by Tasha Suri
I have to be more than this.
Zahir walked past her. He wrenched the arrow free; he touched a finger to the wound in the bark.
“A hare,” he said regretfully, “would be more edible.”
“Any more comments like that and you’ll be the one on the end of my arrow,” Arwa said. But there was no real ire in her voice, and Zahir smiled—a pale half smile—in response.
“I can still run if I must,” he said. “I expect I’d survive.”
She thought of how Gulshera had named archery a kind of alchemy for her grief: a way to give her hungry grief direction and discipline. She thought of the ache of her limbs, the way the journey was tiring and strengthening her, and the taste of ash.
Something alchemical was happening to her too. For good or ill.
She licked the salt of sweat from her lips. Shook her head.
“I suppose we should go back.”
“Is your rage suitably quenched?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But it matters little. The bow would be of better use in Eshara’s hands anyway.”
As they traveled farther, the rest stops established for the pilgrims became more elaborate, and makeshift settlements began to crop up. Caravanserais, Eshara called them, these temporary towns of low mud walls that surrounded the tents and carts of travelers. Zahir found them fascinating. Whenever they reached one he would stare about them, clear-eyed and unblinking, taking in the sights around them with quiet hunger.
Arwa was not half as curious. But the widows and beggar women who congregated in the caravanserais drew her eyes, always. They crouched in shadows with their faceless effigies and piles of ornate grave-tokens for sale, sticks of incense clouding the air around them. On a day when they had stopped to rest in a particularly busy caravanserai—and Eshara had gone in search of supplies—Arwa walked away from Zahir and kneeled down by one of the widows.
The woman straightened, adjusting her shawl. Her eyes brightened at the possibility of a sale.
“Take one of these fine items with you as an offering,” she said quickly, “and the Maha’s spirit will bless you. I can promise it.”
It was a false promise, that Arwa didn’t doubt, but still her curiosity was piqued. She felt, rather than saw, Zahir step behind her, tilting his head in the inquisitive way he often did.
Close now, she could see that the grave-tokens were not made of grass and earth as she’d first thought, but were shaped from clay and decorated finely with paint and small, pale facets of glass. She touched a fingertip to one, admiring.
The woman peered at her more closely.
“A fellow widow,” she said knowingly. “Well, you’ll know the benefit of my wares. Why, when you reach the House of Tears—”
“Arwa.” A hand clamped on her arm. “We need to go now.”
Eshara’s voice. Arwa looked up.
“What is it?”
“Come with me now,” hissed Eshara, grip tightening. “Or I swear—”
“Eshara,” said Zahir sharply. “Let her go.”
Eshara froze. She was breathing hard. Zahir stared at her. Said, in a careful voice, “You’re hurting her. And you’re drawing attention.”
Eshara must have realized he was correct, because she released Arwa.
“Come on, then,” she said, and turned and strode away.
Zahir turned to look at Arwa.
“Did she—?”
“I think we should follow her now, Zahir,” Arwa said.
“Of course,” he said, but his mouth was still a thin line, his brow furrowed.
When all three of them were alone, far from the crowd of pilgrims, Eshara said, “Zahir. Your tale has spread. That—worries me.”
“Surely that was Aliye’s intent,” he said.
“It was a bad decision,” snapped Eshara. “And I hoped the tale would stick to the cities. But it’s worse than I thought. The story has changed. There are soothsayers and false mystics speaking of a blessed heir who rose from the dead, slithering out from between the corpses of his dead kin. A tea seller farther in the caravanserai told me that the Maha’s heir has come to cleanse the Empire of the worst of its heathens. Amrithi, adulterous women, thieves.” She paused, and said pointedly: “Kin killers.”
“That’s very—dramatic,” said Zahir.
