“Don’t you think your widow friend would have spoken to them herself, if she thought they could help her escape?” Zahir asked.
“Perhaps Arwa does stand a chance,” Eshara interjected.
She was sitting with her back to the curtain, slowly sharpening the edge of her scimitar. The hiss of steel on stone cut through the air. She had begun sharpening the blade the very minute Arwa had warned her of what the widow had said about the captain, as if a blade would be anything but a detriment, as if the hiss of metal didn’t sharpen the edge of leashed violence in the air to a terrible point. “Their ilk listen to well-bred women, sometimes. Something abouttreasuringthem.” She shrugged. “She’s a noble and pretty. She might be able to sway them.”
“Or their captain may cut off her head and place it on a stake outside the caravanserai’s walls,” said Zahir. His eyes were keen blades, his voice equally sharp. Everything was sharp now. Even the thud of Arwa’s own heart in her chest. Even the breath in her lungs. “Isn’t that what your widow friend said he does to heretics?”
“He may also cut out my tongue,” said Arwa. “You forgot that.”
Zahir swore an oath.
“Arwa, you’re cleverer than this.”
“And what do you think we should do instead?” she threw back. “This captain cannot be bribed, and we have little coin left anyway. We can wait here until we’re freed—but when will that be? Will we be freed at all?” Arwa threw her hands wide, all feeling. “There are no clever options available to us. There’s only this.”
“There’s no reason it has to be you,” Zahir said. “I could speak to them.”
“You’re mildly less pretty,” Eshara said, squinting down at her blade. Zahir gave her an irritated look and Eshara added, “And I’ve never cajoled anyone. It isn’t my nature.”
“We can go together, then,” Zahir said. “All three of us, if need be. Arwa. Please. See reason.”
She shook her head wordlessly, and Zahir leaned forward, clear light blazing in his eyes.
“You can’t truly think they’re going to let us go,” he said. “You can’t. Please. Be honest with me?”
It was hard to be barbed or secretive in the face of that nakedwant—that hunger for knowledge and truth that blazed in him always, like a great light.
She looked away.
“No,” Arwa admitted. “But I…”
Truth. Give them truth.
What else could she do, after all?
“I had a dream,” she said.
“Oh, a dream,” Eshara said flatly. “Wonderful.”
“You don’t understand. The realm of ash, I…” She curled her hands, tight, tighter. “I have entered it. In my dreams. And sometimes—when I’m awake. When we fell from the dovecote tower, it wasn’t my ash that made me forget myself, alone. Reaching for the ash made me fall into the realm.”
Silence. Then Zahir’s voice, tightly controlled:
“You should use ritual to enter the realm of ash. Opium. Blood.”
“I can’t entirely control it,” admitted Arwa.
“You told me you were well, in Jah Ambha. And I…” He exhaled. Squeezed his eyes shut. “I should have questioned you more. I shouldn’t have trusted you.”
Arwa wanted to recoil, at those words. Something dark squirmed at the back of her skull.
“Because of my ability to slip into the realm,” she said slowly, forcing herself to go on, “I think I was able to feel the danger here, in a way I could not if I walked only in one world. I saw something that I’ve seen before, at Darez Fort. Something that filled me with unnatural fear then and fills us all with it now. A nightmare, Zahir. I saw a nightmare. And I am more afraid of it than any soldier. Because… because I know what it can make a soldierdo.”
“I should have known,” he said to himself. “I should have guessed.”
“Are you listening to me at all? Eshara—”
“Don’t involve me,” Eshara said. She wasn’t sharpening her scimitar anymore, but she was staring down at it with great single-minded intensity, as if the sight of the blade could keep the fear at bay.
