Empire of Sand

by Tasha Suri

  It would be harder—far harder, and far braver—to find a way to survive. Harder even still, to find a way to truly live.

  Amun made a low, tortured sound as he tossed on the bed. She touched his hair, made a hushing noise, as a mother would for a child. He didn’t wake. There were hours still until daylight, and Mehr feared all over again that he would not wake up in time. She curled herself up on the bed beside him, tucking her legs beneath herself. She kept stroking his hair. He made another pained noise, eyelids fluttering, and she began to sing him the lullaby she’d once sung to Arwa, to comfort her little sister when she’d cried.

  It was a ridiculous thing to do; she knew that. Amun was no child. She remembered, distantly, Arwa’s warm weight in her arms—her long braid of hair, her warm child scent. Amun was huge, all sinew and muscle, and smelled of blood. There was stubble on his cheeks. She touched her fingertips to his jaw. Her voice was thin and raw, but Amun still seemed to be soothed by it, his breathing softening as she cupped his face, as she sang.

  She watched his eyes open.

  “Mehr?” he said blearily. He reached a hand out. She took it. His large fingers enclosed hers.

  “I’m here,” she said softly.

  “Did I …?”

  “No,” she said, seeing the fear dawning on his face. “No, you did nothing. You fought.”

  He gave a pained laugh. “No wonder I hurt so mu—” He stopped, his voice choking. His grip on her hand tightened. “I can feel it. The vow.”

  She waited. His grip didn’t weaken. He was so gray with pain. “The song you were singing,” he said finally, pain leaking into his voice. “It sounded familiar.”

  “It was a song my mother used to sing to me,” she said. “An Amrithi song.”

  Amun nodded. “My … my father. He used to sing me to sleep. He was better with me than my mother. Because she had the—the amata gift, she was harder. More afraid. But my father … he had a—good voice. He taught me.” Breath. “Everything I know. He taught me.”

  Mehr listened. Just listened, as Amun struggled for words, as he closed his eyes and spoke, still holding on to her as tightly as a man in the sands holds his last flask of water.

  “After my mother, he was afraid to … to leave me alone. Because I was like her—he knew. He’d seen the dreamfire. With me. He tried not to go to villages. Tried to keep me safe. But we were hungry, so we went. And someone told the mystics we were there.” Pained breath in. Out. “When the mystics found us … Mehr, if my mother had been with me, she would have slit my throat before the Maha could take me. But my father—he loved me too much. He hesitated and they—took him. Us.”

  “You were a child,” Mehr whispered. “When you made your vows to the Maha … you were just a child?”

  “The Maha told me if I made my vows he would spare my father pain. He said he would show him mercy. I learned from the Maha how to tell a lie with truth.” A pause. Another harsh breath. “He killed him fast. It was mercy of a kind. But not the one I wanted.”

  All the stories he’d told her of his life before the Maha, all the careful absences in his stories, suddenly made sense. He’d told her he was young and foolish in his early days in the temple. She hadn’t thought he’d meant that he’d been nothing but a child, tricked into service by a Maha who had used his fear for his father’s life to bind him.

  Amun had been compelled, just as she had, by the need to protect someone he loved.

  Just a child. Oh, Amun, she thought.

  His breathing had grown ragged. He was shaking. “Let me go, Mehr. Go.”

  “I can’t,” Mehr said. “Bahren is waiting at the bottom of the stairs.”

  “I expected him to be in this room.”

  “I asked him to leave me some dignity,” Mehr said. “As an Ambhan noblewoman. But he will still be waiting.”

  Amun shook his head. “Mehr,” he said despairingly. Then he fell silent.

  “Amun,” she murmured, ever so soft. She wished, distantly, that she’d let the lanterns gutter. Maybe darkness would have made this easier. “Amun. It’s okay.”

  “It’s not,” he said. Deep breaths, sharp with pain. “Mehr, I … I’ve asked myself. So many times. When the vows hurt. When I was alone. Would I turn my blade on myself if I could? If I weren’t vowed …”

  “Amun,” she whispered again.

