‘He shouldn’t have been there in the first place,’ I admit with a swirling mass of guilt in my gut.
‘Arezu deserves a scolding,’ Sohrab mumbles, eyes opening sleepily. ‘When my uma lived, she would scold us.’
‘Scold,’ I repeat. ‘I am not your uma.’
They go quiet, and again, a peculiar feeling resonates through me. I regret my words, unable to parse why, except that I would never blame my failures on someone else, least of all them. If I cannot give them the scolding they want, is that their fault or mine?
‘Uma?’ Yahya brings his head up from my chest. ‘Master, my uma.’
They all still at that. The light voice, the light words that seem so small – do they not understand the weight? The responsibility?
‘I am your master,’ I whisper. ‘Not uma.Not uma.’ Yahya’s lips tug down and, to my horror, his eyes water. ‘Wait—’ I panic and Yasaman goes to grab him but I halt her. My hand comes atop his dark curls, soothing the frayed strands until his eyes droop again.
A curiosity takes hold of me and this time I do not fight it. ‘Where are your clans?’
‘Here, in a small village of Al-Haut.’ Yasaman stifles a yawn. ‘Uma was a bone carver; she was martyred giving birth to Yahya.’
‘And your dada?’
‘He was a bone merchant who travelled north and disappeared.’ She frowns. ‘Fortunately, I was chosen as an apprentice to a court librarian; he even sponsored Yahya in the pazktab. My old master taught me my letters to be a scribe.’
I blink. ‘You truly wish to be a scribe? Not a warrior?’
‘Like the scholars, Yahya and I will specialise in the Easkaria, to be scribes for the vizier.’
‘Tell me the point of writing pages of suffering? It’s worthless,’ I mutter.
She flinches. ‘War is more worthless,’ she snaps, loud enough to startle Yahya. I glare above his head. ‘You cannot study a war without the scribes.’
‘Master,’ Arezu scolds. ‘You love your proverbs; here is one for you: the ones who claim books are beneath them fear the knowledge they possess. You are being a coward.’
‘I am trying to save her,’ I snap back but I am no longer there in the room. I am drifting far, far away. My voice lashes in a way it never has before. ‘I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. I made her mistake. Accepting thestoriesof a people is a burden she will never be able to fulfil. It’s the worst curse to pen the history of the past. One day she willbreak.’
‘Master?’
I tuck Yahya into the quilt and hobble on my good leg. Something is wrong with me; I have lost my cool over something so small.
Arezu lurches forward, catching my arm at the entrance. ‘I see you now.’ But I fear what she reads inside of me.
She follows me out into the corridor and we slide down the cold marbled wall. As if to mollify the taut silence, Arezu offers a question. ‘Master, why throw yourself into another battle after the Marka? Why take such risks when the odds are against you?’
‘You would not understand.’
She pins me with her gaze. ‘Then make me understand. I hate when you are like this: here before us, but also not.’
I lift my forearm of gold-threading and dare close to the truth. ‘Like you, long before this, I had a home. My tribe was determined to ignore the outside world, but the world was determined to take every bloodybit of its offerings from us. I was accepted into a new home, and I do not want it pillaged again. Now I train in Za’skar because I want to save it.’
My words are still honest, for she does not know what home I refer to. To her, home is here: Sajamistan.
Arezu says, ‘In Khor, we faced all kinds of raids in my village; many Sajamistanis did.’
She calls herself Sajamistani when she is of a Khorinite tribe. I swallow my protest. I call myself Azadnian, despite being born in Tezmi’a. It is easier to cede to the empire.
Arezu continues, ‘You think we are not alike, but my own brother died from a raid when he was only two.’
I now understand how she grew to be so fond of Yahya. ‘I didn’t know.’
She looks down at her bandaged arms. ‘There are many things you don’t know.’ She smiles; how fondly her jade eyes glisten. ‘A warrior saved me the same time my affinity came into being. So, do not tell me I do not understand. I may be younger than you, but I intend to enlist the next lunar year. To fight like the Sepahbad.’
