Realm of Ash

by Tasha Suri

  “And yet, maybe you’ll discover in the Maha’s ash that there is no other cure to the Empire’s ills. Perhaps you’ll look at the Empire, at people dying in droves, and convince yourself the Amrithi are an acceptable price to pay. A small handful of lives, sacrificed for the many.” She let out a breath. “I would—understand the logic of it. But I am still asking you to promise me, Zahir. If the Amrithi are the price—if enslavement is the price—then let the Empire fall.”

  He was silent for a moment. His shoulders tensed, as if he could feel the burden of it upon them: the choice to see the Empire end.

  “I promise. Some prices should not be paid.” He shook his head, slow. “If the Empire falls—the blame lies at the Maha’s door, and his alone.”

  “Good.” She exhaled. “That’s good.”

  There was something tentative, inquisitive in the turn of his head toward her then: The lick of black hair against his forehead, bare as it was of his turban. The line of his throat. In the daylight he was sharp and mortal and hurt, and yet her heart softened at the sight of his bared neck, all the same.

  “Arwa,” he said. He had not called her only Lady Arwa since the night they leaped from the dovecote tower and lived. “Will you come?”

  Come with him to Irinah. To gold sand and a blaring white sky. To daiva and strange mirages that loomed from the sand. To the Maha’s grave, and the heart of her own grief.

  “You may not need Amrithi blood, in Irinah.”

  “I may not. Irinah may be a strong enough bridge alone,” he agreed. “But you are not a weapon made of your blood. You are a scholar and a soldier who has not broken herself upon her cause—only grown stronger and stronger with every blow the world has dealt her. You have been my partner, my fellow mystic. You are my friend.” His eyes blazed, as if he had trapped the sunlight in them, as if the force of his feeling could warm her skin and mark it. “You have sacrificed so much for this task. I would… it would be my honor to see it to the end together.”

  I can go home, thought Arwa. The idea cracked her heart open like an egg. Home.

  When she thought of home, it was not her father’s small haveli in Hara that came to mind. She did not think longingly of the sharp lashing smell of sea and citrus. She did not think of her marital fort, either: sticky, humid heat, books and soldiers. No. Instead, she thought of the cool marble corridors of the Governor’s palace in Irinah. She thought of her old nursemaid, a gnarled old Irin woman who had treated her kindly and firmly. She thought of her sister holding her, telling her stories, her curling hair and warm voice, rich as honey.

  Irinah was home, once. Somehow—despite all her years of trying to grow beyond her roots—it was home still.

  “We’re a mystic order of two,” Arwa whispered. “Of course I’ll come with you. I’ll come to Irinah.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The day before they left, Aliye offered Arwa her mirror.

  “If you want to cut your hair, of course,” she said.

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Arwa asked.

  Aliye hesitated, almost imperceptibly. Her gaze flickered.

  “I know many a woman who left her widowhood behind,” she said finally. “Courtesans. And—wedded women. After all, my dear, if you travel far enough from those who know you, and allow your hair to grow, no one need know you were ever wed before. It is very simple.”

  A marriage made after a husband’s death could not be a true Ambhan marriage, but Arwa could well imagine that any woman with the opportunity to begin again would put aside the poverty of her widowhood and embrace a new beginning.

  But Arwa was not one of those women. She was not ready or able to put her life aside. She knew what she was, for good or ill.

  “The mirror would be helpful,” she said.

  Aliye brought her the mirror and helped her set it against the wall of her sparse room. It was an old thing and traditionally wrought, no more than a great piece of beaten metal, polished until it shone. Arwa thanked Aliye for the metal and for the loan of a sharp knife, and Aliye let her be.

  She thought of her Amrithi dead. They had never had to contend with the strictures of a noblewoman’s life, or of a noblewoman’s widowhood. What would Nazrin have thought of her shorn hair, her unwillingness to loosen her grip on mourning, even now, when her noble life seemed like a distant memory?

  This isn’t the Amrithi way. We don’t make vows. We understand the power of freedom.

  Arwa turned her head to the left and to the right, cutting as neatly as she could. Then she froze.

