Realm of Ash

by Tasha Suri

  Arwa felt something like despair. It was easier to feel anger than whatever she felt now. She closed her eyes.

  She thought of what Kamran would have wanted. He would have wanted her to cry genteel tears. He would have wanted a soft widow, a widow who wilted gently beneath the weight of her grief.

  He would not have wanted Arwa. He never would have, if he had truly known her.

  There was something wrong with her. She knew it. There was something wrong with her nature, that she could not collapse and weep without feeling shame and fury, that she could not allow herself to like these women without wanting to flinch away from them. All her years of trying to mold herself into a gentle creature worth loving had amounted to nothing.

  Arwa opened her eyes. Rabia’s hand was still holding her own. The shadows were still flickering in their own silent dance. Nothing had changed. Crushing down the feelings rising up in her, the pain in her heart, Arwa spoke.

  “He was a brave man,” she whispered, in the softest voice she had. Tender as blood. “A very brave man. I miss him very, very much.”

  Gulshera invited her to breakfast once more. Shaky from lack of sleep, Arwa was grateful for the offer of tea and fritters and rice flecked with onions fried a deep gold. She sat at the table in Gulshera’s room, surrounded by letters neatly piled, and ate gratefully.

  Gulshera had a ring for her.

  “Here,” Gulshera said, handing it over. “You wear it on your thumb. It should protect your skin from the bowstring. Try it on.”

  She wondered if Gulshera had noticed the wound on her thumb, where she’d drawn blood with her dagger. She resolved to use her upper arm next time. That would be far easier to hide.

  The ring was bone, white and worn smooth from past usage. She slipped it on her thumb and flexed her fingers a little. It was thicker than any glittering ornament made of gold or silver that she’d ever worn before.

  “It fits perfectly,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “I have a dozen,” said Gulshera with a dismissive shrug. “We’ll see later if it helps your aim.”

  Perhaps it would. Arwa had none of Gulshera’s grace of fluidity, but she was improving in slow, undeniable increments. She’d managed to hit the easiest targets, and Gulshera was now encouraging her to improve her accuracy.

  “I know you spoke to Rabia,” Gulshera said, watching Arwa admire the ring. “I’m glad to see you recovering, Arwa.”

  Recovering. As if Arwa’s grief were a spell of illness she would rise out of, with careful enough tending. Forcing herself not to speak, she raised her tea to her lips.

  She had her mouth on the rim of the cup when she heard a sudden shriek. The cup jumped from her hands; hot liquid spilled over the table and the hem of her robe as she scrabbled back, cursing sharply. Gulshera rose to her feet.

  “What on earth,” she began.

  There was another yell. A rush of footsteps. Without another word, Gulshera turned and strode sharply from the room, turning toward the source of the noise.

  Arwa kneeled, wringing liquid from her hem. One of Gulshera’s letters had fallen to the floor in the chaos, and was sodden. She lifted it up. Paused.

  The seal was already broken, neatly parted.

  Without pausing to think—this, after all, was the kind of opportunity she’d been waiting for—Arwa opened the letter.

  Dear Aunt,

  If your widows mention unrest in the southern provinces, write to me immediately. Matters between Parviz and Akhtar are not proceeding as I hoped—

  Parviz. Akhtar.

  She knew those names.

  She turned the letter over again, pressing the seal back into place. Her fingers were steady. They should not have been.

  Footsteps thudded outside the door. Arwa dropped the letter, back to the floor where she had found it, and left the room.

  Other widows were also following the sound of shrieking and yelling. They walked toward the prayer hall. Its entrance was already stoppered up by a crowd of other curious women. Arwa tried to peer over their heads.

  “Step back, step back!” Roshana yelled, striding forward. For once, her voice was not soft with feeling. Her habitual worry had alchemized into an air of authority that made the crowd part unthinking around her, allowing her access into the prayer room. Through the gap, Arwa saw Gulshera already standing there, and the source of the noise.

  One of the two women who regularly drank and slumbered at the back of the prayer room was crying out hysterically. She was gabbling, fierce words tumbling from her mouth as she pointed at the lattice wall with one shaking hand.

