Girl, Serpent, Thorn

by Melissa Bashardoust

  Her mother’s voice came to her, gentler than she deserved: He started this, not you. But you are the only one who can end this.

  Soraya lifted her head. She had promised her mother she would make up for what she had done, and to do that, she still had to find the owl-winged parik. But she would never be able to keep that promise if she stayed here, day after day, at Azad’s mercy.

  It took several tries to pry open the tightly wedged door, but as soon as she did, some of her worries faded. She was comfortable with tunnels, after all—they had practically raised her. If she kept heading down, she’d eventually reach the mountain’s base, where maybe she would find a way out. She just had to evade the divs, as she had done in the palace.

  Soraya moved silently down the tunnel, waiting until the large hallway beyond was empty before daring to take another step. This time she noticed that the ground was built on a slight incline. Soraya went in the direction inclining downward, which was the opposite of where Azad had taken her, staying close to the walls and moving from shadow to shadow. Along the hall were smaller openings that led to side passages, and she paused before crossing them, making sure nothing was going to jump out at her. She noticed, too, that the hall was rounded, and she hoped that this one tunnel wound itself all the way up the mountain in a large spiral. If it did, she could follow it down until she reached the mountain base.

  And perhaps she could have, if the hall had remained empty.

  She felt the vibration of heavy steps under her feet before she saw the divs themselves, giving her enough time to duck down one of the side tunnels before three large divs came into view. She waited a little longer to make sure no other divs would pass, but she waited too long, and soon another passed in the opposite direction.

  She kept waiting, and the longer she did, the more divs she saw moving in both directions—and the more she realized how futile and foolish this decision was. Every time one of them passed her hiding place, Soraya held her breath and shrank back, knowing that eventually one of them would turn this way. She couldn’t stay here, but she couldn’t continue on the main path. She was fortunate that she had managed to make it even this far. Conceding defeat, she followed the tunnel she was already in.

  Soon, she found a stairway, and she went down, knowing she would be trapped if she met anyone or anything in this narrow space. She found herself in another, smaller tunnel, but there were no torches here, nothing to light her way as she stumbled along in the darkness, one hand on the wall. She was breathing so heavily that she worried someone would hear her, and so she put her other hand over her mouth to silence the frightened wheeze her lungs were making.

  But even with her mouth covered, she could still hear the sound of breathing behind her—and it wasn’t her own.

  Soraya ran, all hope of escaping the mountain abandoned in favor of merely finding a safe place to hide. As soon as her hand no longer felt solid rock, she bolted in that direction, moving down another hall that took her deeper into the mountain. The torches began to reappear, though they were few and far between, as Soraya threw herself into the labyrinth of tunnels, trying to outrun approaching shadows and the echoes of footsteps. She didn’t know where to find safety or when to catch her breath. Her heart was racing, the way it had when people kept brushing against her on Nog Roz, never giving her time to recover. Except now she was the only one in danger.

  She should have listened to him. She should have stayed in her room. It was only a matter of time before she was too slow or took a wrong step.

  Down, she told herself. Just keep going down. It was too late, and she was too lost, to retrace her steps to her room. The only hope she had was to keep heading downward until she eventually reached the base of the mountain.

  She kept moving until she found another set of stairs and hurried down them, but instead of leading her into another tunnel, they brought her to a cavernous room—empty, thankfully, except for a fire in the center of it. And beside the fire was something that smelled delicious.

  After catching her breath, Soraya went toward the fire. The smell was coming from a piece of meat spitted on a stick—some kind of bird, from the look of it. Thinking of the finite supply of fruit in her room, Soraya took the stick and sank her teeth into the wing of the cooked bird. She gave an involuntary sigh as she swallowed and took another bite.

  But before she could swallow again, she heard footsteps coming from the stairs behind her. Soraya dropped the stick at once and looked around for another exit, but the stairs were the only way in or out of this cavern. She should have already known that. She should have turned back at once as soon as she saw this was a dead end, but the smell of the food had been too tempting to resist. She had allowed herself to be caught in a trap.