  It was a strange thing, to always need to be alert to wrongness in the air: the scent of incense, a too-long shadow, black ash rising in your blood. But vigilance had trained her body, which knew even before her mind did that something in her reflection was… off.

  Those are not my eyes, Arwa thought.

  But of course, they were. They were upon her face, so they had to be her own eyes. It was her reflection that was tricking her. After all, nothing looked quite correct in a mirror. On the polished metal, her skin was strange, silvery; her hair was too black, her eyes…

  She leaned in closer.

  Her eyes were gray as ash, far beyond the locus of each iris. Ash from end to end, swallowing the whites of her eyes.

  She blinked. Her eyes were her own again.

  She flinched back. Lowered the knife. She felt a horrible urge to smash the mirror flat to the floor, but instead she stood and walked out of the room, refusing to turn back.

  She should have told Zahir. She knew it.

  He had warned her of the dangers of consuming ash. He had stared at her, horrified, when she had forgotten herself after they fell and flew from the dovecote tower. She had brushed off his fears, and his grief had distracted him from pursuing the truth further, but that did not change the truth. The ash had done something to her.

  She knew now that reaching for the ash repeatedly had consequences. She measured it with the care she used for all theories put to the test. Consequence one: Reaching for the ash risked making her forget herself.

  Consequence two: Reaching for the ash had resulted in the realm of ash closing in upon her. The realm of ash was close to her all the time, now. In Jah Ambha, when Zahir had guided her through the city, she had slipped in and out of it as easily as one donned a veil. The taste of ash—smoke and dying—came to her mouth now and again, unbidden.

  Consequence three: When she drew upon her ash, her eyes clearly altered, clouding with it. Was that a new development? She did not know. Could Zahir have missed the sight of it, in the dark of the tomb? Or were the consequences of the ash growing worse with time?

  She fretted, examined the problem, and fretted some more. But she did not tell Zahir.

  If she told him, what would he do? What could he do? He had none of his books, and no time for study and contemplation. No firepit, no opium-laced tea, no sister with financial and political clout to protect him. He had nothing but his keen, clever mind and his bare-boned hopes of finding something—anything—in Irinah that could save the Empire from its painful stumble toward death.

  She vowed to herself that she would simply stop reaching for the ash. No more sigils. No more rites. No more recalling memories that were not her own. She would, in short, avoid plunging to her death by sensibly avoiding the cliff edge before her.

  Instead she focused on practicalities. She dressed as a pilgrim—face uncomfortably bare, a shawl drawn over her short hair—and tied a pack of supplies to her back. She waited until dawn had almost arrived with a quiet Eshara and Zahir, and then bid farewell to Aliye. The older woman led them out of a servants’ exit from the pleasure house, which was still full of music and bursts of laughter.

  “You’re so like her,” whispered Aliye to Zahir, clasping his face between her hands as they stood, all four of them, in the corridor, huddled uncomfortably close together. “Go well, dear heart. May the lamp burn for you.”

  Zahir murmured something in response, and Arwa looked away.
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  No, she decided. She would not tell him.

  The homes of respectable men and women were still closed for the night’s rest, but despite the hour—and the unease brought on by the Emperor’s death—the streets were crowded. Young men and old, women in huddled groups, wealthier women on horseback in saddle palanquins that wavered unevenly—they were all pilgrims and mourners, ready to begin their dawn journey to the Maha’s grave.

  “It’s busier than I thought it would be,” murmured Eshara, neck craning as she strove to keep an eye on all of them and the crowd simultaneously, still a guardswoman to the core. “The Emperor’s death has made everyone more pious, I think. Good for us.”

  “I doubt Parviz’s hatred of heresy helps,” murmured Zahir, and Arwa nodded in agreement. Traveling to Irinah was not an entirely sanctioned act, and no one yet knew what this new Emperor would decide to do with the mourners his father had tolerated. But there was an answer, of a kind, on the city’s walls, where heads of the heretic mystics were still hung, reduced now to gristle and bone.

