“I can’t,” Arwa said. “I can’t lose you again. I can’t watch what will become of you, don’t yousee? I can’t watch you leave me.”
“Don’t go. Arwa. My dear one. Don’t go. Stay with me.” Mehr’s hand was still before her. Held out like a hope. “Stay, my dear one.Please.”
Arwa stopped. The ash was quiet around her.
She held out her own hand.
Arwa braced herself for Mehr to turn to dust before her: for all Mehr’s strange, bright ash to shatter and leave Arwa with nothing but grief and memory and the cruelly stolen promise of her sister, returned to her, whole and safe and alive.
Their hands touched.
Skin. Warm, callused. Grip of Mehr’s fingers, reaching between two worlds.
Mehr met her eyes.
“I’ll find you,” she said. “Wherever you may be, Arwa. I will.”
The worlds shifted. The wheel turned. She fell back into the cold of the realm.
She clutched her hand tight.
She could not think of whether her sister lived after all. She could not think of her parents, and the cruelty those who loved you could inflict, for the sake of that same love. She could not think of what she’d seen: the hope of it, too rich to be borne. She could not think of anything but reaching her ash.
She forced herself to keep on walking.
Finally, she came to it. Her sea of dead.
She kneeled upon the sand, between bones and limbs and shattered ghosts. The end of her path had come. Beyond it lay starry darkness, stricken with the shadow of dreamfire.
A world of the Gods, perhaps, or of the daiva. But Arwa would not walk there today.
Today, she pressed her forehead to the sand, a supplicant and a mourner. She could not weep here. Could not be as bodies were: soft and hurt and grieving.
She thought of how it had felt at the House of Tears, when she had opened the door to all the ash within her. How much it had hurt her and scared her.
She thought of the dovecote, where the fear had tasted sweet. Like fire.
At least we can choose the shape of our death, she’d told Zahir then. It was still true.
The choice of how she died—if that was all she had, then she would take it.
She parted her mouth. Breathed in.
She knew—everything.
A thousand voices whispered in her ears at once.
If we run fast they’ll notice, better to be slow—
The same shape of a rite, raise your hands, here, just so—
—Rukhsar, Rukhsar, your daughter is a lovestruck fool—
hetookthebladehetookthebladehetook
She focused on her blood roots. On her flesh. She struggled to keep the ash at bay.
She still knew herself. That, at least, was a blessing. But the pressure within her skull was growing and growing, and soon enough what defenses her mind had constructed would shatter.