  “I was never—sure,” he said, forcing the words out through his pain. “I thought—no. I couldn’t. But Mehr, I know now. I would rather die than hurt you.”

  Tears pricked her eyes.

  “I’m not even a little afraid of you hurting me. You’ve tried so hard …” She swallowed back tears. “You were trying to buy us time. And you did. You have.” She covered their joined hands with her own. “I trust you more than anyone I’ve ever known. All will be well.”

  “I thought time would be enough. But that was before I knew you.”

  “And now you know me?” Mehr asked softly.

  “Now …” He exhaled, shaky. “I think about the boy I used to be. I think about what kind of man he would have become, if the world had been kinder. If the Maha hadn’t found him. That man would have … he would have courted you. In the Amrithi way. He would have told you how he admired you, for your strength—your beauty. Your heart. He would have left his clan for yours.”

  “I don’t have a clan, Amun,” Mehr said, finding her voice somehow. Somehow.

  “I would have been your clan, then,” he responded, so soft. “I would have loved you without vows or seals. Just my heart for yours, as long as you willed it.”

  “Ah,” she whispered back. Words seemed too far away, too hard to grasp when there was no air in her lungs.

  This, not her past, was the perfect dream, the mirage hovering on the horizon, always out of grasp: a love given freely, without vows or seals, chains or guilt. She ached for it. What he dreamed of was all she’d ever wanted, and could never have.

  If she could have been free. If she could have been born a woman without duties to bind her, if she could have chosen anyone in the world to love …

  “Mehr.” He said her name in that low, solemn voice she’d come to know so well. “You must know that I love you. I know you can’t love me in return, but—”

  “Then you know nothing,” Mehr said, more harshly than she’d intended. She bit down on her lip, hard enough to sting.

  “Please go, Mehr. I can’t …” His voice was a sudden rasp. He winced, closing his eyes.

  Mehr lifted her free hand and touched one sigil at his wrist. She could feel the heat rising from it, burning him from the inside. He was so brave. Brave to have survived, brave to have shown her kindness, and braver still now to keep fighting the Maha’s orders, even though it clearly hurt him beyond belief to do so.

  “If I had been born a free Amrithi woman, I may have loved the man you described, that free man, without vows or fear,” Mehr said, carefully shaping the words even as her insides shook. “But this is the only life I have, Amun. The only one, and I can’t … I can’t simply pretend I might have met you in another, kinder life.” She swallowed hard, searching for words. “But in this life, this one I have … perhaps because we are trapped together, you and I—or perhaps because you’re so kind and gentle, and difficult, and sly and …” The few words she had caught in her throat.

  Amun said nothing as she tried to muster up the dregs of her courage. He waited patiently for her to speak. That was the kind of man he was—the kind who waited for her to find her small, inconsequential words even as a pain far greater than she could understand tried to eat him whole. A good man. The best man she’d ever known.

  “I love you.” She said it like a confession, and with the words a burden she hadn’t even known she’d been carrying eased from her shoulders. In its place was nothing but relief: relief and a sweet lightness that almost brought tears to her tired eyes. “I love you. And if I had my free choice, if we were simply man and woman in this room together, no vows on us, then I …
I would choose to love you as a wife, in body and in soul.”

  “Mehr.” He breathed her name, looked up at her with those pained midnight eyes, dark and sweet. “We don’t have a choice. You know that. You know he’s taken our choices away from us.”

  “We always have choices,” she said. “You taught me that. When you obeyed the word, not the spirit of the Maha’s words, when you chose pain, over and over again, instead of hurting the both of us in … in a different way. When you decided to help me perfect a way to use the Rite of the Bound to save ourselves, even though you knew our hope of success was small and our risks were huge. You showed me what choices really mean.”

  “I can’t see,” he said hopelessly. “I just can’t see what choices we have.”

