His voice came out of the smoke and dark. She breathed in the sound of it.
“Yes.”
She felt strange. The moon was black. The fire burning.
“Please. If you forget all the rest: Do not let go of your roots.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Arwa closed her eyes. Opened them.
A strange sensation came over her: a sense of being split in two halves, when she had previously been one whole creature. In the place where her body slept, wreathed in perfumed smoke beneath moonlight, her eyes remained stubbornly closed, weighed down by laced tea and sleep.
In the realm of ash her eyes opened. Her soul—a thing she had never been conscious of—gazed out at the realm of ash with eyes it should not have had. Sucked in a breath with the mirage of lungs. And yet her soul’s eyes, its skin, feltreal, and the sense of doubleness, of being two instead of one, was disorienting beyond belief.
It took her a moment to see through her internal turmoil to the world around her. Around her there was no sign of the tomb enclosure where her flesh slept. There was no ornate garden. No sky above her. There was only a storm. It was no storm of dreamfire, but a whirl of gray and white, ash and the bitterest snow. Carefully, she rose up on her elbows.
Ah. Her elbows.
With fascination and dread both, she stared down at her own arms. Her skin, here, was not a sand-warm brown. Instead it had no color at all. Clear as glass, faceted by the curl of her fingers and the jut of her elbows and wrists, it gleamed. She thought absurdly of the marble of the palace, so pure that light could pour through it nearly unhindered.
When she pressed her hand to the ground in an effort to raise herself up, something moved beneath her. A sudden burst of flowering red. It coiled around her wrist. When dread overtook fascination, when she tried to wrench herself free, she felt the strangest sensation: a sharp racing of her body’s heart. An intake of breath from her body’s lungs.
Ah. This is terrible, Arwa thought, squeezing her eyes shut. Opening them again. She was still split in two, no more awake or unconscious than she had been moments before.
“Lady Arwa.” Zahir’s voice. An echo through the storm. She turned to the sound of him. Saw him: a blurred figure, like a shadow distorted by water, kneeling upon the ground a fair distance from her. “Please. Be calm. Sit up slowly. Don’t stand yet.”
She had told him she would obey him. She did so, clambering up onto her knees. The red, wisps as fine as a string of rubies, or a weft of lace, followed the rise of her hands and her arms. Like an infant prone to mouth anything, poison or sweet alike, she touched the back of her wrist to her mouth, and tasted bitterness and grief. The blood of memory.
“The red,” his voice said urgently, “is your roots. The bond between you and your flesh. Don’t try to remove yourself from it.”
Arwa shuddered and lowered her arm.
“What would happen,” she replied, “if I did?”
“Nothing positive, my lady.”
“You should have warned me,” she said. “Of the roots, and—my skin, it—”
“I warned you not to let go of them.”
“More context would have been helpful,” she gritted out.
“I’ll remember that in the future.”
She saw his shadow stand, and mimicked him, drawing herself to her feet. The roots spun about her fingers and her ankles, gossamer but unyielding. She did not think she would have been able to pull free from them, even if she had tried.
“I am sorry.” Zahir’s voice once more. It had the sound of real regret in it—and awe, also. “In truth, I didn’t expect this. I did not think we would have so much time. You must understand, when I entered briefly in the past I was aware for mere minutes at most. It was… vaguer. Hazier. You have made this placewhole, Lady Arwa. Your blood has accomplished a miracle.”
She looked about her, at the howling lightless wind surrounding her, shapeless and ragged.Wholeandmiracledid not entirely seem to apply.
“And what of the storm?” asked Arwa. “I am not sure I can move through it.”
“Ah,” said Zahir. There was a moment of silence. Then he said, “I assume you can see no forest?”
“What?”
“One moment,” he replied.
