The thrill soured when she saw the bruises mottling his throat.
“We can enter the realm of ash directly, if you like,” he said.
“How can your family treat you so?”
“I am not family, to Akhtar,” Zahir said. “I had no right to call him brother. In fact”—a rueful smile—“perhaps I wanted to anger him.”
“I hate it,” Arwa burst out. “He should not have done it. It is so—so very wrong. You have worked so hard to help them, you have done everything in your power, placed yourself in terrible danger to save the Empire,theirEmpire, and yet they scorn and hurt you like this? No.”
She took a step closer. No veil, nothing to hide the sheer way she felt everything—too deep, too fierce. “You are a person, you are their blood. You deserve their respect.”
She felt like an animal, wild with feeling. She thought of the dreamed tenderness of Zahir’s grandmother, her sewn golden stars, his grandmother who had never treated him with the same kindness she’d shown her legitimate grandson. She thought of the stars upon her shawl. She knotted her own fingers in her embroidered shawl, with its strange sparse constellations—and froze.
Zahir’s fingers were pressed to her knuckles. Feather light.
“Please,” he said. “You’ll damage the cloth.”
Gently, he untangled the shawl from her hands. Then their hands were simply touching. Skin to skin.
“I don’t require your fury, Lady Arwa. I am in truth very lucky.”
“And who,” she said shakily, “convinced you of that?”
“I did. I should be dead, Lady Arwa. I should have died with my mother.”
He drew his hand back. Touched it to the mottled skin of his neck.
“I don’t often have the opportunity to tell the tale. In many ways it is not mine to tell. But my mother was from—a long heretical Ambhan mystical tradition. An order of women scholars, courtesans by trade, who worked in secret, who sought a world where even those who were not men of noble blood could rise in service to the Empire. A world where choice and merit were prized, where all could serve and rise beneath the Emperor and Maha’s benevolent eyes. In honor of their own secrecy, they named themselves the Hidden Ones. You will, of course, recognize that name.”
Arwa inclined her head in silence. Her mind was racing. Mystics. Courtesans. Poetry. A history of women seeking a stake in the Empire’s games of power and knowledge from the realm of the dead itself.
And Zahir, here, alone. A man and a blessed, bound to them by a thread of scholarship and blood.
“My mother and the Empress were—friendly.” Voice halting. “A courtesan must be entertaining. My mother not only danced and—did as courtesans do. She also sang. Recited poetry. Performed at salons of women, at feasts and celebrations. The Empress took a liking to her. She would invite my mother to sing to her, and when my mother shared a little of her esoteric interests, the Empress saw the potential benefit of them.” Ghost of a smile. “Jihan is very like her.”
“So I have been told.”
“When the Maha died, my mother believed she could help the Empire. She offered her knowledge to the Emperor, and recognizing it as heresy, well…” Eyes closed. Opened. “Perhaps she thought the Emperor’s fondness for her would protect her. Or the Empress’s. But of course—not.
“When the Maha died, and the Empire fell into the first chaos of grief, my mother believed she could help the Emperor raise a new world from the ashes of the Maha’s dead: an Empire like a lamp of truth, a beacon saved and shaped by many hands. She pleaded with him to seek the support of the people.Alchemize their grief into service, she told him.Let your people serve you, and they will build you a stronger Empire from their love.”
“No,” Arwa whispered. She knew her horror was written upon her face.
Zahir inclined his head, acknowledging the look.
“The Emperor had to secure his power. He could not allow his position to be weakened by her heresy. Respect for noble blood and hierarchy and order had to be maintained. I understand this.” He said it matter-of-factly. Confidently. As if it were a thing he had told himself, until the words had worn a groove into his soul, until they had the bone-deep quality of truth. “If not for Jihan’s intercession—if not for the skills my tutors gave me, that my mother gave me—I would have died long ago. I have the opportunity to serve the Empire. I have the opportunity to show Jihan my gratitude.”
Arwa said nothing. Her voice seemed to have left her.
“I am a pragmatist,” Zahir continued. “The world owes me nothing. Prince Akhtar owes me nothing. And yet, I have been given the opportunity—the possibility—to save the Empire. I cannot estimate how many will die if a miracle does not save the Empire. I like precision, Lady Arwa, but the numbers are—impossible, too terrible to calculate. That is what I focus on. The aspect of my life I can control. The deaths I can, perhaps, avert. The work I can do, that I have chosen. And all of this is—not insignificant. I have tried to mold myself into someone worthy of the task.”
“I don’t think you are a pragmatist,” said Arwa.
“No?”
No.
I think you are a furious idealist, so passionate you’ll splinter yourself on your idealism, so hungry for your purpose you would die for it.
