Arwa rolled her head to the side. She saw falling ash and a pale white sky.
“You should leave me,” she said. “I won’t… be me for long.”
“Don’t be a fool.”
“Zahir…”
Zahir swore, hefting her up once more. “Come on now,” he said.
They made it only a few steps before Arwa stumbled. Something had changed within her. Something had severed.
She raised her hurt arm. Slow.
“Arwa, please,” he said shakily. “Stop trying to move it.”
But she couldn’t. She raised her hand to the light. In the realm of ash, she watched the glass of her skin cloud with darkness.
“It’s too late,” she told Zahir. Mouth moving. She remembered how flesh worked, still. “I’m losing myself.”
She turned her hands once more. Her roots were withering, the bond between her and her flesh decaying to dust.
He lowered her once more.
It took her soul a second to follow her flesh back to the ground: a dizzying second of blankness, where her soul was suspended in nothing, a constellation of ash burning its edges smooth.
“The tale,” she whispered, touching his flesh with her hands of mirror-glass, his soul with her trembling, bloodied fingertips. She did not know where she was anymore. She was undone. “Aliye’s tale. Of the doe. I thought—I could escape it. But I took the arrow, I think. Does that make me the doe? The willing sacrifice?”
“Gods, Arwa. It is just a tale.”
“They’re never just tales.”
“Look at me.” He held her face in his hands. “I’m going to help you as I did in the caravanserai. Let me share the burden of your ash.”
“It won’t be enough.”
“It can be. It will be.”
“There’s too much,” she said helplessly.
He touched his forehead to her own. “You are in the realm of ash, even now, aren’t you?”
Ash. Sunlight. The gold of sand. The black and white of an ash sky.
“Yes.”
“Well then,” he said. “Well. There must be a trick to it.”
He closed his eyes, and then he was there in the realm with her, all gossamer and glass, holding her still. Expression grim, he wound his blood roots around her own, lifting them to grace her fingers, her ash-dark wrists.
“Let me take the weight of the ash,” he said. “Let me share it with you again.”
“It won’t be enough.”
“Arwa. Let metry.”
She said nothing more, as he drew the weight of the ash between them, through the bond of their twined roots, said nothing as the clamor of voices grew and grew. But when she saw gray darkness begin to cloud his hands, his arms, she swore and tried to draw back.
He held her fast.