  The blankness was encroaching on his eyes. She cupped his face in a hand, willing it away. “You were thinking of the boy you were, and the man you could have been. Think instead of who you are now. Push back the pain if you can,” she pleaded, “and listen to me.”

  “I’m trying,” he whispered, his skin burning hot beneath her touch.

  “You just as you are now—scars and vows and sigils and all—you are the one I trust,” Mehr said fiercely. “Not some imagined version of you. You. If you esteem me as you claim to do, Amun, then trust yourself as I do. You can let the Maha turn you into an animal, or you can choose to take the love offered to you freely. Look beyond the pain and the blood and tell me: What choice do you want to make?”

  He looked at her, looked through the pain, as if he saw her and only her. His grip on her hand relaxed, fingers uncurling slowly to let her free. She pulled back her own hand, just a little, but remained still. Waiting for him. He rose up on one arm, shaking with the effort. She watched, holding her breath in her throat, as he reached a hand out, and cupped her face.

  Then he kissed her.

  The kiss was tentative—just a bare, brief touch of his mouth against hers, the fleeting pressure of his warm skin. They parted. Then Mehr leaned forward, into his hand and his lips, and kissed him back.

  This kiss was gentle, but not tentative. Mehr marveled at that—that something so new and so alien could feel so perfect, and so much like coming home. Something hot flared under her skin as the kiss deepened, as Amun’s hand moved from her cheek to tangle in her hair. Every inch of her skin felt suddenly, startlingly alive.

  They were on the precipice of—something. There was a yawning pit in her stomach, a sense that if she touched him in return they would move to a place beyond fear to utter sweetness. She brushed her fingers over the line of his jaw. Amun made a noise against her mouth—and then pulled back sharply.

  He got off the bed, even as his legs shook from the pain of it and his sigils stood out bright and livid on his skin. As Mehr tried to gather her thoughts, tried to quell her hammering heart, he slapped a hand against the wall and leaned his weight against it, his back to her. She could hear his ragged breath.

  “No, Mehr.” She got to her feet as he spoke. “Don’t come here. I don’t want to hurt—”

  “Hurt me? You won’t hurt me. What the Maha does, that isn’t you, Amun. I know you.” Her heart hadn’t stopped hammering, but the fire in her blood had burned her despair away and left her feeling alive again.

  The fire he’d ignited in her body had woken something in her heart: a small, fragile light, a thing beyond the hunger and pull of the body. It wasn’t quite hope. It felt like a door opening, a narrow road not leading to the vast freedom she’d so long yearned for, but to something more possible. More real.

  Something to hold on to in the dark.

  She said his name again, once. But she didn’t move. She’d told him he had a choice. She had to let him make it.

  “Vows,” he said abruptly. He turned to look at her, all his sigils feverish and bright on his dark face. “If—if we must be bound by his vows, I want us to make our own vows to each other.” A spasm of pain crossed his face. “I want to vow true things. Things that we choose to bind us.”

  “Vows,” she repeated. She nodded. “I can do that.”

  Vows. True things. Their lives had been shaped by vows layered upon vows: vows of service, vows of marriage, vows of ownership. Amun gave a gasp, doubling over, all his weight on the arm he had planted against the wall.

  He couldn’t speak, so she had to. She mustered up all her courage.

  “I vow that I trust you. That I will keep trusting you,” she said tentatively. “I vow to … to continue seeing you as the man that you are, not what other people have tried to make you.” A deep breath. “I vow to know you.”

  He slumped a little further. Afraid he would collapse, she ran to his side and caught hold of him. But he wasn’t falling. He turned in her arms, pressed his forehead to her own, as if her body gave his strength. She felt his breath soften as his pain eased. His fingers touched her face, light as dust. She shivered.

  “I vow …” A laugh. “I want to vow not to harm you, but how can I do that?”

  “You promised true vows,” Mehr said quietly, measuring her words as best as she could. “You can’t promise to protect me from the Maha, or from the mystics. But you can vow that you will never choose to hurt me. You can vow that.” She touched his face in return. “I trust you. More than anything, I’m sure of that.”