“It’s all propaganda against the Emperor,” Eshara said, with emphasis. “The tale’s spun free of everyone’s control, and you are at the heart of it. Parviz has put his faith in might and his own righteousness, but he’s also placed himself squat in the center of a very ugly rise to power. People don’t like it. And I don’t like the danger swirling around your name. We need to travel more swiftly. Avoid the caravanserais, if we can. There is a Grand Caravanserai ahead of us, but if we travel a lesser-known road…”
“We’ll be more exposed on less traveled roads,” Arwa pointed out. She kept her voice even. Eshara was panicked, that was clear, wound tight with fear. Arwa had never seen her so. “At least here, we’re easy to miss among the crowds.”
“The crowds are the problem!” snapped Eshara. “So many eyes and so many whispers—I can’t keep us safe here. What if—”
“Eshara.” Zahir’s voice. “We trust your judgment. We’ll do as you suggest.”
Eshara stopped, falling silent. She nodded.
“Well.” A breath. “Well. Let’s go, then.”
Over the next few days they relied on Eshara to guide them as they walked through the rich vegetation of undisturbed green, far from the worn-smooth familiarity of the pilgrimage route. Arwa found she missed the noise and the throng of people. Eshara and Zahir were far too quiet. Arwa could not help but prod him with questions, uneasy with the weight of his silence and Eshara’s combined.
“Does it worry you?” Arwa asked him. “These tales?”
“What led you to that conclusion?” Zahir said tiredly. Eshara did not even look back. She was striding forward, utterly focused and determined.
“Zahir,” she said. “Please.”
“Fine. Stories of the Maha’s heir? Of course they worry me. It means Parviz will look for us, whether he believes I live or not. It will be enough that others do.”
“You truly think he will care what ordinary people say?” Arwa asked.
“I think we both know that stories grow,” said Zahir. “They swell and they spread swiftly, like sickness. And this story…” He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I can see the appeal of it. It offers… hope. An alternative. That is dangerous to him.”
Arwa thought of the story Aliye had told her, when Arwa had recovered in the safety of the pleasure house, under the shadow of the tree-carved lattice. There was a tale of sacrifice and love woven into the very fabric of Ambhan society: in its widows and their hermitages, its courtesans and their pleasure houses. A tale unspoken but known, in the bone and the blood. The Maha was a myth embedded in the skin of the Empire, deeper than any arrow. His death had left a void behind, waiting to be filled. All the Empire needed was the right tale. The right man.
Of course a legend was growing around Zahir. Not around Zahir himself, exactly—sharp-boned and exacting and hungry for knowledge as he was—but around what he represented. Emperor’s blood. Not-prince. Blessed. He was a symbol around which the growing fear and discontent of the people could focus, a shining light of possibility in a world that stumbled, stricken by ill luck.
He was the promise of a miracle.
But the miracle had been Arwa’s miracle, of course, a thing born of daiva and Amrithi blood.
What room did the Empire and its people have for that?
Arwa opened her mouth to speak, when Eshara stopped abruptly in front of them. In the blink of an eye she had her scimitar in her hand, free from its careful concealment under her robe.
“Eshara,” Zahir said. Soft.
“The cart ahead,” Eshara said. “Look.”
Through the shadows of trees, an overturned cart was just visible. One of its sides was splin
tered through. Now that Arwa was paying attention—as she should have been all along—she could hear the wet buzz of flies, and smell more than vegetation sweetness in the air.
She could smell rot.
There was a body there. She knew it. Her own body remembered the scent. She drew her shawl over her mouth and nose, straining to blot it out.
Bandits had attacked the cart, perhaps. Or animals.
Or something else.
“Someone,” Zahir said, “may still be alive.”
“No one is alive,” Arwa whispered. “You can be sure of it. Whoever died has been there for some time.”
“What do you know of death?” Eshara said. There was no sharpness in her voice; instead it trembled as if on a knife edge.
Arwa crumpled her hand tight into her shawl. Breathed deep and slow.
“I was at Darez Fort, Eshara,” she said. “You know that. Surely you guardswomen gossiped. But look, if you like.”
They all walked forward together, in the end.
