She was shivering. She couldn’t control herself. She wished the Maha had ordered her to be silent instead of Amun. It was hard to resist the urge to garble out apologies, to cry and beg for his mercy. He had done nothing to her, but in her bones she knew he would. He wanted her fear. He wanted it more than her gratitude.
The Maha allowed the moment to stretch thin between them. His hand drifted, with deceptive casualness, away from the tea glass and spoon toward a tray of fruit. There was a knife on the tray. It was small, with a firm handle and one sharp edge, useful for cutting fruit down into fine segments. He took hold of it.
“Hold out your left hand, Mehr. Palm up.”
Mehr wanted to refuse. But he had ordered her. She should not have been able to resist an order. Allowing his voice to compel her was almost a relief. She held her arm out across the table, palm upraised. With his order racing through her blood, her arm didn’t even tremble.
He held the knife over the smallest finger. The metal skimmed her skin.
“You don’t need all of your fingers for the rite,” he told her. “I know that.” A pause. “I was once served by an Amrithi male named Gaur. He was strong. Healthy. But the smallest finger of his left hand was lost when my mystics took his blade from him. A shame, but he learned to serve despite his early failures.”
Mehr held her breath. There was a whiteness buzzing behind her eyes.
“Will you do better?” the Maha asked quietly. “Or will you require encouragement?”
He pressed a little harder. A bead of blood welled up on Mehr’s skin.
“I will do better,” Mehr said. Her voice shook like a leaf. “I promise I will.”
Even in the cloud of fear fogging her mind, Mehr knew he was unlikely to risk maiming her permanently so near the storm. She knew. But that made no difference. He could hurt her. He had hurt her today—cut the knowledge of her powerlessness directly into her flesh. Once the storm had passed, he could hurt her even worse. Skin deep, soul deep. However he liked. Her life belonged to him.
This knife would hang over her, always and always, for the rest of her vow-bound life.
He met her eyes. Whatever he saw must have pleased him, because he nodded to himself and placed the hilt of the blade in her open palm.
“I will observe your training directly from time to time, in the future,” said the Maha. “Clearly I was wrong to think Amun would be a reliable teacher.” He slid the tea across the table to Mehr. It was still warm, steam rising from its surface. “For now, wipe the blade clean,” he said. “Drink the tea and calm yourself.”
There was nothing for Mehr to clean the blade with. Under the weight of the Maha’s hooded eyes, she took the blade in her bloodied, shaking hand and wiped the knife clean on the sleeve of her new tunic. Her hands refused to stop trembling. She put the blade down, lifted the glass, and drank. The liquid was scalding, a shock of sweetness and heat.
“You will both perform for me now,” the Maha said, his voice silken. “Show me that you will be able to do what is required of you, and you aren’t as clumsy and foolish as I’ve been led to believe.”
Under his watchful gaze, Mehr and Amun stood. Unable to speak, the weight of the Maha’s command upon him, Amun guided her to look at him with a light touch of his fingertips to her arm.
Follow me, his eyes seemed to say.Trust me. We will get through this together.
Mehr took a deep breath and raised her hands to form the first sigil.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
You seem calm.” Amun watched her carefully as she sat down on the bed in their room, as she curled her hands in her lap.
“I’m not calm,” Mehr said. “I just can’t allow myself to feel. Not yet.”
She inspected her hand carefully. The cut was shallow. It had pained and bled far more than a cut of its size deserved to. Even now, every time she curled her fingers, sluggish blood oozed from the wound. She pressed her stained sleeve hard against the cut to stem the flow. Performing the rite, shaping its sigils, had opened the cut again and made it pain all the more.
Her poor sleeve. After all the effort Amun had gone to in order to make her tunic presentable, the fact that the cloth was irreparably ruined seemed somehow a greater injustice even than the wound the Maha had inflicted on her. Mehr ran a finger over the cloth. The stain had dried fast. Even if Mehr begged some boiled water from the kitchens and sacrificed some of her new soap to the task of getting it clean, something of the stain would be left behind—some faint hint of darkness, the smell of bitter iron.
“You’re doing well,” Amun said. “No matter what the Maha claims, you are.”
“Then why punish me?”
“He wants you to be as skilled in the rite as I am,” said Amun. “He needs us both to be prepared, Mehr, or his rite can’t be performed. He doesn’t have other Amrithi to perform the rite as he once did. He just has us.”
It was strange to think of the Maha as fearful. It was stranger still to think that the Maha needed them: that without Mehr and Amun the great Empire, all its provinces and wealth and beauty, would fall to dust.
“Youareprepared, Mehr,” Amun said into the silence. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried about that,” Mehr lied. “Has he ever observed your training before? Ever demanded you perform for him?”
