“Well, we’re coming anyway,” said Diya.
When Zahir gave Eshara a helpless look, she shrugged and said, “They know the risks. They’ve come here to see the place where the Maha died, but I suppose they’ll settle for watching you perform a miracle.”
“It won’t be an impressive miracle,” Zahir said, looking hunted.
“I’ll make them keep their distance,” Eshara said, amused.
They walked out onto the sand.
True to her word, Eshara kept the watchers a respectful distance back. Zahir and Arwa made their way down into a valley in the sand, a basin surrounded on all sides by faint outcroppings of rock and vague, wizened trees. It felt like an appropriate place to begin.
Zahir kneeled down to start a fire. He began setting it in place. Paused.
“Arwa,” he said. “Look down.”
She looked.
The sand had flared out around them, gleaming like it was full of jewel-toned flame. They stared down at it in awe. She kneeled beside him and pressed her hands into the sand, sifting it between her fingers. It fell like an outpouring of light.
“Gods,” she breathed. She felt shaky. He was staring at the earth, eyes wide and wondering.
She touched her hand to his. Felt the blood roots, distant, ash-blooded, pulsing between them.
“Start the fire,” she said. “I have my dagger.”
She removed her dagger from her sash. It was the dagger her sister had given her so long ago, when she was just a girl. She made a cut, adding her blood to the flames. He did the same.
Here in Irinah—the desert where the worlds of the living, dead, and immortal touched—they placed their blood in the flames. It took no more than that. The realm of ash dragged them in.
And it was nothing like it had ever been before.
The realm unfurled around them, melding with the mortal world. The sand lost its color, fading to rich silver. The sky darkened further, ink black, pricked with glaring white stars. This was Arwa’s path of ash and the true desert of Irinah entwined into one. In snatches she saw the storm of her path, carving the air with winds that turned like white blades in the air. Around them she saw Zahir’s ink-black trees unfurl, their great grace of branches curling against the air.
Irinah was a gate binding three worlds. Arwa should not have been surprised by the sharpness of the realm around her—the sheer richness of it, as if it were a place of flesh and not echoes. But she was.
She looked at Zahir’s face. All the hewn, glittering edges of it, the way it tilted toward her.
He offered his hand. She took it.
“Let’s find the Maha,” he said.
They stepped away from the flames. Their flesh remained where it was, slumped by the fire. But their souls walked. Beneath their feet the sand shivered and settled and turned, as if it lived and breathed, marking the way in rippling waves before them.
“I think this is my path.” He paused, silent for a moment, then said, “I suppose we follow it.”
Arwa squeezed his hand.
“Lead the way,” she said.
They walked and walked, through the shadows of trees that sprouted from nowhere, through the strangely real hills and eddies of the desert. They walked a familiar path, passing the shadows of the dead, the stars stitched upon a ceiling, the ink of lost books.
They walked through Arwa’s own dead. She felt the roiling thud of her own heart and stomach, a deep reflexive grief, but this time she didn’t let go of Zahir’s hand, and she didn’t look down.
“Do you feel any pain?” Zahir asked.
“No.” She felt as if she could walk forever here, in a place that was mortal ash and immortal dreaming both, walk until the end of time, until she’d forgotten her flesh and herselfentirely. The idea was both exhilarating and terrifying. “Do you?”
“No,” he said. He was staring forward. Through his glass skin, she could see the dark of the night, and glow of the sand, far brighter than it should have been, and far too alive. Through his skin, she saw the shadows of the dead. “But I think we’re nearly there. I can feel him.”