  He let out a breath. A smile shook his face.

  “I vow to be the man you trust,” he said softly. “Choices and all.”

  Their mouths met. The touch felt sharper somehow, like the harshest midday sunlight concentrated in the press of their lips, the touch of their fingertips. Then his hand was in her hair, and her body was arching into his, consumed by the fall of his shadow, the shaking strength of him.

  “I vow to love you,” he whispered, when they parted. “Always.”

  “You can’t vow that,” she told him.

  “I can,” he said, low and reverent, and kissed her again.

  She noticed how her touch flushed the pain from his body, restoring his strength. He moved easily back to the bed with her, never quite letting her go. His touch was gentle, a question in every brush of his fingers. Like this? Or this? She took his wrists in her hands, strangely sure of herself, despite her hammering heart. With her guidance, he slipped off her tunic, her shawl, leaving her bare to his eyes and touch.

  “Oh, Mehr.” His voice was full of light.

  She hadn’t been ashamed of her own skin before coming here, before her body had been marked indelibly as property. She felt some of her new shame fade at the look on his face, all wonder and want. She felt exhilarated, unafraid, even as his sigils glowed, even as the Maha’s compulsion ran through his blood.

  To be unafraid—that was a choice too.

  She touched the sigils on his face. When he gave a shake of his head, she moved her fingers to the seal etched onto his chest instead. In the mark she saw her history—all the men who had made her, an old and illustrious bloodline that had defined Mehr, like it or not. In the mark she saw herself.

  “I vow to hold these vows higher, more sacred than any vows that have been forced from us,” she said. She drew him closer still, the bed firm beneath her back, his skin warm and glowing with sweat and life. “I vow that I am your tribe and your clan and … I vow that I choose to belong to you.”

  He touched her seal-marked skin in return, a back-and-forth touch, so tender it nearly brought tears to her eyes. “We belong to each other,” he said. “That is a true vow, Mehr.”

  They touched each other compulsively, curiously. She learned the language of his body and her own, as new and strange and holy as a rite, but one that needed no name, no laws. The brightness inside her grew as whispered vows gave way entirely to touch. She was sure, so sure of him. The feel of him against her, inside her—even the clumsiness of it all, the brief pain, the heat of his breath on the slope of her shoulder—all of it only made her more sure.

  I vow that you’re my choice, the only right choice I’ve ever made, she thought, feeling the vow b
loom open in her heart, red as blood. No vow, no matter what it compels from me, will be more important than the one I’ve made to love you.

  Maybe she spoke the words. Maybe she didn’t. But in the dying lantern light, after his sigils had dimmed and he lay beside her in the growing glow of dawn, she looked into his eyes and saw the light in them, the softness of it. He knew her, heart and soul. He knew.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Mehr lay next to Amun as the dawn lightened the sky. Amun was quiet. She could feel his eyes on her, drinking her in.

  Her body felt different. Warm, wrung out with trauma and with joy. The sigil on her chest was burning, stretching its roots deep under her skin as it shifted and changed with the force of a vow made permanent. Her fate was sealed into her skin now.

  She didn’t think of Hema, of Arwa, of anyone or anything at all. She listened to Amun breathe. She thought of the cage that had closed in around them.

  They could no longer use the rite to try to win their freedom. All their escape plans—the sigils they’d strung together, the knowledge they’d carefully gleaned, the map they’d redrawn in kohl … it was all a waste. They were utterly bound, by body and by soul.

  She fanned a hand thoughtlessly over her stomach, felt the heat of her own skin.

  “You don’t have to fear,” Amun said. His voice was hoarse. All his agony had faded, but its ghost was still there, in his eyes.

  “I have a lot to fear,” Mehr said wryly. “We both do.”

  “No.” A moment of hesitation. Then he placed a hand over her hand, covering her bare stomach.

  “You won’t …” He hesitated. “There’s no need to worry.”