“Them?”
“The noblewomen. The widows. The ones who smoke their pipes and drink their wine and lament their fate, even though they have nothing to lament. No hunger, no strife, no real suffering to speak of.” Eshara shrugged then. “You’ve lived an easy life, Lady Arwa. You have no place on a journey this vital. And yet—here you are.”
Her words were a knife twist, turning in Arwa’s chest. Arwa sucked in a sharp breath, straightened her spine, and did not respond.
They sat for a long moment in silence. Then Zahir murmured and turned in his sleep. Arwa rose to her feet.
“May I borrow your bow?”
“If you like,” Eshara said, not looking up. So Arwa took it from where it rested against their packs and walked away.
Ah. Truth was a sharp knife, wasn’t it?
Eshara had a neat, serviceable bow and a handful of arrows. They were tools—as I am a tool, thought Arwa bitterly—and not a frivolous way to release her rage. So she made a focused effort to hunt for an addition to their morning meal, and didn’t solely waste her arrows on venting her feelings, as she sorely wished to. But there were no animals in sight, no birds, no deer, only one hare that darted swiftly away from her, leaving her arrow to thud in the dirt. With nothing worth killing in sight, she allowed herself the indulgence of taking the used arrow and nocking it once more. She could already feel the soreness of her fingers, without a thumb ring to hand to hold the string steady, the tension of the bow mirroring the tension in her arm.
She heard footsteps behind her.
“Are you truly hunting this early?” Zahir asked.
“Leave me be,” she said.
“I’ll take that as ano.”
“I was hunting,” she acknowledged, through gritted teeth. “But as I’m clearly having no luck, I’m hunting my rage instead and—skewering it through.”
“Ah.”
“It is a thing that Gulshera taught me.”
The thought of Gulshera—maybe dead, maybe gone, Arwa did notknow—only wound her feelings tighter.
She let the arrow loose. It buried itself in the bark of the tree. She released a breath.
“Do you know what Eshara said to me?” said Arwa.
“No.” Crunch of his boots. He stood beside her. “Did she say something that made you angry, by any chance?”
“I’m not angry with her,” Arwa said. “I am just—angry.”
Angry with her own choices and her own nature. Angry with a world that had told her that to be worthy she had to be a proper noblewoman, no more and no less; angry with herself forbelievingit. Angry that she had not been better, more, with what she’d been given.
Eshara had not been wrong. That stung.
When you strip everything away, Arwa thought,there is nothing in me but raw feeling: rage pulsing free like the blood of a thing unskinned.
I have to be more than this.
Zahir walked past her. He wrenched the arrow free; he touched a finger to the wound in the bark.
“A hare,” he said regretfully, “would be more edible.”
“Any more comments like that and you’ll be the one on the end of my arrow,” Arwa said. But there was no real ire in her voice, and Zahir smiled—a pale half smile—in response.
“I can still run if I must,” he said. “I expect I’d survive.”
She thought of how Gulshera had named archery a kind of alchemy for her grief: a way to give her hungry grief direction and discipline. She thought of the ache of her limbs, the way the journey was tiring and strengthening her, and the taste of ash.
Something alchemical was happening to her too. For good or ill.