Later, as Eshara retched against a tree, Arwa felt Zahir press his shoulder against her own. He did no more than that, but it comforted her more than she could say. She realized she was trembling, from her lips to her toes.
This was natural fear. Natural fear, only, and natural grief too, born from unnatural circumstances. She told herself that. Clung to the thought, as if releasing it would drown her.
Death. Everywhere she went, death seemed to follow her, and Arwa felt strangely exhausted, as if her heart had no more room for further mourning.
It was easy to forget, sometimes, what darkness lay over the Empire. She’d grown adept at folding away all her griefs. And then suddenly, such a moment came, and it was impossible not to remember.
Eshara walked back over to them. Refreshed her mouth with water.
“We need to return to the safety of the main path,” she said grimly. “Tales aren’t as great a risk as—this.”
They walked until it was deep night, until there was nothing to guide them but a sliver of the moon, and then they curled up together, all shame and animosity forgotten.
Arwa finally slept with her head against Eshara’s shoulder and Zahir’s back to her own, in brief snatches fractured by fear. She dreamed, over and over again, like the turn of an inexorable wheel of worlds, of daiva skin peeling back to reveal a nightmare’s terrible, chalky bones. She dreamed of her mother’s hands washing her own clean, scrubbing until all the lines and whorls and scars had smoothed away from Arwa’s flesh and she was marble pure. She dreamed of her father weeping. Dreamed that she walked across the floor to him, and pressed away his tears with her fingers. They burned her fingers blood red.
Why did you say Mehr is gone? she asked him. Why gone, and not dead? Why only gone, Father? Where has my sister gone?
She woke sharply, repeatedly, scent of incense in her nose, ash in her throat, and was grateful beyond words when dawn finally came.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Grand Caravanserai resembled a military fort.
Long before they reached it—when it was only a miniature in the distance, an image wavering in the heat—she saw great watchtowers and high walls, clearly built to mimic the shape of a great Chand fort. If her blood had not already been frozen by the carnage in the forest, it would have grown cold at that sight.
She stopped for a moment, sucked in a sharp breath between her teeth, then continued to stride forward. She’d seen real horrors that night. She would not be shattered by a memory. Not today.
As they grew closer, she was comforted to see that the walls were simple mud and far lower and simpler than a fort’s, the watchtowers unmanned. There were only surly guards at the caravanserai’s entrance, collecting toll—for the Governor, they claimed—who waved them in once Eshara had pressed a suitable bribe into their hands.
A courtyard vaster than any belonging to caravanserais they had passed through before greeted them. There were stalls for tea sellers and food sellers; shrieking children and men and women shoving their way past one another. Newly constructed buildings were set back against the walls. Within those buildings—or so their banners and shouting voices of their owners suggested—were prophets and mystics, and pilgrims returned from Irinah’s sands with precious relics, for sale at the right price. Scraps of genuine Saltborn mystic robes. The hem of the Maha’s robe, preserved beneath glass.
Arwa stopped dead. “Did that man say he has the Maha’s shin bone?” she said, incredulous.
“What?” Zahir stopped too. He craned his neck, turning. “Where?”
“I swear,” Eshara said, aggrieved, “I am sick of both of you. Sick. And I am going to get some rest if it kills us all.”
Limited though their coin now was, they found a place to sleep for the night. It was no more than an old storeroom divided into separate rooms by curtains affixed to the ceiling on hooks. Arwa could hear voices, someone snoring loudly. It was the cheapest accommodation available to travelers, but it was a blessing after their night of horror.
Eshara curled up almost immediately on the ground, cushioning her head on her arm. She looked shaken, face gray with exhaustion. She might have claimed she was sick of the both of them, but she leaned against Zahir easily enough when he kneeled down on the ground beside her and placed his hand on her shoulder, concern furrowing his brow.
“Eshara,” he said. “You must rest.”
“We need food,” Eshara said tiredly. “We have only a little left, we’ll need the bread for the desert, we’re going to need something else for tonight.”
