“Broke oaths,” she echoed.
It smiled. The surface of its face was a dozen fragments, moving unevenly, scraping against one another. She saw teeth like points of light.
The one who holds you has old blood of the Empire. His bloodline know a great deal of oaths. Shall we speak to him of it?
“You don’t touch him,” Arwa said sharply. “He is mine.”
The nightmare cocked its head.
Yours.
“Mine,” Arwa said firmly, feeling the burn of the words distantly, the hunger in them, and the fear of them too.
I suppose I cannot take what belongs to my kin.Wet, strange curl of its mouth, pale flesh peeling into a simulacrum of lips.So, kin: Shall I tell you what you could be? Shall I tell you the tale your fear spins?
“As you told Captain Argeb? No, old one.”
It placed the cold points of limbs against her dreamed flesh. Its face shifted once more, forming into something almost human.
You fling yourself into fears, it crooned.Death. Service. Your Amrithi blood.
“I am not afraid of such things.”
The nightmare’s face, for a glimmer of a moment, was her mother’s—fierce and furious, ashamed. Then it was broken once more.
You can’t lie to your own dark blood. You are always afraid. And yet you throw yourself into the things you fear. As if choosing the knife will make the pain less. So, my kin, let me tell you the truth.
Its face changed once more. Mehr’s face. Throat oozing great black pearls of blood.
It doesn’t, said the thing wearing her sister as a mask.
She was frozen. Her insides were ice. She could not even weep.
“No,” she managed.
Her sister’s face, wrought in ivory and bone, smiled once more.
She held her courage close. She forced herself to ignore her sister’s face, the awful whisper of the nightmare’s voice reaching into her skull. She met its flat silver eyes and said, “How can I convince you to let this caravanserai live?”
I have done nothing, it said.You have no need to convince me.
“What has been done to the captain’s mind is not nothing,” Arwa said, clinging to the dregs of her strength. “What has been done to pilgrims he calls heretics is not nothing.”
That was done by men.
“You whispered in the captain’s ears.”
That is merely my nature. Your bird-spirits fly. Your death-spirits kill. I am part of the balance, my kin. I speak, and sometimes mortals listen.
Argeb. Hungry for purity and purpose. He must have been easily swayed.
Arwa swallowed.
“Everyone died, at Darez Fort.”
Ah.
The daiva whirled around the nightmare like a crown. Her sister’s face peeled at the edges; she saw the bones of a jaw, shaped into a permanent smile.
