Aunt Aliye told me you’re recovering.”
“I feel much better,” she said. “But where have you been? She wouldn’t tell me a thing.”
“You’re angry.”
“Oh no, my lord. Not at all.”
He was looking down at his hands, moving them restlessly upon something that gleamed silver. He looked suitably ashamed.
“Arwa,” he said. “Lady Arwa. I owe you an apology. I am sorry I have not visited. I have been unwell also, and…”
“Your wound,” she said. “Has it healed now?”
“Somewhat,” he said. “It still hurts. I gather that is to be expected, when you have been stabbed.”
Arwa rose up onto her elbows, then into a seated position. She leaned forward, clasping her hands, her head blessedly clear for the first time in… how long had she been here? Days?
“Is this where you grew up?” she asked, attempting to distract herself from her own distress, the moth-eaten gaps in her memory. From the cold pit growing in her stomach at the way he would not meet her eyes, the fragile hunch of his shoulders. “You told me your mother had a home beyond the palace.”
“My mother had her own establishment, but she came here regularly,” he replied. “They were good friends, she and Aunt Aliye. After my mother…” He smiled once more, thinly. “After. I found a way to continue to write to Aliye. There was a guardswoman who was kind enough to help me.”
“How many years since you last saw her?”
“Since my mother’s death. Perhaps before that.” A faraway look in his lowered eyes. “I did not know if she would recognize me, but she did.”
His hands paused, their restless motion held in check.
“Did you know you had the power to compel spirits? To use them to—save us?”
“It wasn’t compulsion,” said Arwa. “I only begged. I told you the truth, on the dovecote. Spirits saved my life in Darez Fort. I didn’t ask them to. In fact, I wanted them gone. Then I ate the ash of my ancestors, and I understood a little more of what the daiva are. Not monsters. Simply… my blood. They saved us because I asked, in their language and because they… wanted to. I think.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know,” Arwa said, voice sharp with frustration. “I know they vowed to protect the Amrithi. But I have no understanding of why they chose to protect me, when so many Amrithi have not been protected—have been beaten or murdered or driven from the Empire. There is so much I don’t know about what it means to be Amrithi. I only know what the ash has given me. I have sigils and stories. I have no context.”
“I think we need to speak of the ash too,” Zahir said. “You forgot yourself again.”
“Unusual circumstances, my lord.”
“You were not in the realm. You were in your own skin. And you still lost yourself. It has harmed you, no matter what you claim. Done something to you. I should never have… I…”
He exhaled and turned his head away from her, so she could see only his profile.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I know who I am now. No harm has been done.”
A bitten-off laugh.
“Lady Arwa, you can’t possibly believe that.”
“I do. In the end, Lord Zahir, whatever it has done to me, we are both alive because of it, and I am grateful for that.” Still, he wouldn’t look at her. “Now,” she said. “Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me why you won’t look at me. Tell me what has happened.”
One heartbeat. One more.
Finally, he turned to face her. The look on his face…
Even before he spoke, she felt dread rising through her limbs.
“Well.” His voice shook faintly. “You need to know. Perhaps you guessed. On the night we fled the palace, my father died.”
Her breath left her. She had known what the Emperor was—seen it. Frail and mortal and spiteful. But she had also worshipped him her whole life, taken comfort in his faceless, eternal image. Her grief was reflexive and undeniable.
“I am so very sorry,” she whispered.
“I do not know if he died peacefully, but you saw him near the end. No doubt Masuma saw to his care. But after he died, it seems Parviz was not willing to let the Emperor’s decision stand. He…”
Zahir bowed his head once more.
“Akhtar is dead,” said Zahir. “Nasir—I don’t know. But it was Parviz who arranged for their deaths, and my own. I’m sure of it. No traitors have been arrested, and only Parviz has loyal soldiers at his beck and call. Lady Arwa, he has proclaimed himself Emperor. He has had new coins struck to honor the dawn of his reign.” His restless fingers paused then. She knew now he held the new coin between them. “He has taken the Empire, against the wishes of his father, and claimed it is because the Gods blessed him with the power and might to do so.”
He clenched his fist around the coin.
“It is strange, to try to piece the truth of that night together,” Zahir said, a sudden bite in his voice. “I am used to mending knowledge, taking fragments and making them whole. But this…” He sucked in a breath. “I do not know Nasir’s fate. I do not know Jihan’s fate. I know only what Aliye has gleaned from patron gossip and from the Hidden Ones, what has been announced in imperial proclamations, and what I—we—saw on that night. Nothing, Arwa. I know nothing.”
Gulshera. If she had seen the soldiers walking the corridors, what would she have done? Had Parviz planned to lock Jihan and her women into their rooms, ensuring they would be under his direct control? Had all the women survived—Jihan’s attentive noblewomen, her widows?
So much unknown. All she and Zahir had was the knowledge of dead servants, and soldiers with bloody weapons, and the choice they’d made between certain death and a literal leap of faith.
He was right. They had nothing.
“I am not sure how to make my knowledge whole. And I am afraid if I do… Arwa. I am afraid of what I will find.”
There were tear tracks on his face. He did not even seem to be aware of them.
“You’re crying,” said Arwa.
“Ah.” He touched the back of his hand to his cheek. “I am.”
Arwa did not think. She placed her hand on his arm. Her head on his shoulder.
“I am so sorry,” she whispered, as if her apologies had any weight, any power to comfort him. “Weep, if you want.”
“I don’t want to weep.”
“Better to tell yourself it’s a choice,” she said. “Grief will drag you under whether you like it or not. So weep, Zahir. You have the right.”
He was frozen for a long moment, as if he couldn’t accept the comfort of her touch, or bring himself to move away from it. Arwa understood. Neither of them was good at the business of being vulnerable, of letting the softest blood of grief rise to the surface.
And yet the softness bloomed within her regardless, more easily than it ever had before, something gentle born from pain that had little place in the hard forge of her nature, when he leaned his chin against her hair, and breathed slow, ragged breaths, wet with grief.
One breath. Two. Three. Four. His breath finally softened.
They remained like that for a long time. How long, she didn’t know.
Eventually he lifted his head, and she lifted her own. His eyes were sticking with the salt of tears, his face wan from pain both physical and quite beyond the flesh.
“So,” Arwa said finally. “What will you do now?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and there was something strange in his voice. “I don’t know.”