Realm of Ash

by Tasha Suri

  “The woman, of course, was not a normal woman. She was something born from the earth. Not a God, or anything kin to one but—old. We have no names for her kind anymore. But she saw his despair, and she could not allow it. The next time he went hunting, she came to him in the form of a golden doe, so he would not recognize her. She told him if he took her life, her blood would shape the land. His land. It would give him trees and fruits and nourishment, for these are the things that build thrones. But she also warned him: ‘I am a living creature, ancient and powerful, and my death will have a price.’”

  “He killed her, didn’t he?”

  Aliye hummed noncommittally in response. Then: “He shot her, yes. And from her blood grew flowers and crops, rich vegetation where before the soil was arid. Where her body lay, a tree unfurled, rich with fruit. Then a forest. And the man who would be king of Ambha, long before our Empire was born, had a fertile land now and a future for his people. But he kneeled by his bride, dead in a pool of her own blood at his hand, and wept, knowing the price of power was his heart.”

  “I can see why this story isn’t told,” murmured Arwa.

  “Oh?”

  “No one likes to think their world is—born out of spilled blood. It’s too sad. And it makes the Empire seem…”

  Although she had no more words, Aliye was nodding, even as she stitched. “Just so,” she said. “And yet you widows build grave-tokens, don’t you? Where do you think those began?”

  Arwa rolled fully onto her side. She looked through the weight of fever and sleep at the lattice once again.

  “I’ve never heard that story,” Arwa said. “Not once. I would remember it.”

  “And yet,” Aliye said, “it has not truly been forgotten. Its ghost squats within us. We place it in grief, our walls. We seed it in our women. There is nothing finer, after all, than being a sacrifice. Stories can have great power. Give a story blood, let its roots settle, and any tale can bear fruit. A story of a sacrificial love.” She paused, then said lightly, “The story of a Maha’s heir.”

  “You’ve heard, then,” Arwa said, voice thin with exhaustion. “About Zahir.”

  “Courtesans hear everything,” said Aliye.

  What bargain did Zahir make with you? Arwa thought.

  Aliye lowered her sewing, touching a hand to the cloth on Arwa’s forehead.

  “You feel a little better,” she said, approving. “But you should rest now, dear. I’ve taxed you enough.”

  When Arwa next woke, she knew three things: her fever had broken; she was painfully hungry; and Zahir was at her side.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  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.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  They healed, and hid. Once Arwa regained a measure of her normal strength, she began to learn and explore the small segment of the haveli she and Zahir were limited to: a few small rooms, a collection of carefully tended to books, and a narrow corridor with finely latticed windows that overlooked the central courtyard of the haveli beneath it.

  From evening until daybreak the haveli courtyard was full of laughter and music. At night the women of Aliye’s house entertained men in the haveli’s rooms or danced for their entertainment in the central courtyard. Dancing girls and female musicians—all courtesans by trade—were hardly an unusual sight in typical women’s quarters, and certainly not unusual in the imperial palace. But Arwa had never had the opportunity to watch courtesans who were also members of an ancient mystical order perform. So she sat at the window lattice, chin on her knees, and watched the women sing and dance.

  Arwa had known how the Hidden Ones afforded to adhere to their scholarship and mysticism, independent and unseen. But it still surprised her to hear a dancer’s bells in distant corridors or in the courtyard during the quiet daylight hours, followed by a heated discussion of theories of the afterlife, of new manuscripts traded by Hidden Ones from eastern Chand, of women moving through the finest households of Jah Ambha and collecting knowledge alongside their gold. In the households of the nobility, the Hidden Ones had the positions of influence and invisibility. They were as clever and vicious and charming as any noblewoman Arwa had ever encountered—and they were thriving.

  Her mother Maryam had always taught her that fallen women were to be derided—that her own concubine birth mother had been a low, corrupting influence for reasons beyond her Amrithi blood. An influence Arwa had to rise above.

  Maryam had been wrong.

  There was so much Arwa did not know. The breadth of her ignorance was staggering. Her life was so small and insignificant in comparison to the scope of the world. And yet she had believed if she acted a certain way—reshaped her nature and molded herself into a true Ambhan noblewoman, worthy of an Ambhan marriage—she would matter.

  There are so many ways to live, Arwa thought. And I know only one, and I am no good at it.

  Applause broke her out of her reflection. A woman below had finished dancing, her skirt of mirror-glass whirling to stillness around her. She laughed and bowed her head, black hair a curtain around her.

  With the performance over, Arwa slipped away from the window.

  Their section of the haveli was small, but had one particular benefit: a ladder that led to the roof. She climbed it and rose into the cool night air.