  As the steps grew louder, Soraya moved away from the fire, into the shadows. She pressed herself flat against the wall right beside the opening to the stairwell, hoping she could repeat her trick from the palace and sneak past the div.

  The steps slowed, then stopped, and Soraya waited for the div to appear.

  And then a large fist slammed into the wall above her head.

  Soraya ducked as the div lunged out from the stairway, bits of rock raining down onto the top of her head. He had only missed her because he had struck without looking, and she knew he wouldn’t miss again. She ran for the stairs, but it was a last, hopeless attempt at escape, and she wasn’t surprised when the div clutched the back of her dress and pulled her back into the cavern, throwing her to the ground.

  “I heard you breathing, little thief,” the div said in a rumbling voice. He had the torso of a man, his skin deathly white, but the legs and head of a wildcat. “I can smell my dinner on your breath. But that’s no matter—I’ll just eat you, instead.”

  “I’m the Shahmar’s guest!” Soraya cried, reaching out an arm as if that could somehow stop him from killing her. It would have, before, she thought with a strange pang. Once, she could have killed him easily, with only a touch. She would have been deadlier than he was. And she wouldn’t have to use the name of her captor as a shield. “He would be displeased if you harmed me.”

  The div chuckled. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, human, but it doesn’t matter to—”

  He never finished, because two hands appeared on either side of his head and viciously snapped his neck to the side with inhuman strength.

  Before the div fell dead to the ground, Soraya’s rescuer jumped lightly off his back and stood with her hands on her hips.

  “There you are,” Parvaneh said.

  Soraya remained frozen on the ground at first, her mouth hanging open. “I thought you left me,” she said as she rose. “You disappeared.”

  Parvaneh shook her head. “I transformed. Pariks all have one other form they can take.” To prove her point, she suddenly vanished—or so Soraya thought until she noticed a dark gray moth hovering where Parvaneh had been standing. In another moment, the moth was gone, and Parvaneh reappeared. “I followed you all the way here.”

  “You’ve been here the entire time,” Soraya said, more to herself than to Parvaneh.

  “I lost track of you for a while, and by the time I found you again, you were sneaking through the tunnels—which was very foolish, by the way.” She gestured to the dead div on the ground. “If I hadn’t heard you, he’d have eaten you by now.”

  Soraya looked from Parvaneh’s disapproving stare to the div. And then, to her own surprise, she began to laugh. She didn’t know why she was laughing, exactly—because she’d almost been eaten, or because she was being lectured by a demon, or because she still had an ally and wasn’t trapped alone in this mountain with only Azad for company after all. She was laughing so hard that she couldn’t breathe, and tears began to stream down her cheeks, and now she wasn’t sure if she was laughing or sobbing.

  She only stopped when she felt Parvaneh’s cold hands on either side of her face, shocking her into silence. Would she ever become used to something as simple as the feel of
someone’s hands on her skin? It seemed impossible.

  Soraya focused on those eyes like glowing embers, even more vivid now in the light of the fire, until the rise and fall of her chest slowed to normal.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she managed to say.

  “We had a deal.”

  “Yes, but divs aren’t known for being true to their word.”

  Parvaneh lifted an eyebrow. “I must be fond of you, then.”

  Soraya smiled to herself as Parvaneh returned to the div’s corpse and searched it. She pulled off the tattered, voluminous cloak he’d been wearing, her lip curling with distaste. “Here,” she said, tossing the cloak to Soraya. “You can hide in this the next time you want to wander through the tunnels.”

  “I wasn’t wandering,” Soraya said. “I was looking for a way out of the mountain. I still need to find the parik with owl’s wings. You said you would take me to her.”

  Parvaneh nodded, but she was still staring down at the dead div, avoiding Soraya’s eye.

  “Az—the Shahmar said he would return tomorrow night,” Soraya continued. “Can you take me to her before then? Can we go now?”

