Lalita spent a few hours with her on the first day, talking to her and offering her comfort. She treated Mehr as if she were fragile, keeping her voice soft and her movements slow. The kindness aggravated Mehr to no end. Too full of feeling, she couldn’t remain still under Lalita’s eyes. Instead she walked the room in circles, bristling like a caged animal.
Lalita watched Mehr pace, back and forth across the shelter’s floor, and said, “You need to rest, Mehr. Sit. You’ve been through an ordeal.”
“I’m well,” Mehr said, and that was true enough. She was as well as she could be, would be, when her chest ached, when Amun was not with her, when the Maha still lived and the echo of immortal nightmares still writhed under her eyelids.
“Just try not to think so much, then,” Lalita said gently. “I can almost see you fretting. For now it’s enough that you’re safe, and you’re here.”
Lalita left eventually, assuring Mehr she would return when she could, but as the days passed with no sign of her, Mehr soon found she was glad to be alone. She was grateful, so very grateful, that Lalita was alive and well. But she wasn’t the girl Lalita remembered any longer. That girl had believed in her own strength, but she had been soft, her resolve untested. Mehr had been tested, and she had shattered and remade herself. There was no going back for her.
Rest, Lalita had entreated. But Mehr couldn’t allow herself to rest. Not yet, not even for Lalita’s sake. She would need to regain her strength eventually, but for now the thought of being soft, even for a moment, pained her.
That night, after eating some of the food Lalita had left for her, Mehr lit a prayer flame. She told herself it was a much more economical use of fuel than the oil lantern, and also far less likely to draw attention from any Saltborn out searching for her. But really she simply liked the comfort of holding the small clay container in her palm and feeling the flickering heat of the candle flame. She sat on the floor and looked down at the marriage seal around her neck, the one Amun had carved for her long before he’d met her.
The light flickered on the seal, and on the whorls Amun had carved into it, the same whorls that decorated the walls of this Amrithi ruin around her.
Amun would have been so happy to be in this place, among these walls. Mehr imagined him by her side, kneeling on the cool ground, imagined him tracing the whorls of her seal, the only mark on it apart from his name, and speaking in that low voice of his.I gave you a symbol of our people—
She let the seal go.
Her heart ached for him, and for herself.
Amun had sacrificed so much to save her, and Mehr had found so much that she’d feared she had lost forever: her mother, Lalita, a surviving clan. She had no right to feel crushed by her own grief, and yet she was. Amun should have been here, not Mehr. This was where Amun belonged.
A noise from beyond the shelter made Mehr flinch, then tense abruptly. Straightening, curling her fists at her sides, she looked up—and saw her mother watching her from the doorway. In the light of the flame, her hooded face was largely shadowed, and Mehr was glad of that. She wanted no mirrors.
“I’ll be on watch, if you’d like to join me,” her mother said. She vanished back into the dark.
When Mehr finally followed, she found her mother seated facing the horizon. Her hood was thrown back, her hands clasped in front of her. She had no lantern of her own to illuminate the night, but she didn’t truly need one. The stars were achingly bright above them.
Mehr looked up at those stars and shivered. They looked … wrong. They glittered like shattered glass, splinters of fury on the black surface of the night. They reminded her of the Maha’s nightmare-flecked eyes. Sickened, she forced her gaze down, only to find that the sand was reflecting the starlight, wavering and strange.
“Come sit by me,” her mother offered.
Mehr wrenched her gaze up.
“I don’t need to be guarded,” she said.
“It puts my mind at ease to do so,” her mother responded. “Come.”
Mehr sat down next to her. The air was painfully cold, but the breeze was blessedly faint. Her mother was silent beside her, eyes narrowed and watchful. At her left side lay her dagger. Unlike the one she’d given Mehr when she left Jah Irinah, this one was unornamented, with a bone handle worn smooth by countless hands. It seemed she really did intend to remain on watch.
Mehr followed her mother’s gaze and stared out at the desert. Under the shattered sky, the flowing lines of the desert—its peaks and valleys, its sparse vegetation—glowed with subtle, off-kilter light. Only the horizon remained dark, a deep and fathomless blackness.
Under Mehr’s gaze, the darkness shifted.
She flinched with surprise, then narrowed her own eyes and leaned forward, squinting through the darkness.
“The daiva are moving,” said Mehr after a moment, awed. Now that she was looking closely, she could see them roiling upon the horizon, wild and seething.
Her mother was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “Strong dreams give them life. Now that the Maha’s grip has weakened, they dance.” Ruhi leaned forward too; she laid one hand on her dagger hilt, the fingertips of her free hand pressed thoughtfully to her lower lip. “If not for the Maha, perhaps they’d still walk the earth like men.”
“When I was little you told me stories about the daiva,” Mehr said. “Do you remember?”
“Ah, Mehr,” her mother said. Her breath gusted out of her. “Of course I do.”
“I used to try to tell Arwa those stories. But I don’t remember them as well as I should,” Mehr admitted. “And I had little chance to tell her tales.”
“Why?” Ruhi asked. Her voice was cautious.