  Zahir was sitting on the edge of the roof, near a bare sleep mat. He was staring out at the flat roofs of Jah Ambha, at the scattered lights of the houses and businesses that made up the city, and beyond them—set upon its inky expanse of water—the imperial palace.

  She approached him. He near jumped out of his skin when he heard her footsteps. He reminded her for a moment of the mangy, wary cat she’d found in her garden as a child. Then just as swiftly he calmed, hands unfurling, some of the panic fading from his eyes.

  “Arwa,” he said. Strained. “You shouldn’t have come up here. You need to regain your strength.”

  “Climbing a ladder is hardly going to exhaust me. Besides, I am not the one with the wound in my side.”

  She sat down on the ground near him.

  Zahir spoke.

  “I feel more at home here than I did in all my years at the palace.” He sounded contemplative. “I thought I had forgotten my childhood. But now I’m here, I remember it very well.”

  “What do you remember?” Arwa asked.

  “My mother had her own establishment. But this place… it reminds me of her own. Of a time when life was—different.” His fingers twitched, as if searching for the coin he’d twisted in his hands, when he had told her his brother Akhtar was dead, his brother Parviz crowned. “I remember the meetings the Hidden Ones held. Women from across the city would gather at her salons, and share their knowledge. And argue.” A smile. “They loved to argue. Though knowledge was shared, each woman had her own understanding of truth, and feelings often ran high.”

  “What did they debate on?”

  “Theories. The right wording for a poem. Politics. They often discussed the Emperor. His advisers. Strategies to win him—and them—to the Hidden Ones’ cause.” He shrugged. “I barely remember. I was only a boy. But I always wonder what I would have been, if my mother had not offered up her knowledge to my father. If she had chosen a different way, and I had continued to be my mother’s son. In time the Emperor would have ensured I had a suitable post and a suitable wife, I expect. But no more than that. Perhaps that would have been…” He trailed off. Exhaled. “Different,” he said finally. “It would have been very different.”

  “Yes,” said Arwa. She could not imagine what Zahir would have been like, raised without tomb walls and the threat of his own death hanging over him. That saddened her. “I expect it would have been.”

  For a long stretch of time they sat in silence. Finally, in a low, serious voice he said her name.

  “Arwa. I need to understand how you saved us.”

  “I told you what I know.”

  “My mind isn’t at its best,” Zahir said, mouth a brief, bitter curl of a smile. “But I would appreciate your patience. I’d like to understand.”

  Taking a deep breath, she told him what she could of Darez Fort, and the nightmare and daiva she had seen there. She told him of what the ash had taught her of blood and vows, of rites of worship and sigils as language. She told him how she’d used the knowledge of the ash to save them both.

  “Before we entered the realm of ash, before I found the Amrithi dead, I believed I was cursed,” she admit
ted. “Cursed with a daiva’s presence. It followed me to the hermitage. It followed me to the palace. I thought it was a murderer, that it killed everything I loved. I thought it was my ruinous blood that brought it, and that only my blood could keep it at bay.”

  “You believed your cursed blood drew the daiva and repelled them?”

  “I can see the illogic of that now, Zahir, but fear is not a beast of reason. But…” She swallowed. “I know the daiva are no curse, now. And neither am I.”

  Zahir was quiet. Arwa looked at him, his ink-black hair, bare of a turban. His eyes, near colorless in the dark.

  “So,” she said, “now you know everything about me.”

  “No,” he said softly. “I know only the barest part of you, still. And everything I learn, I marvel at. Have you carried this burden entirely alone? Since your husband passed?”

  “Gulshera knew of it. Somewhat.” Arwa shrugged. “I did not need a confidante.”

  “Arwa,” he murmured. “Thank you.”

  Together they stared at the black sky, the glittering city, in companionable silence. For a moment.

  “Is there a daiva here now?”

  “Gods, Zahir, there’s no need for more questions, is there?”

  “I can ask tomorrow instead, if you prefer.”

  “You could not ask me at all.”

  “That… is an option.” His voice sounded a little strained.

  Ah, how he hungers, she thought. For knowledge. For hope. She shivered.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “How can you not know?”

  “I am not its master.”

  “Could you call it to you if you wished, using your sigils?”

  “Possibly,” said Arwa with a shrug.

  “Why does it protect you?”

  “I don’t know, Zahir.”

  He shook his head, and she glared at him.

  “I don’t think on it much,” she said.

  “A spirit follows you and you don’t think on it?”

  “Of course I have. I do. But I’ve been preoccupied with finding the Maha’s ash, just as you have been, Zahir.”