  “It was there,” she was saying. “There, right there! Behind the lattice. Right there.”

  “You didn’t see anything,” another woman said to her, cutting through her words. “By the Emperor’s grace, if you insist in drinking as you do, of course you’ll imagine things—”

  “I know what I saw!”

  “Dina,” Gulshera said, placing a hand on the hysterical woman’s shoulder. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Please, dear,” Roshana added gently.

  Dina sucked in a shuddering breath. She dabbed the edge of her shawl hastily against her eyes. “It was just like the stories my mother told me when I was a little girl,” she said. “Just like that.”

  Arwa’s stomach clenched. Her face felt strangely numb.

  “It had black wings,” Dina was saying. “Gold eyes. Exactly how my own mother described it. It was a daiva. I know it.”

  Arwa took a small step back. She reached for her own shawl and drew it up around her face, as if she could ward off the press of eyes with cloth alone.

  “Did you see anything?” Gulshera asked the other elderly lady, who was standing back, bewildered, the bottle clutched in her hands.

  “No, I… I don’t know,” the woman said, nonplussed. “What was I meant to see?”

  Roshana focused on the task of calming Dina down, as Dina began to yell again that she was not lying, not drunk, that she knew what she had seen and why wouldn’t anyone believe her? The women around Arwa were muttering, their unease palpable.

  Arwa was not uneasy. She was not anything. Her mind was a perfect void of sound and light. She turned on instinct alone, easing her way through the crowd, slipping between bodies until she was free of them, alone in the hallway, walking soft-footed toward her room.

  She walked. And walked. And then she began to run.

  She flung the door to her room open. Nothing had moved. The bed was undisturbed. The lantern was unlit. She went to the window and lifted her own small effigy. The line of blood beneath it was undisturbed.

  She breathed in and out, in and out.

  The smell hit her a moment later: sweet and cloying, as rich as smoke and perfume on water.

  Incense.

  She shuddered and bent forward, sucking in great gouts of breath, letting them go. Her ribs ached. Her mouth was full of the scent of incense, the iron of blood.

  This was what she’d been waiting for, wasn’t it? She’d waited in Chand, when the courtiers had interrogated her and her mother had shorn her hair; waited in her palanquin, with blood daubed behind her ear and nausea roiling in her stomach; waited in the valley with a bow and arrow in her hands.

  She’d known, in her heart of hearts, that she could never run far enough. She’d always known.

  The daiva had found her again, after all.

  Arwa did not go to meet Gulshera. She lay in her bed, shivering, the embroidered blanket drawn up over her. It was easy to convince the maid who came to sweep her room that she was unwell, and to pass her apologies on to Gulshera. The maid returned later with lentil broth and bread for lunch, which Arwa left untouched. Hunger felt very far away from her.

  She lay still, as the sun faded from the sky and sunset colored the room in rose hues. She listened to the widows walk outside her room, voices hushed.

  She thought of all the secrets she’d carried all her life. She thought of the weight of her own his
tory, always heavy upon her shoulders. She thought of Darez Fort.

  Gold eyes. A hand on her sleeve. A circle of blood.

  A scar on her arm, silver in the lantern light.

  When the darkness finally came, and the hermitage fell silent, Arwa slipped out of bed. She tightened her sash around her dagger. She grabbed her bow and placed her quiver on her back. Last of all, she slipped the bone ring around her thumb. She had never been more armed in her life.

  Arwa looked out the window. She saw nothing swoop through the air, saw no flicker of eyes, or wings rustling in the black. But she saw bright points in the dark, and knew she was not the only woman with a lantern lit tonight.

  She thought of Rabia’s hand on her own, and Roshana’s damp worried eyes. She thought of Gulshera. Asima. A dozen grave-tokens, and a dozen more women clustered in the foyer on the night she arrived, staring at her with curious, bright eyes.

  She did not love these women. Not a single one. There was no love left in her to be spared. But she would not allow this hermitage to become the next Darez Fort.

