Then the tent flap closed, and Gulshera was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Hours and hours.
Hours and hours and hours.
No one was going to come for her. There would be no physician. No food. No water.
She heard the men and women in armor. The stamp and cry of elephants. Music.
The Emperor is here, then, she thought. She thought of Zahir and felt helpless, helpless.
She could not save him. She couldn’t even save herself.
“Can’t you?” A man’s voice. Gentle. Patient. “Come now, Iria.Remember.”
With difficulty she raised her head. Through the flicker of ash and glass, as the world wavered, she saw figures of ash kneeling around her. No longer nothing but broken limbs, they were whole people, staring at her eyes like the palest clouds.
“You can’t be here,” she said, uncomprehending. “I am still Arwa. Still myself.”
“Your mind is full of ash,” Iria said. She was no child any longer. She was a woman grown, with keen dark eyes and a braid of curling hair thrown over her shoulder. Her face was a thing carved of dust. “We are with you. Within you. And you haven’t the sense to keep us distant.”
Were those Iria’s words or Arwa’s own? Now that she was paying attention, forcing herself to think through the pain, she could taste the ash through the iron of blood in her mouth. She could feel the tug of the ash clouding her mind, the way the memories of her long dead were unfurling within her.
“I suppose,” Arwa gritted out, “that dying has made a fool of me.”
“No,” said Nazrin. Her ash was missing a great gout at the neck, leaving nothing but a void where her dagger had sliced her own artery through. “You simply don’t want to die alone. There is nothing foolish about that.”
Arwa swallowed. But she was alone. That was the truth.
“I don’t want to be in pain anymore,” whispered Arwa. “I don’t.”
The ash moved in her head. A great whirl of it.
“Then you know what to do,” Nazrin said gently.
Yes. Arwa knew.
She needed to go to a place where she was not flesh. Where the pain would be a distant thing—bound to her only by thin roots of blood. She closed her eyes. Breathed deep and slow. She did not need anything but her own will.
She sank back into the realm of ash.
The tent still surrounded her. Her body lay still upon the floor. When she had entered the realm of ash in Zahir’s tomb, she had entered another world entirely. But this was Irinah, where all realms met. The world of flesh lay against the realm of ash, one breathing with the lungs of the other.
She kneeled, free of her flesh. The pain was blessedly far away.
She could remain where she was and take comfort in the peace the realm had offered. She could wait, now, quietly for death. But when she’d entered the realm with Zahir in Irinah’s desert, she’d felt as if she could walk forever. She felt the same now. Two worlds lay spread about before her. Her feet of mirror and memory could carry her.
She thought of remaining here, dying, inch by slow inch.
She thought instead of throwing herself into the abyss before her.
Always, when she had a choice, it was the danger she chose. She looked back at her body, at its bloody wound, at the way her chest rattled from the pain of it. She looked about—at the walls of the tent, at the ghosts around her—and took a step forward.
She walked through the canvas wall into the open. She saw the elephants, the soldiers, the glaring blankness of the sky. The realm of ash echoed with things still living. There was a tent in the distance, far vaster in size than the one she’d been contained in. Its surface glittered in the light, richly embroidered with either silver or gold.
So the Emperor was here, after all. She had not been wrong to think so.
