“I shouldn’t go,” Mehr said. “I know I shouldn’t go.”
Sweating, sore, she was curled up on the floor with her head in her hands. Amun sat across from her, legs stretched out across the floor, looking equally exhausted.
“You should know by now, Mehr. I have nothing to say.”
“I’m asking you to say something.”
Amun shrugged.
“Go if you want to go,” he said.
What did Mehr want?
She wanted to practice the sigils. The sigils they’d strung together were almost coherent enough to be of use when the storm came. They were so very close to finding the secret to freedom. But she also knew that neither of them had anything left to give. Instead of practicing they were collapsed, exhausted, doing nothing.
“I’ll achieve nothing by going to them now,” Mehr said. The sigils were far more important than anything the women could give to them.
“It’s your choice.”
“They think you hurt me,” Mehr said. “Do you realize that?”
Amun shrugged again.
“You don’t care?” she asked.
“You know I don’t,” he said levelly.
Mehr heaved out a sigh. “Well, I do.”
They were both silent for a long moment. Then Amun spoke.
“It’s better they believe I hurt you, instead of the Maha. They would just wonder how you’d failed him, and blame you for it.” He looked at Mehr, simple truth in his eyes. “You need people, Mehr. Go to them.”
“And you?” she asked. “Do you need people?”
She thought, for a moment, that Amun would react badly. He frowned at her, his brow furrowing—and then a yawn cracked his seriousness. He gave a soft laugh and leaned back against the wall.
“I need to rest,” Amun said. “That’s all that I need right now.”
The wine was a mistake.
Mehr realized too late, of course. The girls had gambled, and Anni had triumphantly poured them all wine into cheap clay cups pilfered from the storeroom. The cups were small. They could only hold a mouthful or two of drink. It had been easy for Mehr to take the first cup of wine offered, then the second, then the third; by the fourth she was light-headed and dazed. She realized too late that the wine was far stronger than the watered-down, sweet stuff she had drunk in her father’s household. It didn’t help that she had barely eaten and that she was exhausted. She’d been weak and out of sorts before the first mouthful of drink had even touched her lips.
I should go home, Mehr thought. But she couldn’t seem to make her arms and legs move. Instead she sat at the edge of the room, the chatter around her eddying in and out of focus. The girls were talking about the male mystics, their voices hushed and full of laughter.
“Of course I don’t go near the men,” Rena said, more loudly than the rest. She sounded affronted.
“We go near the men all the time,” another girl said in a joking voice. “They’re everywhere.”
“Except when we eat, bathe, shit, pray, or sleep,” another voice said dryly. Mehr thought it was possibly Hema’s. But the room was soft and the voices blurred like ink and water. She didn’t really know.
“We have a sacred duty to serve with our whole hearts. Men are a distraction.”
“And you keep away from men, do you?”
“It’s not as if we can get—”
“Don’t say it.”
