Arwa gazed at it, her attention drawn as if by cold fingers. White, gray, ash, and smoke. Within it, she saw shadows of figures, no different from the ones she had seen in Zahir’s forest of ink-dark trees.
One of the figures moved. And for the barest moment—a heartbeat, at most—the ash parted. And Arwa saw her.
Turn of a skirt. Long braid of curling hair. Skin, brown as rain-drenched soil, a face of high cheekbones and a soft mouth and a blue shawl at the throat, of flesh and not ash, and Arwaknew that face—
Mehr.
“What is it?” asked Zahir.
She squeezed her dreamed eyes shut, felt her distant body move a little upon the ground where it slept. When she looked again, her sister’s too-mortal figure was gone. Somewhere her heart raced and raced, and her skin flushed with grief so sharp it was a knife in her belly, but she could only feel it distantly here, and she was thankful for that.
“Lady Arwa,” Zahir prompted. His voice was low with concern. “Speak to me.”
My sister, she thought.I saw my sister.
She could not say it. If she did, she would shatter entirely. And what good would she be then? Instead she said, “Something is different here. I feel as if… I’m on my own path of ash, and not yours.” She spoke carefully, glad her voice was steady, glad her racing heart could not shape her voice here. “I think our paths have—crossed, somehow. Joined. Or bled into one another.”
“That would be—an interesting development,” he said tightly.
“When you last ate ash, you know I saw a little of what you saw,” she said. “Perhaps when people travel the realm of ash together, their paths begins to… connect.”
“I think we may need to research this further, before we continue.”
“As if you haven’t read every book in your library.”
“Ah, you forget the key quality of books,” he responded. “They have a far greater capacity than a man’s memory, and doubtless contain answers I can’t recall.” His grip tightened. “If we let the roots draw us back—”
“No.”
She thought of Akhtar’s hand around Zahir’s throat, of the Emperor, old and trembling. She thought of Mehr.
And she thought—as she always thought, every moment—of Darez Fort.
“Lord Zahir. You are running out of time. The Empire is running out of time. Besides, what better way is there to test the limits of what we can accomplish, than to try?”
He said nothing. But when Arwa stepped forward, he did not argue. He followed her.
Another step. Another.
On the storm-burnt sand that was their joined paths, they stopped once more. Horror rose in Arwa’s throat.
They were surrounded by bodies.
This was not a scene of war: a dream she could understand being left behind in this realm of mortal dreaming and ghosts. This was… children. Women. Men, young and old, their ash figures too sharp in her vision, broken into segments of limbs, half buried, as if a storm had lifted the sand and revealed their remains.
Their presence should have repulsed her, sent her stumbling back to her own skin. She should have felt the tremor of her own heart, a sharp cold breath in her lungs.
Instead she felt a terrible longing. Aknowing.
These bodies lay upon both their paths. But they were as much hers as the dancing figures, the throned ones, that existed under the shadow of Zahir’s great trees. Her sister had been a sign of them, somehow: a portend, a bright beacon. A blazing lantern in the dark, guiding Arwa to the truth.
“Arwa,” Zahir said, voice urgent.
“Step forward with me,” she insisted. He spoke again. She did not hear him.
She kneeled down despite Zahir’s distant protests, drawing him down with her. She felt the call of the limbs before her like a song. She saw a shadow memory of a hand, broken from a body, a dagger clutched desperately in its fist.
The dagger. It looked like—
