Mehr stood as Maryam walked over to her. “Why did you send the servants away?” she asked.
“Because some things aren’t for their ears,” Maryam said. Her skirts, diaphanous layers of netting and embroidered cloth, whispered against the floor. Closer now, Mehr could see the tension lining her face, the way her hands bit into the slippery weight of her shawl.
“You didn’t bring me here for privacy,” Mehr pointed out. “You brought me here to humiliate me.”
“How bold you are,” said Maryam, venom in her voice. “Things change, Mehr.”
Crossing the last bit of distance between them, Maryam roughly took hold of Mehr’s chin. She stared up into Mehr’s eyes without blinking.
“Look at you,” Maryam said softly. “Every year you grow more rebellious. You think I don’t see the look in your eyes? I know what you are, Mehr. I’ve accepted that trying to improve you is a pointless task, but perhaps you’ll pay me some heed when I tell you this: Your stubbornness is putting us all at risk, especially Arwa.”
Mehr could feel the sharp bite of her stepmother’s nails. She didn’t try to pull away. She told herself the pain was nothing.
“You don’t understand politics,” Maryam went on. “And why should you? Your father has kept you sheltered, as is right and proper. But I am your father’s other half. I share his burdens, and I know too much. I cannot allow you to continue blundering about in ignorance, harming us all.” She lowered her voice. “The Emperor, praise his name, has sent messages to his nobles across the Empire. He believes their efforts to drive heathens out of the Empire have been … lacking. He has asked them to search out your mother’s people in earnest and force them to the edges of society, where they rightly belong.” Maryam was still holding Mehr in her grip, nail to flesh, keeping her pinned fast. “Mehr, by the Emperor’s grace, you were born an Ambhan woman, and the walls of your father’s household shelter you from their sight and from harm. But even you are not so well hidden that your heathen rituals may not draw … attention.”
Mehr’s mind was full of noise. Her jaw ached.
“Why has the Emperor’s hatred grown so suddenly?” she whispered, forcing the words out through the grip of Maryam’s hand.
“It isn’t for us to question the Emperor,” Maryam said sharply.
Mehr bit down on her tongue to hold back an audible wince of pain as Maryam’s nails dug in deeper.
“No one has to know about the taint in your sister’s lineage,” Maryam said. “She is already my child in all the ways that matter. If you stop reminding the world of your heathen background, your father and I may be able to arrange good marriage prospects for her. Arwa could have the life she deserves. Or not. It’s up to you, Mehr.”
Finally Maryam released her. Mehr resisted the urge to touch her face.
“May I go?” she asked.
“You may go and think on what I’ve told you,” Maryam said. “But be warned. If you don’t make the right decision, I will have to convince your father to stop indulging you.” Her eyes were flinty. “No more dancing. No more heathen rites. His guilt won’t control him forever, Mehr.”
You can try, thought Mehr. This time she chose to be wiser, and held her tongue even as her heart hurt in her chest. Maryam made a dismissive gesture with one hand, and Mehr turned without offering her even the semblance of a respectful farewell. She swept through the doors, not bothering to hide the red marks on her face. Let the servants say what they liked. She’d had enough of her stepmother and her games to last a lifetime. Now all she wanted was to be alone.
Over the next few days Mehr got exactly what she’d wished for. The servants gave her a wide berth, mindful of the fact that Mehr was at odds with her stepmother. No one wanted to face Maryam’s displeasure by showing Mehr any favor. Arwa was kept away from her just like Maryam had promised. Mehr spent most of her time in her own chambers, waiting for the bruises on her face to fade and watching the horizon.
The daiva had been a herald of a storm. Mehr had been right about that. Every day the storm rolled in closer, building in waves against the sky. She watched the dreamfire glowing against the horizon, its deep ruby and amethyst flames flickering white at the edges. This was the first storm to reach Jah Irinah in a decade, and it should have been a privilege to witness it.
And yet, all Mehr could think of was Maryam’s sharp words and Lalita’s gentle warning. She couldn’t help it. The memory of Maryam’s nails tightening on Mehr’s jaw tangled together with the memory of Lalita’s voice as she warned Mehr to be careful, leaving a strange, painful dread in Mehr’s heart.
The Emperor was looking for her mother’s people. The Emperor wanted his nobles to drive out her mother’s people in earnest. People like Mehr.
Like Arwa.
Mehr worshipped the Emperor and the Maha, the Great One who had founded his bloodline, when it was expected of her, of course: on the Emperor’s birthday, on the anniversary of the Empire’s founding, or whenever Maryam demanded it. But she had no altar in her chambers, and no particular love of the Emperor in her heart. Her mother had hated him, in her own quiet way. She had refused, when Mehr was small, to worship him at all.I will never pray for him, her mother had said, with a black look in her eyes that Mehr had never forgotten.He has no right to an Amrithi’s prayers.
As a child, Mehr had not understood the weight of blood and history that lay behind her mother’s hatred. It was Lalita who later taught Mehr how the Maha, the first Emperor, had conquered Irinah and raised his temple upon its back. She told Mehr that the Amrithi had rebelled with the help of the daiva. When the daiva had begun to weaken, fading, the Empire had crushed the Amrithi with terrible swiftness. The Amrithi had been reviled for their resistance ever since.
Every time Mehr thought of the Emperor, she remembered that history and felt an echo of the darkness she’d seen in her mother’s eyes inside her own heart. She thought, too, of the way noblewomen would look at her when they visited her father’s palace, and the things the servants would whisper when they thought Mehr could not hear them.That one stinks of her mother’s blood. She’s not really Ambhan. Look at her face. Look at how she behaves.
They believed, just as the Emperor did, that there was no place for heathens in the Empire. If Ambhans were the highest of the high, blessed by the Emperor’s grace, obedient to the laws of an orderly and civilized culture, then Amrithi were the lowest of the races: barbarians, faithless wanderers, who had no respect for contracts or Ambhan law. The people of the Empire’s other provinces—even the Irin, for all their superstitious respect for the daiva—belonged to the Empire in a way the Amrithi never could.
To be visibly Amrithi was to be outcast. Amrithi had no real place in the Empire.Mehrhad no place. And if the Emperor’s hate for her mother’s kind had truly sharpened into a deeper and more active loathing, then Maryam was right to be afraid. Mehr had put them all at risk, simply by being who she was.
The Amrithi were hunted by the nobility and hounded to the edges of society, forced to live far beyond the borders of Irinah’s towns and villages, where they could not taint the Empire or its citizens with their alien culture or their heathen rites. Some survived as Lalita did, by hiding their heritage and building new lives. So far, Mehr had been protected by her father’s position and by the walls and veils that defined her life as a sheltered noblewoman. But if the Emperor was encouraging his nobles to persecute Amrithi more aggressively, if their eyes were beginning to seek out her mother’s people in vicious earnest …
Well. Mehr would do whatever she had to in order to keep Arwa safe.
Lalita had found a way to hide her heritage and thrive, taking on a Chand name and practicing Amrithi rites only in secret, behind closed doors. Mehr could do the same if she had to. Shewould. For her sister’s sake, she would do a great deal. But she had fought very hard to hold on to her heritage, and she would not discard it or make herself small without good reason.
