He turned to her.
Looked at her.
“Arwa,” he breathed.
“You fool,” she whispered. “You utter fool. We’re not dying like this, Zahir. Not like this.”
She touched her glass fingers to his face. Drew back. The ash whirled through her, around her, so close.
She stepped back. Back.
“I need knowledge,” she said. The grand tent around her wavered. Even Zahir was a smear of faint light.
“We are knowledge,” the ash said.
“No,” said Arwa. She felt her distant flesh—fading, suffering. And she was alight, furious. If she’d had blood in her, it would have burned. “I need all your rites. All your sigils. All your lost knowledge. I need to save us both. And for that, I need everything. Can it be done?”
“Perhaps,” said Nazrin.
“Perhaps,” said Iria.
“It will come at a cost,” Ushan said. “You will go far deeper than any mortal woman should.”
“You could lose yourself,” said Nazrin. “The ash could carry away your name. Your nature. The weft of your soul.”
“You could become trapped here, never able to return home,” said Iria.
“Or worse, both,” said Nazrin. “You could become lost, forgotten even to yourself. A ghost within a land of ghosts.”
“I know,” Arwa whispered. But of course she did. They were part of her. “And yet, I would rather lose myself than let them take me.”
She turned to face her ghosts.
“Did you walk the world in the end, Iria? Did you save people from ill-starred daiva?”
Iria’s ash turned to her. The answer rose to the lips of her ash, from deep within Arwa’s own skull. From the wealth of memories she’d consumed.
“I did, for a time. But no one can protect others forever.”
“No.” Arwa said. “I suppose not. But I would have… I would have liked the chance to try.”
Arwa gripped her courage—and her roots—tight. She turned from Zahir and began to walk her path of ash.
Deeper and deeper she went. Ink-black trees that had once been Zahir’s surrounded her. The sand glowed, as rich and wild as the Haran sea. She was unraveling from her own flesh, step by step. The pain faded. She looked up at the sky, which was a lidless eye, blazing with fury and storm light.
She had walked Zahir’s path. She had stumbled through her own out of desperation. But she had never walked it deliberately. The realm raged around her, sweetly familiar, a thing born from her own soul, and terrifying for it. Irinah unfurled itself beneath her feet, real and mortal and yet so far away. It shifted about her like a dream.
On her path loomed her past. Doors opening to opulent rooms. An overgrown garden. Blades and—
She stopped. Froze.
Around her loomed Darez Fort.
Before her were Darez Fort’s great gates. And before them lay Kamran, all riven ash, slumped, a knife through his gut.
“You are not my blood,” she whispered, gazing at him. “You should not be here.”
But he had been her husband. She’d wed him in the Ambhan way: placed her marriage seal around his throat. Worn his, until his death. Vowed that her soul was bound to his, all through her mortal lifetime.