  Parvaneh lifted her head. “That depends,” she said. “Did you bring the simorgh’s feather with you?”

  Soraya’s hands went to her sash, but then she remembered that Azad had taken the feather from her before bringing her here. Parvaneh must not have seen it happen when she was following in her moth form. Still, she hesitated before telling this to Parvaneh. Why did Parvaneh need the feather in order to take her to the other pariks? If she knew Soraya didn’t have it, would she refuse? Soraya wanted to trust her—Parvaneh had become, in a strange way, her confidante as well as her ally—but she was still living the consequences of the last time she had been too eager to trust someone.

  “Yes,” she said, her hand pressed down over her sash. “I have it. But I’ll give it to you after we find the parik.”

  Parvaneh started to argue, but then she nodded, a wry smile on her lips. “Fair enough,” she said. “I won’t need it till then anyway.”

  “Why do you still need it at all?”

  Parvaneh hesitated, and Soraya supposed she was also deciding how much they could trust each other. “We can’t defeat the Shahmar without the feather,” she said.

  Soraya couldn’t help scoffing. “How is a single feather going to stop him?” But Parvaneh’s expression remained grave, and Soraya felt a twinge of worry as she again remembered the feather in Azad’s fist.

  “That feather,” Parvaneh said, “is the only thing that can make him human.”

  Soraya shook her head. “He can change form at will—I’ve seen him do it.”

  Parvaneh again hesitated, as if trying to determine how much to say. “I mean permanently,” she said. “The feather will make him human, as he once was, before he became a div—just as it removed your curse. And only then can we kill him.”

  In the silence that followed, Soraya wondered for the first time how Azad had become a div. The stories made his transformation sound like some kind of divine punishment—he acted monstrously and became a monster. Stories lie, he had told her. She wondered, too, if he knew that the feather could restore his humanity. If he did, why hadn’t he used it? He must have already known what Soraya hadn’t understood—that the price of humanity was vulnerability.

  Soraya’s fingers curled over her waist. “Is there no way to defeat him while he’s still a div?”

  “It would be difficult to strike any blow—his scales are like armor,” Parvaneh answered. “But even then … there’s something you don’t know about divs. It would be easier to show you.”

  Parvaneh took the tattered cloak from her, looking from its length to Soraya with an appraising eye. “We can both hide under this,” she said. She stood beside Soraya and threw the cloak over Soraya’s shoulders, drawing it forward over both their heads to create a makeshift hood. “Hold it tight,” she said.

  Soraya drew the edge of the cloak in toward herself, and she and Parvaneh huddled close under the fabric. It was long enough to hide their feet, and thin enough that they could see where they were going.

  “Something’s wrong,” Parvaneh said. “Can you not breathe?”

  Soraya’s breathing was quickening, but not because of lack of air. “I’m not used to this,” she managed to say. Parvaneh’s shoulder was flush against hers, and every time their hands brushed against each other in the close proximity under the cloak, Soraya felt an instinctive jolt of panic.

  “Give me your hand,” Parvaneh said. Soraya shyly threaded her fingers through Parvaneh’s, and then they waited—waited until Soraya adjusted to the presence of touch, until her heart slowed and her breathing became normal. It was like sinking into a hot bath, the water gradually becoming bearable against sensitive skin.

  “I’m ready,” Soraya said.

  Parvaneh led the way through the tunnels, using their joined hands to indicate which direction she wanted them to go. Soraya kept her eyes down so she wouldn’t trip over the cloak’s hem. They passed other divs on their way, but none of them glanced at the unwieldy shape beneath the cloak.

  Once they had returned to the long hallway, Parvaneh led them down—the way Soraya had been planning to go before she’d become lost. But when they reached the end of the path, at the base of the mountain at last, Soraya saw that she would never have managed to make it out of the mountain alive.

