Mehr felt an unfamiliar tenderness well up in her, looking at the stubborn shape of his jaw, his hands clenched over his bent knees.
“Oh, Amun,” she said gently. “You couldn’t have helped me. But next time I’m upset, I promise to shout at you. Is that fair?”
He shot her a sidelong glare that spoke far more loudly than words. Mehr smiled back.
“Mehr,” he said. His voice was halting. “What I told you last night. If you have any questions …”
Her insides were tight, panic unfurling in her heart again. She took a deep breath. “I can’t talk about this yet.”
He murmured an acknowledgment. Then he said, “Tell me about your old home. Tell me what it was like to dance in Jah Irinah.”
His words were an obvious attempt to distract her, and Mehr accepted the opportunity gratefully. She told him about her old quarters, about the perforated screen facing the desert, about the way she had danced and danced, hours spent in joyful loneliness under the checkered light that poured through it. She told him that her mother had taught her, that another Amrithi had taught her when her mother had left. She told him how the love of the rites had sustained her like air. She told him more than she’d intended to. But she was lonely, lonely and scared, and Amun waskind.
“I’ve never been able to dance like you,” she admitted. “Your knowledge far surpasses mine.”
When he performed the rites his movements weren’t beautiful. His dancing had none of the poetry of Lalita’s, or the wild, raw abandon her mother had possessed when she’d performed a rite. Amun was economical, powerful—there was a precision in his performances Mehr had never seen before. In his dances, Mehr recognized the flaws in her own.
“I’ve had a great deal of practice,” he said. “Every waking hour not spent in prayers, I have spent on the rites. For most of my service, it has been the one duty the Maha has tasked me to focus on.” A shrug. “Anyone would grow in skill under that regime.”
“What does make you happy, then?” Mehr asked. “Surely something must.”
She was afraid for a second that he would tell her nothing made him happy. But instead he ran a hand through his damp hair, setting the curls into absolute disarray. She recognized that gesture now, from all the times he’d caught her dressing in their shared tent, or trying to untangle her long hair with her fingers. He was embarrassed.
“Come now,” Mehr cajoled. “Everyone has something that they enjoy. Perhaps you’re a secret painter, hm?”
Amun was clearly amused despite himself. “What would I paint here, Mehr? Sand or more sand?”
“You see more women than most painters would ever dream of,” Mehr said with a laugh. “You know my stepmother had her miniature painted for my father once? She commissioned one of the finest artists in Jah Irinah. He couldn’t see her face, of course—my stepmother is too well bred to reveal her face to a stranger—so the poor man worked entirely from her description of herself.”
“Was it accurate?” Amun asked, in a tone that told her he already knew the answer.
“Of course it wasn’t. So my father was blessed with a miniature of a stranger’s face to carry around with him. A stranger who was a good deal more sensuous than my stepmother has ever been, I might add.” Mehr clucked her tongue. “What an imagination that man had.”
Amun grinned. The flash of his teeth, the crinkling of his eyes, left Mehr startled. He guarded his expressions so vigilantly that the curve of his mouth struck her with the force of a physical blow.
“And you, Mehr. Did you ever demand to be painted?”
Mehr snorted. “Me? No. I wasn’t ready to wed, so I didn’t have anyone to impress. Besides, any painter given my description would still have insisted on making me moon pale with hair like a fall of silk.” She made a dismissive gesture. “I don’t need false flattery.”
“They paint what they think you want to see,” Amun noted, with insightfulness that—again—struck Mehr.
“They paint what they think I want the world to see,” Mehr said. A woman beautiful in the eyes of the Empire. A woman with purely Ambhan flesh. “But they would be wrong about me. I like myself perfectly well as I am.”
“You don’t want to look Ambhan?”
“Me? No.” If Mehr had looked Ambhan, perhaps her stepmother would have looked at her and seen a child she could mold to her own ends, instead of an Amrithi heathen and living reminder of Suren’s exiled mistress. If Mehr had looked Ambhan, perhaps she would have lost what remained of her heritage to Maryam’s manipulations. The thought viscerally sickened her. To be Ambhan in an Ambhan world, to have light brown skin and lighter eyes, and straight hair and fine bones, was to be beautiful and to belong. But Mehr had never wanted to belong to that world. She’d simply wanted a place to call her own. “I’m content with what I am, Ambhan and Amrithi and all. Wouldyouwant to look Ambhan?”
“You’re half Ambhan,” Amun said. “I am not.”
“Answer my question anyway,” Mehr said. “Humor me.”
“It would be nice to vanish in a crowd,” Amun said after a moment of thoughtful silence. “But no. I am what I am.”
I am what I am.He hadn’t said that he liked himself, and in a way Mehr was glad for that honesty. She remembered the fractured hatred she’d seen on his face that night in the desert. She knewlikewould have been a lie.
But she wanted to see his smile again. She wanted to see his face—that dark, serious face, inked in fluid blue lines—crack open with emotion that wasn’t bloodied and sad.
“Amrithi or not, you’d never vanish in a crowd,” Mehr said, absently. “You’re too …” She made a vague gesture with her hands, trying to encompass his broad strength, the way he towered over her even when hunched over and seated. “You take up a great deal of space.”