  She stepped out of her room and closed her eyes. Her blood was pounding in her ears. She sucked in a breath and moved, one foot in front of the other, following the scent of incense, the tug of something beyond sense and flesh. Something in her blood.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When Arwa was a small girl, she’d had a sister.

  There were many things that Arwa was taught not to speak of, after her family’s fall from imperial grace: the loss of her father’s governorship; the severity of his illness; the faults in her own nature. But her sister had always been the greatest silence of all.

  Her sister, after all, was the reason their fall had begun.

  Mehr had been ten years her elder. When their father had still been Governor of Irinah, Mehr had been blessed with all the same comforts Arwa still remembered wistfully from her childhood: grand rooms and gold-armored guardswomen; an army of maidservants and silks and jewels in abundance. But Mehr had never been happy. She’d been a watchful and quiet figure, never quite at home in the walls of the Governor’s palace. The maidservants who cared for Arwa whispered about her sometimes, when Arwa’s nursemaid was not there to scold them for gossip. That one has bad blood. She’s no good. Even Lady Maryam can’t set her right.

  Mehr had never considered Maryam—their father’s wife, the woman who had raised Arwa as her own—her mother. Mehr had been old enough to remember their birth mother, the Amrithi mistress their father had banished a year after Arwa was born, and she clung fast to that memory. Clung fast, too, to the Amrithi heritage their birth mother had given her: rites of dance to worship the Gods. Rites of blood and dagger. No matter how Maryam punished her, no matter how she begged or cajoled Mehr to see reason, Mehr stayed firm. She would not give them up.

  Arwa had been taught from infancy what it meant to have Amrithi blood. Cursed, her mother had called her—out of love, Arwa had known it was out of love. Tainted.

  Amrithi were heathens. Barbarians. Blood worshippers. To be Amrithi was to be abhorred by good Ambhan people. To be Amrithi was to bring danger down on the family. So Maryam had always told her.

  And she had, of course, been proved correct.

  When Mehr revealed her heritage in some foolish way, the Maha’s mystics had come for her, taken her away to his temple upon the sands. And Maryam had spirited Arwa off to Hara. To keep you safe, she’d said. Until all is well in Irinah once more.

  But things were never well in Irinah again. Months later, her father arrived in Hara, stripped of his governorship, disgraced for having tried—foolishly, desperately—to convince his fellow nobles in supporting him to bring Mehr home. He’d grown sicker and sicker, shattered by his failure and by an illness no physician could cure, a malady that stole his strength and coordination and aged him, it seemed, nearly overnight.

  And then the Maha had died.

  Rumors began to swirl that the Emperor was executing traitors and heretics. Even mystics—once the loyal acolytes of the Maha himself—were being removed, if they were considered a threat to the Emperor’s power. Her mother dismissed all but the most trusted servants, closed the shutters, and remained up all night with only a lantern for light, in a vigil Arwa would repeat many years later for very different reasons.

  This is your sister’s fault, her mother had told her. Trembling and tired. If she had only been good, only listened to me…

  But there was nothing to be done, now.

  Arwa remembered the night she thought the Emperor’s men had finally come for her father. She woke to the sound of heavy footsteps in her room and saw the silhouette of a man at the window lattice. She had scrambled up onto her hands, heart in her throat, and seen that it was only her father. He stood on legs that trembled. Stood, and wept.

  She remembered—even now—that he held a letter in his hand. A missive crumpled by his fist.

  Your sister, he said, is gone. Gone forever.

  Then: I am sorry, Arwa.

  She had been angry with her sister for months and months before that—heartsick and furious at the way Mehr had failed to be good enough, and had left Arwa to learn to be a good Ambhan woman all on her own. But that night, she felt nothing but grief like a blow to the gut.

  For years after, she wondered how Mehr had died. Had she died alongside the Maha, in the unnatural cataclysm that had begun the Empire’s curse, or had he taken her life, as punishment for her heathen nature? She did not know. Her sister was a silence that grew and grew, blotting Arwa’s childhood out to a void of fear and loss.

