She wiped the dagger clean on an old cloth and pressed the material to her finger finally to stem the last of the bleeding. She looked at the window. The blood was still there, illuminated by her lantern, a firm line demarcating the dark and the light, the safety of the room, and what lay beyond it.
She sat on the bed, curling up her knees. She placed the dagger by her feet, and watched the flame move. Waiting.
The night remained silent.
Nuri’s voice rose up in her.You… you need someone to take care of you. To protect you.
And who, Arwa thought, not for the first time, as sleep began to creep over her,will protect everyone from me?
If there was an answer to that question, she had not found it yet. But she would. She had to.
CHAPTER TWO
Anoise woke her in the night, hours before dawn. She opened her eyes. Held her breath. Her heart was a pulsing fist in her chest. There was a call, hollow and cold, beyond the window. The flutter of wings.
It was just birdsong. There was nothing here. She could smell no incense in the air. See no eyes in the dark.
Feel nothing burrowing into her skull, cold-fingered and deathless.
Still, she rose to her feet. Her legs felt like water. She stared through the light of the candle. On the walls and beneath her feet the shadows flickered like beasts, unfurling with the bristle of blades and broken limbs.
It was not here. It was not here.
By the Emperor’s grace, let it not be here.
It cannot cross the blood. You’re safe, she told herself.Safe.
The air was ice around her, as she knelt on the ground, beneath the pooled light of the lantern.
“It is not here,” she whispered to herself. Out loud this time, as if her voice would cut through her own terror. It did, a little. “Not here. Not here. And it—youcannot hurt me.” She raised her head to the light. “If you are here, you cannot cross my blood. I know what you are.”
She held on to the words—and the dagger—until the sky bled pale rose with dawn.
The walls of the hermitage were thinner than they first appeared. She could hear women chattering as they headed to breakfast. The widows, it seemed, were early risers. Once the corridors were quiet again, Arwa dressed and left her room. The night’s bitter chill had softened, and now the indoor air of the hermitage felt no more than pleasantly cool on her skin. She drew her shawl loosely around her head and her shoulders, her bare feet moving soundless across the stone floor.
She found the prayer room much more quickly than she’d expected to. It was set farther down the corridor from where she’d slept, the scent of incense wafting from its open doors inviting her in. She had hoped it would be quiet, now that many of the women were breaking their fast, and it was. Two very elderly ladies were asleep against one wall, leaning against each other with their shawls tucked up to their chins. Apart from them—and their gentle snores—the room was empty and silent.
Arwa did not know if the women had come to pray at dawn as the most pious did and fallen asleep shortly after, or if they’d come here to surreptitiously share the carafe of wine she could see tucked between them. Although her guess was firmly on the latter, Arwa was just grateful they were not awake to speak to her, to question her or pity her with soft eyes.
Quietly, so as not to disturb the widows, she crossed the room. Behind a curtain, in a nook, lay a small library. Widows were dedicated to prayer and solitude, and were accordingly scholars of a kind. She had hoped there would be books. Books on faith and prayer; books by the Maha’s greatest mystics and the Emperor’s advisers, on the nature of the Empire’s strength and glory. Books that would show a wayward, cursed noblewoman a path out of the darkness she’d found herself in.
But there was nothing. Not in the first book, or the second, or the third. They were nothing but staid religious tracts, the kind Arwa had learned by rote as a small girl, so old that they still spoke of the Maha as living and the Empire as timelessly glorious. Arwa did not curse, but she did bite down on her tongue and press her head to the spines, tears threatening sharply at her eyes. She would not weep. Not over something so trivial. But ah, she was so tired of her own secrets and her fear. She was tired of bracing for the return of the dangers of Darez Fort, with nothing to hold them at bay but the shaky defense of her own cursed blood. If faith could not help her, what could?
She returned to the prayer room, looking around herself slowly as she breathed deep and slow to ease the furious beating of her own heart. One of the walls was a latticed screen, carved to resemble tree roots and great sprouting leaves. The light poured through it in honeycomb shadows. Before the screen stood a statue as tall as Arwa herself. She drew her shawl tighter around her and approached it.
The statue was of a male figure, garbed in a turban and robes. Its upraised palm held the world inside it.
It was a statue of the Emperor—of all Emperors, past and future—and their blessed bloodline. It was a statue of the Maha, the Great One and first Emperor, who built the Ambhan Empire and then raised a temple upon the sands of Irinah province, where his power and piety had ensured the blessings of the Gods would shower for centuries down upon the Empire and grant him a life span far beyond mortal reckoning.
The sight of the effigy’s blank face—of the eternity of its varnished, bare surface—brought Arwa an immense sense of comfort that she couldn’t fully explain. Perhaps it reminded her of kinder times during her childhood, when she’d prayed at her mother’s side, for the sake of the Empire and for its future glory. Perhaps it merely helped her believe that all suffering was finite, and even the anger and grief coiled within her now would one day fade to the void.
There was no one to see her, or to scold her. So Arwa took another step forward and placed her hands against the smooth face. The feel of it reminded her of the opal in her dagger hilt: smooth and somehow achingly familiar against her palms. It was absurd to find as much comfort in her heathen blade as in the Maha’s holy effigy, but that was the way of it, for Arwa. She could not change her nature. And ah, she had tried.
She let out a slow breath. Some of that awful tension in her uncoiled. She stepped back and kneeled down before the altar.
The ground was cold. She sang a prayer, soft under her breath so as not to disturb the sleepers behind her. At the feet of the effigy was incense, and a cluster of flowers, freshly picked. Tucked discreetly at the base of the statute were tiny baskets, woven of leaves and grass and filled with soil. Arwa paused in her prayer, thoughtful, and touched one with her fingertips.
She knew what they were. She had seen them on dozens of roadside altars, on the journey through Chand to the hermitage.
