her flesh.
She held her hands before her. The one scarred, the other nearly unmarked. She turned them before her. She remembered the shape of a knife in her hand. The shape of sigils her ancestors had used to speak to the daiva in their own language. She reached for that knowledge now, out of curiosity, out of a fear that was half hunger: How much still remained with her?
She felt the ash rise higher within her, felt knowledge bloom, somehow sharp as glass. A rite was a form of worship. A rite communicated with the daiva, worshipped the daiva. Feet firm to the ground, tying one to earth. Hands to the air, to touch sky. The body as the conduit between.
Arwa raised her hands. Widened her stance.
Breathing deep, she moved. Sigils flickered on her fingers, hands drawing into unfamiliar shapes. Muscles unused to the actions took a hairsbreadth of a moment to respond, but respond they did.
It was only when she stopped, panting, that she knew what she had done, cobbled together from a patchwork of ash. The Rite of Shelter. A safe harbor from the storm. A rite Nazrin had performed, to protect her children, foolish as the hope was.
She had prayed for safety with the same foolish hope as her ancestors. She stared down at her hands, then drew them up to her face, holding them to her skin. In the cover of her own palms, she felt shielded from the weight of her own crushing fear.
I don’t want to die, she thought. But I can’t leave. I won’t.
I chose this path. I will see it to the end.