Ah.
Arwa swallowed, throat dry.
“I will be safe here,” she said finally. “You’ve seen the hermitage now. You can tell her so. It’s nothing but broken roads and old women. There couldn’t be anywhere safer in the world for someone who is…” Arwa paused. She could not say it. “Someone who is—afflicted. As I am. No one will discover me here. I’ll make sure of it.”
“Lady Arwa. Your mother—Lady Maryam—she insisted—”
“I can keep my own secrets safe,” Arwa cut in tiredly, ignoring Nuri’s words. “She’ll know it was my choice. She won’t cast you out for it. I expect she’ll be glad of your help with Father anyway.”
Arwa reached into her sash and removed a purse. She held it out.
“Take it,” she said. “Enough for your journey to Hara, and more for your kindness.”
If her mother had trusted Nuri with the truth of Arwa’s nature, then Nuri had no doubt been paid handsomely to accompany Arwa. But more coin would not hurt her, and would perhaps soften her to Arwa’s will.
At first, Nuri did not move.
“Please,” said Arwa. Voice soft, now. Cajoling. “Is it so strange for me to want to be alone to mourn? To have no more eyes on me? Nuri, I am begging you—return to my mother. Allow me the dignity of a private grief.”
Hesitantly, Nuri held out her hand. Arwa placed the purse on her palm, and watched Nuri’s fingers curl over it.
“I should finish sorting your clothes,” said Nuri.
“There’s no need,” said Arwa. “You should go and rest. You have a long journey tomorrow.”
Nuri nodded and stood. “Please take care, Lady Arwa,” she said. Then she left.
Arwa kneeled and sorted through her own clothes. She would have to arrange for one of the hermitage’s servants to have them washed in the morning. When the job of sorting through her clothing was done, Arwa latched the trunk shut and closed the door.
She placed the oil lantern on the window ledge, sucked in a fortifying breath, and took her dagger from her sash.
She held the blade over the heat of the oil lantern’s flame. Her hand rested comfortably on the hilt of the blade, where the great teary opal embedded within it fitted the shape of her palm in a manner that brought her undeniable comfort. She counted the seconds, waiting for the blade to warm, and stared out the window. The dark stared back at her, velvet, oppressively lightless. She couldn’t even see the stars.
She lifted the blade up and waited for it to cool again.
She’d been too afraid to use the dagger on the journey, with Nuri always near, with her guards ever vigilant. Her dagger was far too obviously not of Ambhan design. Where the finest Ambhan daggers were richly embossed, etched with graceful birds and flowers and flecks of jewels, her own was austere and wickedly sharp, the opal in its hilt a glaring milky eye. It was an Amrithi blade, unlovely and uncivilized, and any soldier of the Empire—trained to seek and erase the presence of Amrithi barbarians, to banish them to the edges of the civilized world where they rightly belonged—would have recognized it on sight.
She recalled the guardsman’s comment on blood-worshipping heathens with bitter humor.
If only you knew, she thought,that you carried one on your shoulders all along. Oh, you would have tossed me over the cliff edge then, and you would have been proud of it.
Once in her palanquin, despite the risks, she’d made a small cut to her thumb, and daubed blood behind her ear, in the manner mothers daubed kohl behind children’s ears to keep the evil eye at bay. She’d hoped it would be enough, and perhaps it had been. She’d seen no shadows. Felt no evil descend, winged and silent. But every night she had lain awake, listening and waiting like a prey animal braced for the flash of a predator’s wings in the dark. She had imagined in great, lurid detail all the things that would happen if her meager scrape of spilled blood was not enough: Nuri’s body cut open from neck to groin, her insides splayed out around her body; the guards turning on one another, their scimitars red and silver and white as bone in the bloody dark.
Darez Fort, all over again.
And all that time, Nuri had known what Arwa was. All that time. If Arwa had only known—if she had been able to employ Nuri to distract the guards, so that she could reach her blade…
Well. No matter now. The journey was done, and soon Nuri would be gone. Useful though Nuri perhaps would have been, Arwa was grateful for that. She did not want someone to fuss over her with worried eyes. She wanted no spy from her mother, sent to ensure that she was suitably quiet and secretive andsafe. The thought of Nuri remaining here made her feel suffocated.
Her mother—Emperor’s grace upon her—could not shield her. Nuri could not shield her.
Only Arwa could do that.
Once the blade had cooled, she placed its sharp edge to a finger, and watched the blood well up. The cut was shallow, the pain negligible. She placed her finger against the window ledge and drew a line across its surface.
The lantern flame flickered, caught by a faint breeze. Arwa watched it move. She thought of her husband. Of Kamran. Of a circle of blood, and a hand on her sleeve, and eyes that gleamed like gold. Her stomach felt uneasy again, roiling inside her. Her mouth was full of the taste of old iron.
Curious, how even when the heart was silent and the mind declined to recall suffering, the body still remembered.
