Mehr said nothing. When it was clear she couldn’t or wouldn’t respond, her father continued.
“You try to stay true to your mother’s customs,” he said softly. “For that I don’t fault you. But when you left your quarters, you betrayed your duty asmychild. And that betrayal, daughter, comes with a price.”
He leaned forward and pressed an item into her hands. She looked down. Pressed against her palm was a circle of carved stone, marked in Ambhan script with the names of the men of the family who had come before her. She saw her own name, set at its heart. Her blood ran cold.
Her seal. This was her marriage seal.
“You are not only Amrithi. You cannot eschew all vows and contracts as your mother’s people do,” he said, in that same terrible, soft voice. “I have raised and treasured you as an Ambhan noblewoman, and like all my countrywomen, you have the right to make one contract.” He closed her fingers around the seal. “The choice is wholly yours, Mehr. But it is a choice you must make.”
Mehr’s throat closed.
“Maryam has agreed to chaperone you,” her father went on. “She will accompany you to her family holdings in Hara. If no courtiers there suit you, she will take you to Numriha. Find a good man, Mehr. Give him your seal. Wear his proudly. I believe you will find a way to be happy.”
He spoke of other provinces of the Empire: Numriha, with its mines and its artisans; Hara, lush and green, fed by rivers and ocean alike. Mehr had heard of them, and knew guards and servants within the women’s quarters who hailed from them, but she had never seen them in person. She had never left Irinah.
Her father hadn’t mentioned Ambha. That, she understood. Ambha was no simple province. It was the jewel of the Empire, its beating heart, where the Emperor ruled. The greatest of the nobility, the old Ambhan bloodlines, all hailed from Ambha itself. No province had ever been ruled by a Governor who was not of Ambhan blood, born from the great Ambhan families who served in the Emperor’s court to this day.
It was certainly no place for a half-Amrithi daughter.
Mehr raised her head.
“I watched a woman die today,” Mehr said. Her voice sounded like a stranger’s. “A good woman. I held her in my arms as she passed. I watched her go. And now you’re exiling me? Sending me away from everything I know?”
“What you did in the storm, Mehr, the way you behaved, the rite you performed …” He paused, and shook his head. “I do it out of love,” her father said gently. “Beyond Irinah, you can begin again.”
“Begin again,” Mehr echoed. “I see.”
Leaving Irinah would place her beyond her tangible heritage. There would be no daiva to seek her blood, and no dreamfire to answer her prayers. Beyond Irinah she could hide her Amrithi heritage. She could give up her rites, her dagger, her dreams. She could claim to have a Chand mother, perhaps, to explain her dark skin and the distinctly un-Ambhan cast to her features. There would certainly be men willing to believe the lie for the sake of allying with the daughter of the Governor of Irinah.
She could begin again by erasing herself.
“You’re not safe here anymore, Mehr,” said her father.
Mehr looked hard into her father’s steel eyes, eyes that were nothing like her own.
“You should never have kept me and Arwa,” Mehr said. “You should have sent us away with our mother. We don’t belong in the Empire.”
Her father didn’t flinch. But it didn’t matter. Mehr knew she had struck him a blow.
“You’re confined to your chambers indefinitely,” he said. He looked away from her. Mehr squeezed the seal tight between her fingers.
Maryam looked at Mehr with a hard expression on her face and clasped her husband’s hand tight, in a gesture that was both protective and possessive.
You’ll be gone soon, Maryam’s eyes said.I’ll make sure of that.
“Go now, Mehr,” she said, in a voice far softer than the look in her eyes. “Your father and I have a great deal to discuss.”
Mehr stood and left without another word.
CHAPTER FOUR
Alone in her chambers, Mehr lay down on her divan and wept. She thought of Usha and of Lalita, of blood on her clothes and the sand beneath her feet; she thought of the dreamfire clutching her wrists and ankles, of awe and terror and the absolute helplessness of watching someone die. The tears poured out of her uncontrollably. She wept and wept and wept. Eventually exhaustion dragged her down into a restless sleep. When she woke, hours later, she felt as fragile as glass.
Earlier she had flung her seal to the other end of the room, too heartsick and furious to look at it. She collected it now, threading it onto a length of silk and hanging it around her neck. She washed her face clean with a damp cloth, rubbing away the salt and sleep marking her cheeks. She looked into her mirror. A worn, tired face stared back at her.
The seal was heavy. It had to be, to carry the weight of her family’s history. It was marked with dozens of names, minuscule carvings that traced Mehr’s lineage back over three hundred years, generation upon generation, to the first soldier who had followed the Maha from Ambha into the neighboring lands of Chand and Numriha and Hara, conquering them all in turn and forging the Empire. One of those ancestors had been at the Maha’s side when he had conquered Irinah and made it the seat of his everlasting temple.
She touched the grooves on the stone with gentle fingers. She understood that in giving her a seal marked with his ancestors, her father had tried to show how much he loved her. Illegitimate daughters had no right to ancestral names. Yet here against Mehr’s skin was a heritage lovingly offered, the unspoken right to call herself a daughter of Suren, a granddaughter of Karan, a child of many men and as many nameless women.