Zahir raised his head, meeting Arwa’s eyes.
“Let me go and buy a meal,” Arwa said. “It’s a simple enough task,” she added, when she saw doubt cloud Eshara’s eyes. “You can trust me with this.”
“I’ll stay with you and keep watch,” Zahir said to Eshara, his eyes still on Arwa’s.
Eshara visibly hesitated for a moment. Then exhaustion won out.
“There’s coin in my pack.”
It was a peace offering of a kind, so Arwa took it, curling her fingers around the coins, rising to her feet. She did not want to care for Eshara’s well-being and yet…
Eshara was curled up fully, long braid of her hair drawn over her face. Zahir met Arwa’s eyes. They shared another look, long and unspoken, and she thought of his fever-bright eyes when they jumped from the dovecote tower. The feel of him watching her, in the dark of the tomb.
“You both rest,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”
A woman ladled rice onto banana leaves and began to fold them shut for neater transport. As she worked, Arwa looked around idly, across the stalls, until her gaze was caught by a building in the distance, set back against the walls of the caravanserai.
The building should not have caught her attention. It was no brighter than the ones that surrounded it, but it was large, and upon its surface was a large painting in rich greens and browns. A tree with a vast canopy and great snarled roots, that curled in streaks of paint across the ground beneath the building’s wall.
Arwa thought of the hermitage. Thought, too, of Aliye’s tale, of a doe that was a woman, who died so Ambha could live. A story that lived in the blood, the air, the bones of the Empire.
“What is that place?” Arwa asked the woman. “With the tree.”
“The House of Tears,” the woman said. Her gaze flickered to Arwa’s shorn hair. “They give widows a home there,” she added. “Not a bad place to be, if you have no family to care for you.”
The House of Tears.
With a murmur of thanks, Arwa paid her coin and tucked the parcels into a sling made of her shawl. She turned to return to their makeshift room. Then stopped.
She could not pretend that she didn’t know how to resist her impulses. She’d learned to be whatever was required of her. But she did not want to resist this impulse. Her heart was singing in her chest. She turned on her heel and walked—slowly, deliberately—toward the House of Tears.
There
was a pool of silence around it. The only person she could see was a short-haired widow in a pale Chand sari, cross-legged in the shade of the roof, filling small clay lamps with clarified butter. The widow did not look up as Arwa crossed the building’s threshold, stepping into the cool dark of the interior.
She walked forward. Unexpectedly there were steps leading down to a room below the ground. She thought of Zahir’s tomb enclosure, and kept on walking. Heavy doors at the base of the stairs were open. She passed through them, and the sight that greeted her stole her breath.
Lanterns upon the walls. Flames in miniature clay lamps, set upon the floor. And before her: an effigy. Maha and Emperor both.
The statue of the Maha was carved from grief itself. Pale as ivory, pure and austere. The world in its palm was a liquid sheen of silver and gold in the flickering light.
Arwa took a step toward it.
The ground was covered, from end to end, with grave-tokens made of green and also of clay. The clay tokens glimmered in the faint light, dusted with paints and fragments of mirror, ceramic and silver.
The widow at the last caravanserai they’d visited had been right: She would have benefited from having a grave-token to hand. Her palms felt empty, graceless at the sight before her.
She was kneeling. She hadn’t intended to kneel.
All the Maha has done, she thought, and yet the awe and adoration wells up in me like blood still.
How terrible to have the Empire she’d lived in and loved be a thing born from such darkness. To be born from a person she had been inculcated to love, and couldn’t let go of, in her bones and heart.
She looked at the Maha’s statue, fear and grief buzzing at the back of her skull; then she stood and walked up the stairs, back into the blistering light.
The widow was no longer alone. She had a companion. The two of them looked at Arwa as she passed.
“Where are you going, sister?” one widow yelled. She rose to her feet, striding over to Arwa. “Where’s your offering? Don’t you know it’s bad luck not to make an offering at a grief-house?”
