When they looked at Amun—if they looked at him at all—it was with loathing. Always.
“Why do they hate you?” Mehr asked. His coldness was no excuse for the level of silent spite directed at him. “Is it because you’re Amrithi?”
“You are too,” he pointed out, as if that were an answer.
“I’ve been reliably informed that I am not Amrithi in the way you are,” Mehr said dryly. “But I can’t quite believe that they hate you so much for that alone.”
“Then you think too well of them,” Amun said. They walked in silence for a moment longer. Then Amun said, “You have a way with people. They like you. It changes how they view you.”
Amun made it sound as if Mehr had a natural touch with people. She didn’t. Mehr cultivated connections with people by necessity. She’d learned to be whatever she needed to be, in order to win favor and gain the knowledge she needed to ensure her own survival.
Instead of telling him so, Mehr shook her head. “Oh, Amun. If you had known me before, in my father’s house, you wouldn’t say so. I wasn’t well loved.”
“I doubt that.”
“Doubt all you like. It’s the truth.” She clutched her new clothes tighter to her chest. She’d tucked the soap between the folds of cloth, letting the sweetness of the herbs permeate through the bundle. She inhaled the scent of it now: lush like the rose gardens of the Governor’s palace. “I have no special gift. I just try a little harder with them than you do.” That was to say, of course, that she tried at all.
“Do you miss your father’s household? Your family?”
“They’re different things,” Mehr said. “But yes. I miss my family.”
“I miss mine too.”
Mehr gave him a sharp, surprised look. He’d never mentioned his family before.
“Will you tell me about them?” she asked tentatively.
“My mother was strong,” he said, after a while. “Strong and clever with a knife. My father was gentler, but neither of them was weak. We lost our clan, so we traveled between villages and settlements, bartering blood and rites in return for everything we needed to survive. They were good people.”
“What happened to your clan?” Mehr asked.
Amun shrugged.
“The rare ones with theamata—or the ones the mystics thought might have theamata—were hunted down. They used their blades to save themselves,” he said matter-of-factly. “Clans like ours became afraid of trading with villages. They feared that the villagers would tell the mystics how to find them. Food became scarce. When our clan began to starve, some left Irinah to start again. The rest of us tried to survive in smaller, less noticeable groups. That was what my parents chose to do together.”
Amun stopped, letting out a slow exhalation. His jaw was granite, lines of tension furrowing his brow. She hadn’t realized how tense he had become, or how tightly she’d been holding her own breath inside herself, coiled like wire.
“What happened to your parents?” Mehr asked him softly.
She regretted her question almost instantly. She placed her hand on his arm, watched as he lowered his head.
“Amun,” she said. “I’m sorry, I—”
“It’s fine,” he said. “No one has ever asked me before. That’s all.” But he still wouldn’t look at her. “My mother didn’t return to our tent one night. A week passed. My father looked for her, and when he came back he told me she had turned her knife on herself. The mystics must have discovered her. She preserved her freedom in the Amrithi way. As for my father …” He looked at her then. “Losing my mother was hard. Losing my father, too, was harder. In those early days, my grief made me an animal. I was too young and too foolish to realize that raging and howling like an animal would only make the mystics treat me as one. The mystics think I am a monster, Mehr, because in those early days, I was.”
He spoke matter-of-factly, no emotion in his voice, as if those early days were long gone and couldn’t hurt him anymore. But Mehr had seen him lower his head like he couldn’t carry the weight of the memories that lived inside it. She knew those days lived inside him still.
“You’re not a monster, Amun.”
“Not anymore,” he agreed.
“You’ve never been a monster. I’ve seen monsters.”As have you, she thought.The Maha. Even Kalini.“You’re not one of them.”
“Doubt it all you like,” he said, echoing her words back at her. He smiled, but it was a bleak look. “It’s still true, Mehr.”
Mehr shook her head. She could have called him a fool, then, but what good could it possibly do? He was harsh enough to himself. He didn’t need her help to make him feel any worse.
“I manage myself better now,” he continued. “But I still don’t need these people to be kind to me. I don’t want them to be. I learned long ago that no one can replace my family.”