  She grew into a woman sure of one thing alone: that revealing her Amrithi nature would be a death sentence to her family. She had to be the daughter her mother had reared her to be. Her mother’s voice followed her like a cold shadow.

  Amrithi have no respect for laws and vows. You must be obedient. Respectful. Lower your eyes, Arwa.

  Amrithi worship through frenzied dances and blood, like the barbarians they are. Distaste in her mother’s voice, in the curl of her lip. You must have faith in the Maha and Emperor above all else. Bow your head and pray.

  Be good, Arwa. Above all else, be good.

  Arwa had been obedient. Faithful. Good. And if she had yearned as a foolish girl to be the Arwa she was not—the Arwa who was everything she had been taught not to be, free and fierce and faithless and Amrithi—she had learned long ago to put that childish want aside.

  As Arwa walked through the silent, nighttime corridors of the hermitage, she tried not to think, for once, of the lessons her mother had taught her, about the importance of silence and secrecy, and of shaping herself into something worthy of love. She thought of her sister instead, and of the night she taught Arwa the truth about the daiva.

  Her sister had never had the opportunity to teach her much of what it meant to be Amrithi, and Arwa had spent the last decade trying to forget what little she knew. But Mehr had taught her a lesson, on the night a daiva had swept into Arwa’s room in Irinah during her early childhood, gold-eyed and shadow-fleshed. That lesson had grown blurred at the edges, softened by time. But Arwa had not forgotten the bones of it.

  Her sister had told her Amrithi were descended from daiva. Their blood lives in us, she’d told her. Just a speck. Their shared blood drew the daiva to them. But their blood was also their defense. Placed upon a door or a window, it could keep the daiva at bay. For all the daiva were monsters, they were loath to hurt their own kin.

  Arwa was cursed, in the blood, in a way she could not deny any longer. Her blood had brought the daiva to Darez Fort. But it had also saved her life.

  Arwa had remembered that lesson in Darez Fort. She remembered it now.

  She stopped outside the prayer room, breath frozen in her chest. The daiva was back where it had been before. In the silence left by the absence of breath, she could hear the rustle of its wings, whisper-soft. She inhaled then, deliberately, and smelled its daiva scent, sweet as incense, a tangle of water and smoke.

&
nbsp; It had been waiting for her.

  She entered the room slowly. Through the lattice wall she saw its eyes first, bright and golden in its face of velvet smoke. It had great wings that filled the lattice wall in feathered shadows.

  “You’re not wanted here,” Arwa whispered, voice shaky. “Go.”

  It didn’t move, merely cocked its head, its lambent eyes blinking softly. She realized its wings were not moving, as bird wings moved. It was simply hovering in the air, in defiance of the laws of nature, its vast body stretched elegantly out against the blanket of sky. The sight of it made her stomach roil.

  Very, very slowly, she reached into her quiver and drew out an arrow. She pressed the arrowhead to her own skin, just below the elbow. The point drew blood.

  Beyond the lattice, the daiva shivered faintly, a great susurration running through its wings.

  Arwa placed the bloodied arrow to the bow. In the dark, she had to locate the nocking point with nothing but her fingertips and her memory to guide her.

  She raised the bow. The lacquered wood creaked.

  She heard an intake of breath from the doorway.

  Arwa moved nothing but her eyes, her gaze sliding away from the daiva toward the figure standing in the hallway at the entrance of the prayer room.

  Rabia stared back at her, eyes wide. Judging by the sweets clutched in her hand, she’d made an ill-advised late-night visit to the kitchen, heard noise from the prayer room, and turned her head at the wrong moment as she’d made her way down the corridor. Now she was frozen by the sight of Arwa holding a bow and arrow. By the sight of the daiva.

  Don’t move, Arwa tried to communicate with her eyes. Don’t make a sound.

  The widow’s mouth opened. A helpless choked noise came out of her that rose inexorably into a scream.

  “Help! Someone help!”

  The daiva took flight, swooping toward the valley; the sudden movement of its wings made the wind rise around Arwa. She lowered her bow with a swear on her lips, fury and terror bubbling in her blood.