  Although there were soldiers on the streets in significant numbers, soldiers at the city’s walls, none looked their way. They were far more concerned with inspecting new arrivals to the city for sickness. For now, at least, Akhtar’s policies of cleansing against the nightmares remained. The three of them passed makeshift tents and great drums of water, huddles of merchants and farmers with their carts, waiting to be assessed, and—Gods be praised—passed by them all unseen, carried by the mass of pilgrims out of Jah Ambha, and onto the first steps of their journey to Irinah’s sands.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  In mere weeks, they would reach Irinah. But Arwa could not imagine it. Irinah felt like a place that lived in her childhood memories alone. Irinah was the Governor’s palace: great marble corridors, and the flickering candlelight on the pillows in her own nursery; her father’s footsteps, firm and sure, and the whisper of her sister’s voice, murmuring stories in her ear. It was like the realm of ash, gossamer and strange but not a thing of the world.

  Appropriate, then, that their journey was a tough and slow thing, a true test of her will. Arwa had traveled long distances before. She’d had to, as a commander’s bride. But she had traveled in the relative, if nauseating, comfort of a palanquin. She’d been tended to and guarded. Now she was a pilgrim, unveiled, her shawl knotted over her hair, walking. And walking. And walking.

  Every painful step—beat of the sun on her forehead, sweat sticky at her neck and her back, her leg muscles aching—felt as if it were building the realness of Irinah. The desert was the thump of her heart and her parched throat and the hungry twist of her belly. It was a place that demanded body and bone to be reached, no different than traveling to the realm of ash.

  Zahir—still recovering from his wound—could only walk slowly. Eshara was solicitous of him. She slowed her pace so she could remain at his side, talking about life beyond the palace, about Aliye and her pleasure house, about Hidden Ones whose names Arwa had never heard before but clearly meant something to Zahir, who lit up at their mention. Arwa walked a little behind them on aching feet, and tried not to think too much on the way Eshara carefully avoided looking at her, her shoulders always turned, her back a forbidding line.

  It was easy enough to do so. The journey was a new world, one very unlike any realm Arwa had walked in before. The pilgrimage route was well-established, the earth shaped by thousands of footsteps, which had killed the vegetation and worn the way smooth. The pilgrims traveled largely on foot, but there were a few notable wealthy travelers, in bullock-drawn carts or on horseback, their women concealed in swaying veiled side-saddles or separate palanquins. The sheer press of people made Arwa feel like a speck of dust, insignificant, carried on a strange wind quite beyond her control.

  They stopped, now and again, at the roadside stalls that had been established to cater for the wave of travelers. They drank tea, rich in mint and cardamom, heaped with honey. At night they tried to sleep far from the other travelers, beneath the vague cover of sparse trees, a small fire lit for warmth. Sometimes, Arwa would wrap herself in a thick over-shawl and sit and stare out at the dark, seeking daiva in the shadowy flicker of their camp’s flames. But she saw nothing. They were alone.

  She woke early one morning, dawn barely breaking the sky. Zahir was asleep propped against a tree, his robe wrapped tight around him. But Eshara was awake, tending to the fire, warming flatbreads over the flames so that their doughy surface blistered with heat. She raised her eyes and gave Arwa a flat, unfeeling look.

  “Ah. You’re awake.”

  “Yes.” Arwa watched Eshara lower her eyes, saw the tic in Eshara’s jaw, as she ground her teeth. “Can I help?”

  “Can you cook?”

  “I’m teachable.”

  Eshara plucked the bread from the flames. Neatly flicked it onto a cloth.

  “No, then,” she said. “Quicker for me to do the job myself.”

  Eshara kept on working, as Arwa straightened, rolling her shoulders to erase the stiffness of a night’s rest. She couldn’t look away from Eshara. The woman’s shoulders were hunched, her jaw still tight with feeling.

  A voice, very like her mother’s, whispered a warning in her skull.

  Don’t say a word. You don’t need any more trouble than you’ve already earned.

  “You do not like me very much, I think.”

  Eshara’s jaw only seemed to tighten an increment further. Then she huffed out a sigh, and visibly forced herself to relax.

