“Is that what your father’s people believe, my lady? That daiva deserve our respect?”
Oh, Mehr had already grown to dislike that opaque voice of his. His face was unreadable. She couldn’t tell if he was furious or calm.
“Call me by my name,” she snapped. “I’ve told you before, I’m not a noblewoman any longer. Surely you know that. It’s your fault, after all.”
“Then don’t call me husband,” he replied, just as fast. She realized, then, that he was angry. Good. “Call me Amun, and I will call you Mehr. Consider it a trade.”
“It’s what you are,” Mehr said sharply.
“I’m not …” He stopped. Swallowed. “I don’t want to think of myself as that.”
She thought of the weight of that word,husband, and the duties bound up with it. Mehr resisted the urge to touch the seal at her throat.
“Fine,” she said. “As you wish. I will call you Amun.”
She wrapped her arm around her knees, drawing her legs up to ward off the chill. She could feel Amun’s eyes on her, still watching her. There was a beat of silence.
“You’re cold,” he murmured. He reached for her wrist. Mehr felt the brush of his fingers on her skin and thought of the daiva, of its fingers shattering around her, and flinched away from him.
Amun’s face changed before her eyes, hard blankness breaking for a moment to reveal the feelings beneath. His expression was awful—a deep, painful angry thing, his features twisted with loathing.
Mehr had wanted to see some emotion in his face. She saw it then, in the flickering light.
His face became shuttered. He turned away from her. Blew out the lamp.
Mehr clutched her own wrist. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
She heard him shift, lying down on the ground. She didn’t have to see him to know that he had his back to her. She opened her mouth to speak. Closed it again. He didn’t want or need her apologies. He wanted her silence. He’d shown Mehr, unwittingly, the secret that lay at the heart of him. He’d shown her his weakness.
Under the mask he wore, Amun was full of poison. But none of it was aimed at her. No. Mehr knew what it looked like when another human being stared at her with hatred. What she had seen in Amun’s face was a knife turned inward.
She had seen it in his eyes, then. How he hated himself.
Even in the darkness, the sight of his face was imprinted on her memory. She’d been denied knowledge, any knowledge at all for so long, but in his face she’d found a light to burn away the edges of her ignorance and keep the cold at bay. His self-loathing made a cold, terrible kind of sense. In all the days that had passed, she had never seen the mystics offer him company or a kind word. If Mehr felt lonely, after mere days in their company, she could only imagine what Amun felt. To be so utterly unwanted, to be scarred and silent, to be treated in large and small ways as less than entirely human …
That kind of torture had the strength to shatter anyone. But Amun was not shattered. He was whole and strong, lying next to her on the floor of the tent, wide awake, breathing his careful, even breaths. Despite his self-hatred he had reached for her hand. Despite it, he had offered her a little time, a little mercy. He wanted goodness and tenderness—hecravedit, starving with loneliness as he was—and that fissure in his strength was a tool at Mehr’s disposal.
I could use him, Mehr thought, a thrill running up her spine. It felt like something akin to hunger. It would not take much. The Maha had bound him with vows written into his skin and his soul. But Mehr could bind him too. All it would take was a little kindness.
She could place a hand on his back now. She could apologize again.I’m sorry.Let her voice soften.I didn’t mean to hurt you.
She could turn him to her own ends so easily. And she deserved a shield, didn’t she? She was so very alone out here, among enemies and strangers. Would it be so wrong to ensure that Amun was on her side?
A voice echoed through her head:People are not tools to be used, Lady Mehr.
Nahira had told her that when she had discovered how Mehr had used Sara, bribing her with blood for a momentary escape into the storm. She’d warned Mehr off that path, and yet here Mehr was again—hand raised, words hovering on her lips—ready to bind Amun with the insidious power of kindness.
People are not tools to be used, Lady Mehr.
Mehr had used Sara in order to try to save Lalita’s life, and however foolish that had been, she had at least had noble intentions. There would be nothing noble in manipulating Amun. She swallowed around the guilt rising in her throat. Like it or not, survival was not a noble cause. It was a necessity. Mehr would do whatever preserving her life and freedom required, fine morals be damned.
But there was no doubt in Mehr’s mind that manipulating Amun as she’d imagined would change her irrevocably. She didn’t want to be everything she hated about Maryam. Whatever choices the mystics had stolen from her, this one choice belonged wholly to her. She could be like the people who had manipulated her and used her—the mystics, the distant Maha, her stepmother—or she could be something else.
She had to find another path.
She curled her toes against the soles of her boots, grounding herself. And then she took a leap of faith.
