They took a step forward. Another.
And there he was.
The Maha’s ash stood at the end of his desert of dead. Beyond him was nothing but howling darkness, a storm without color, as if dreamfire had thrown a great shadow across the realm. But the Maha’s ash glowed despite the dark, as if each inch of it were suffused with the desert, drunk with the magic of Irinah.
The lamp of truth, Arwa thought. Ah, how bitter truth could be. Awe and love and grief welled up in her, unbidden and unwanted.
Where the past figures of ash they’d seen in the realm had been fractured, only partial shadows of the people who had left them behind, the Maha’s ash was eerily perfect. He was not unusually tall or broad, and not as old as she had thought he would be. His face was unremarkable, austere. His eyes were closed.
Zahir walked toward him. Arwa held tighter to his roots and her own, and followed.
The sand moved beneath them, wavering like water in the wind’s hands, like a pale and cold fire. They crossed it. And Zahir stopped before the Maha and looked into his face.
They were the same height, he and the Maha. They had the same sharp bones. Everyone had told Zahir that he had his mother’s look, but standing before the Maha’s ash, it was as if Zahir stood before a dark mirror. His reflection, carved by the smoke of the dead.
Zahir reached his free hand out, nearly touching the Maha’s. But not quite. Not yet.
“We look alike,” Zahir said shakily. “I’d hoped we wouldn’t.”
“You look nothing alike,” Arwa managed to say.
“Thank you,” said Zahir, “for lying. I appreciate it.”
His hand moved up, tracing the air around the Maha’s ash. His arm. His shoulder. His close-eyed face.
“Here,” he whispered. “Here at last.”
He steeled himself, his face as resolute as it had been on the day he thought his father would strike him dead. Then, abruptly, he crumpled to his knees.
His head was bowed.
“Zahir,” she said, alarmed. She kneeled down with him, their roots a great slash of red across the desert floor.
“I can do it,” he gritted out. “I can. I am only afraid.” Then he shook his head. “No. Not afraid.” He looked at her, face fierce with feeling. “I told you, to fix a broken tool you must understand the intent of its maker. But he built with the purpose of breaking the natural balance for his own ends. He built with an unforgivable intent by unforgivable means. What can I take from his ash, but another way to break the world? But how can I leave his ash here, and say that balance isenough, and let the people of the Empire suffer and die?”
“You need not do this now,” she told him. “We can stay in Irinah and consider what to do… or. Or we can try to find another way.”
“And waste all our work, our sacrifice, on my cowardice, my fear of becoming too much the scion of my father’s blood?” He shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Zahir.” She spoke his name as if it would quell him, comfort him. She did not remind him of the price the realm of ash would demand of him. She did not tell him she feared seeing him lost. Her heart ached.
They both knew the risks that lay before him. They had come anyway.
She pressed her forehead to his. They remained like that for a long moment, no breath between the hewn glass of their souls, the Maha’s silent ash towering above them.
She felt him freeze. Felt him pull back, just a little, eyes open.
“Arwa,” he said. “Do you hear that?”
Her storm was wavering about them. Silent, wheeling. But…
Yes. She heard it.
“Is it the sound of the trees?” she asked.
“No,” he said. He stood. “No. Those are voices. And I… I think I can hear my mother’s, among them.”
The wind was moving through the trees, setting the skeletal branches wavering. But the wind was not simply wind. It was a great, sinuous blade, paring the trees down to ribbons of darkness. The dark unfurled, liquid as water and just as river quick, streaming across the sand in great skeins of words that moved and whispered. Arwa recognized those words: They were poetry of the Hidden Ones. The poetry of a lineage that lived in Zahir’s blood and in his soul.
