Arwa took a small step back. She reached for her own shawl and drew it up around her face, as if she could ward off the press of eyes with cloth alone.
“Did you see anything?” Gulshera asked the other elderly lady, who was standing back, bewildered, the bottle clutched in her hands.
“No, I… I don’t know,” the woman said, nonplussed. “What was I meant to see?”
Roshana focused on the task of calming Dina down, as Dina began to yell again that she was not lying, not drunk, that she knew what she had seen and why wouldn’t anyone believe her? The women around Arwa were muttering, their unease palpable.
Arwa was not uneasy. She was not anything. Her mind was a perfect void of sound and light. She turned on instinct alone, easing her way through the crowd, slipping between bodies until she was free of them, alone in the hallway, walking soft-footed toward her room.
She walked. And walked. And then she began to run.
She flung the door to her room open. Nothing had moved. The bed was undisturbed. The lantern was unlit. She went to the window and lifted her own small effigy. The line of blood beneath it was undisturbed.
She breathed in and out, in and out.
The smell hit her a moment later: sweet and cloying, as rich as smoke and perfume on water.
Incense.
She shuddered and bent forward, sucking in great gouts of breath, letting them go. Her ribs ached. Her mouth was full of the scent of incense, the iron of blood.
This was what she’d been waiting for, wasn’t it? She’d waited in Chand, when the courtiers had interrogated her and her mother had shorn her hair; waited in her palanquin, with blood daubed behind her ear and nausea roiling in her stomach; waited in the valley with a bow and arrow in her hands.
She’d known, in her heart of hearts, that she could never run far enough. She’d always known.
The daiva had found her again, after all.
Arwa did not go to meet Gulshera. She lay in her bed, shivering, the embroidered blanket drawn up over her. It was easy to convince the maid who came to sweep her room that she was unwell, and to pass her apologies on to Gulshera. The maid returned later with lentil broth and bread for lunch, which Arwa left untouched. Hunger felt very far away from her.
She lay still, as the sun faded from the sky and sunset colored the room in rose hues. She listened to the widows walk outside her room, voices hushed.
She thought of all the secrets she’d carried all her life. She thought of the weight of her own history, always heavy upon her shoulders. She thought of Darez Fort.
Gold eyes. A hand on her sleeve. A circle of blood.
A scar on her arm, silver in the lantern light.
When the darkness finally came, and the hermitage fell silent, Arwa slipped out of bed. She tightened her sash around her dagger. She grabbed her bow and placed her quiver on her back. Last of all, she slipped the bone ring around her thumb. She had never been more armed in her life.
Arwa looked out the window. She saw nothing swoop through the air, saw no flicker of eyes, or wings rustling in the black. But she saw bright points in the dark, and knew she was not the only woman with a lantern lit tonight.
She thought of Rabia’s hand on her own, and Roshana’s damp worried eyes. She thought of Gulshera. Asima. A dozen grave-tokens, and a dozen more women clustered in the foyer on the night she arrived, staring at her with curious, bright eyes.
She did not love these women. Not a single one. There was no love left in her to be spared. But she would not allow this hermitage to become the next Darez Fort.
She stepped out of her room and closed her eyes. Her blood was pounding in her ears. She sucked in a breath and moved, one foot in front of the other, following the scent of incense, the tug of something beyond sense and flesh. Something in her blood.
CHAPTER FIVE
When Arwa was a small girl, she’d had a sister.
There were many things that Arwa was taught not to speak of, after her family’s fall from imperial grace: the loss of her father’s governorship; the severity of his illness; the faults in her own nature. But her sister had always been the greatest silence of all.
Her sister, after all, was the reason their fall had begun.
Mehr had been ten years her elder. When their father had still been Governor of Irinah, Mehr had been blessed with all the same comforts Arwa still remembered wistfully from her childhood: grand rooms and gold-armored guardswomen; an army of maidservants and silks and jewels in abundance. But Mehr had never been happy. She’d been a watchful and quiet figure, never quite at home in the walls of the Governor’s palace. The maidservants who cared for Arwa whispered about her sometimes, when Arwa’s nursemaid was not there to scold them for gossip.That one has bad blood. She’s no good. Even Lady Maryam can’t set her right.
Mehr had never considered Maryam—their father’s wife, the woman who had raised Arwa as her own—her mother. Mehr had been old enough to remember their birth mother, the Amrithi mistress their father had banished a year after Arwa was born, and she clung fast to that memory. Clung fast, too, to the Amrithi heritage their birth mother had given her: rites of dance to worship the Gods. Rites of blood and dagger. No matter how Maryam punished her, no matter how she begged or cajoled Mehr to see reason, Mehr stayed firm. She would not give them up.
