Sohal was Amrithi. A part of him, at least.
“I’d visit the House, when we passed through. Take the widows offerings. I thought I imagined them the first time, but later I was sure that the dark was… not simply dark.” He shook his head. “I thought they were there for me. For—family. But now I wonder if they were just there to curse us. Were they?”
He was Amrithi enough that he’d recognized the daiva, in the dark of the House of Tears. Enough that he’d looked into her ash-blown eyes and not thought of witchcraft or of heresy, but of daiva, and of people with immortality in their blood.
He was as Amrithi as she was.
And yet he looked as much part of the Ambhan Empire as she did.
She felt strangely shaken.
“No,” she said. “They were trying to save us.”
“Ah.” He breathed out. “That’s good, then.”
She looked ahead, at all the pilgrims—young and old—following a foolish hope. At the turn of Zahir’s head, in the distance—the way he looked back at her, searching for her face.
“Sohal,” she said. “We’re alike. At least in this.”
“I thought so,” he said, and there was something eager and lonely in his voice. “Hoped so, maybe.”
“How much do you know of being Amrithi?” she asked him, a strange yearning in her belly. “Do you know of—rites? Sigils?”
He shook his head.
“Food? Or—traditions?”
“My family didn’t want me to know anything,” he said. He spoke the words as if they shamed him. “They thought the less I knew, the less likely it was that anyone would ever know the truth. But sometimes my grandfather would speak about his own mother and his childhood and I listened.” There was yearning in his voice.
“My mother hoped the same. But I know—a little—of what being Amrithi means. I have a little knowledge of rites and sigils, and history. And yet…”
She stopped, abruptly.And yet.
She could not articulate it, could not put into words how not having something nonetheless left a void with a history inside it—a void that reshaped the rest of her, all the Ambhan parts of her that were incomplete without the lost pieces of her that would have made her feel whole.
She recognized the yearning now. It was hunger for a thing she had never had.
Sohal was nodding. There was recognition in the shape of his mouth, the tilt of his head. “I know,” he said. “It is hard, knowing other Ambhans would hate you for the Amrithi blood in you. Knowing you’ve forgotten something of who you are. Isn’t it?”
She nodded in return, wordlessly.
“The other pilgrims followhimnow because of what the widows said. Because they think he is the Maha’s heir, or failing that, that he has power to keep them safe.” Sohal hesitated. Looked up at her. The sound of the mule’s hooves clipped the air. “But me, I follow because of you.”
“Oh,” she breathed. She did not know what to say to that. “And your friend?”
“He follows because I follow. Because we shouldn’t have obeyed, in the caravanserai.” Sohal looked away. Swallowed. “I think Aran is looking for the Maha’s forgiveness.”
Arwa did not know if such forgiveness existed. So she merely nodded once more in acknowledgment, and listened to the huff of the mule, the chattering of pilgrims’ voices.
There had to be others like both of them in the world. Others with Amrithi blood, denied anything but fractures of part of their lineage; others with a gift often named a curse hidden within them.
Sohal had little knowledge of being Amrithi. Arwa had once been in the same position. But now she had one thing he did not: a mind full of ash and memories, a fractured knowledge dredged up from the dead.
And she had the Rite of the Cage.
She was no longer ignorant, she realized. No longer a woman shaped only by the emptiness within her history. She had her ash, and the knowledge it gave her was a gift.
“I have something more than prayer,” she said. “If you’re willing to learn from me, then I can teach you a rite. A way to hold the nightmare at bay for a time, if you encounter it again. If you feel that fear again, Gods forbid—if you sense it clawing at your skull too swift for shared prayers to quell it—the rite may save you. It will be swifter than prayer alone, and allow you time to flee.”