  “I am not required to like you. You are not my mistress. Nor are you a sister in my order. You are just… a set of characteristics that have utility. To Zahir. To the cause.”

  “A tool, you mean.”

  “I have seen you, Arwa,” Eshara said. “Servants see a great deal more than people think we do. Yes, you are a tool, shuttled about for the purposes of people greater than you.” A beat. “No offense meant, of course.”

  “And how exactly,” Arwa said, “am I not meant to take offense at that?”

  “Oh, Princess Jihan said worse to you, I’m sure,” Eshara said. “And no doubt you smiled and accepted her words without argument. But when I speak—well. I was just a function in your life, and my opinion is accordingly worth little.”

  There was no spite in Eshara’s voice, which was somehow worse than if there had been. Instead her tone was weary and matter-of-fact. She dampened the fire, movements pointed but not hurried, then folded the cloth around the bread to keep it warm.

  “I understand the need for you, and I appreciate you being here,” Eshara added, in a tone that suggested she did not in fact appreciate Arwa being here at all, “but I trust in Zahir’s dedication, and my own. Yours?” She shook her head. “You were not born to the Hidden Ones. You never earned our secrets. You haven’t proved your worth.”

  Arwa clasped her hands tight, nails digging into her own skin. In a controlled voice, she said, “I’ve walked the realm of ash. I have chosen this path.”

  “You’ve walked the realm only because of your blood,” Eshara said dismissively. “But for all your blood, Lady Arwa, you’re no different from the rest of them.”

  “Them?”

  “The noblewomen. The widows. The ones who smoke their pipes and drink their wine and lament their fate, even though they have nothing to lament. No hunger, no strife, no real suffering to speak of.” Eshara shrugged then. “You’ve lived an easy life, Lady Arwa. You have no place on a journey this vital. And yet—here you are.”

  Her words were a knife twist, turning in Arwa’s chest. Arwa sucked in a sharp breath, straightened her spine, and did not respond.

  They sat for a long moment in silence. Then Zahir murmured and turned in his sleep. Arwa rose to her feet.

  “May I borrow your bow?”

  “If you like,” Eshara said, not looking up. So Arwa took it from where it rested against their packs and walked away.

  Ah. Truth was a sharp knife, wasn’t it?

/>   Eshara had a neat, serviceable bow and a handful of arrows. They were tools—as I am a tool, thought Arwa bitterly—and not a frivolous way to release her rage. So she made a focused effort to hunt for an addition to their morning meal, and didn’t solely waste her arrows on venting her feelings, as she sorely wished to. But there were no animals in sight, no birds, no deer, only one hare that darted swiftly away from her, leaving her arrow to thud in the dirt. With nothing worth killing in sight, she allowed herself the indulgence of taking the used arrow and nocking it once more. She could already feel the soreness of her fingers, without a thumb ring to hand to hold the string steady, the tension of the bow mirroring the tension in her arm.

  She heard footsteps behind her.

  “Are you truly hunting this early?” Zahir asked.

  “Leave me be,” she said.

  “I’ll take that as a no.”

  “I was hunting,” she acknowledged, through gritted teeth. “But as I’m clearly having no luck, I’m hunting my rage instead and—skewering it through.”

  “Ah.”

  “It is a thing that Gulshera taught me.”

  The thought of Gulshera—maybe dead, maybe gone, Arwa did not know—only wound her feelings tighter.

  She let the arrow loose. It buried itself in the bark of the tree. She released a breath.

  “Do you know what Eshara said to me?” said Arwa.

  “No.” Crunch of his boots. He stood beside her. “Did she say something that made you angry, by any chance?”

  “I’m not angry with her,” Arwa said. “I am just—angry.”

  Angry with her own choices and her own nature. Angry with a world that had told her that to be worthy she had to be a proper noblewoman, no more and no less; angry with herself for believing it. Angry that she had not been better, more, with what she’d been given.

  Eshara had not been wrong. That stung.

  When you strip everything away, Arwa thought, there is nothing in me but raw feeling: rage pulsing free like the blood of a thing unskinned.