  At the base of the mountain was the largest cavern that Soraya had seen yet—it was larger than the palace gardens. They stayed close to the wall, still hidden under the cloak, and Soraya’s hand tightened around Parvaneh’s. Through the fabric, she saw mostly shapes and shadows, but it was enough to let her know she was looking into the hellish heart of this mountain.

  There were divs lounging throughout the massive cavern, some drinking or eating, many sleeping, and others just watching. In the center of the cavern was a wide pit, and from its unknown depths, more divs climbed out at irregular intervals.

  “Is this some kind of test?” Soraya asked, thinking of the training grounds.

  “This is his throne room,” Parvaneh said, gesturing to the far wall of the cavern. There, a massive throne had been carved into the rock. It was empty, of course, its usual occupant currently visiting a different throne. “And that,” she said, pointing to the large pit, “is Duzakh.”

  Soraya shuddered at the word. “That’s the home of the Destroyer,” she said, remembering the yatu.

  “When the Destroyer releases us into the world, this is where we emerge,” Parvaneh said. “When a div dies, the Destroyer feels it, and he sends out a replacement, a druj for a druj, or a parik for a parik, and so on. That’s why the Shahmar always captures pariks but never kills them.”

  Soraya’s eyes were locked onto the mouth of Duzakh as a wolfish head emerged from it. A div similar but not identical in appearance to the one who had perished in the sparring pit crawled his way out. As soon as he was fully above the surface, a wiry druj came to his side and led him away—recruiting him to the Shahmar’s cause, Soraya guessed. She thought of all the battles her brother and the shahs before him had led, all the divs they had killed, not knowing that each victory was only temporary.

  “Will the same thing happen if we kill the Shahmar?” she asked. “Another div will rise to take his place?”

  “Not exactly,” Parvaneh said, her voice strained. “Some of us tried to kill the Shahmar in the beginning. But something about his human origins has interfered with the usual process. When he’s struck a mortal blow, he doesn’t die—he regenerates. His scales spread out and close over any wound. I think the div in him only grows stronger with each attempt. In order to truly defeat him, we must make him human first—and to do that, we need the simorgh’s feather.”

  Soraya’s hand went to her sash again, a hollow feeling growing in the pit of her stomach.

  18

  From Azad’s throne room, Parvaneh led her back into the tunnels. Sh
e mentioned something about a secret escape route known only to pariks, but Soraya only half listened. She was too busy arguing with herself.

  Tell her about the feather, one part of her was saying. Tell her now.

  If you tell her now, she’ll never help you, the other insisted. She’ll leave you here in the tunnels to be torn apart.

  They stopped in front of a blank wall, Parvaneh looking around before she dug her fingers into a crease and pulled open a heavy slab of rock. She removed the cloak from around their shoulders, and both of them took a breath. “Watch your head,” Parvaneh warned, and they ducked into a narrow passage. Once they were inside, Parvaneh pulled the hidden door back in place, leaving them in total darkness.

  Soraya tried to straighten up, but her head met the rock above with a dull thud. This passage was clearly smaller than any of the others; she felt more like she was inside the passages of Golvahar than the finely carved halls of Azad’s mountain palace. But the darkness of Golvahar’s passages was far more familiar to her, and she tried to find the wall with her hand to give her something solid in the nebulous dark.

  Something brushed her hair, and she let out a small yelp.

  “It’s me,” Parvaneh said in a hushed voice. Parvaneh’s hand found Soraya’s, and Soraya gratefully latched on to it. “We’re in a part of Arzur that only pariks know about,” Parvaneh explained. “Keep your head down and don’t let go of my hand.”

  They continued on, and when the ground beneath them started to incline upward, Soraya hoped they were near the end. The air here was thin and stale, and not being able to see made her feel untethered, with Parvaneh’s hand as her only anchor.

  Finally, Parvaneh told her to wait as she took back her hand. Soraya heard the sound of rock scraping against rock, and shortly afterward, a stream of air and moonlight bathed her face, as pure and refreshing as any river.