The dagger her sister had given her.
Mehr’s dagger.
Distant breath tight in her chest. She reached for the hand, feeling the ash shatter at her touch, sweeping over her glass-boned fingers, gray clouding it from within. If she remained where she was, it would fill her.
“Arwa!”
Zahir wrenched her to her feet. The storm drew the ash away.
“We need to leave here,” he told her.
“These are Amrithi dead,” gasped Arwa. “I know it. I recognize the blade. I can feel them drawing me to them.”
“Lady Arwa, you need to be careful.”
“I know who they are. I can feel it. And I saw—”
“You know there are dangers here,” he cut in, desperate. “Please—”
He was reaching for their roots, ready to allow the tethers to draw them both back to their flesh. But Arwa could not leave. Not yet.
She wrenched free from his grip. Roots wrenching, unfurling. She was suddenly only one soul, alone. She felt the thud of her heart, lungs seizing. But her path of ash had a terrible magnetism.
There was no sign of her sister. No bright beacon to guide her. But there was a figure lying between the rest, its edges somehow clearer and sharper than all those that surrounded it. A torso, a face turned against the sand, a single arm flung out, knife in its throat. The eye opened. A jumble of parts. A jumble of bodies.
Arwa leaned over it, terrified. She thought again of her sister in the storm, a cruel mirage, too bright and alive.
She had to know. Had to know.
She parted her mouth. Pressed her hand down. The ash rose to meet her.
She was not Arwa anymore.
She was a woman named Nazrin. She knew what it meant to be an Amrithi woman: to live in Irinah’s vast desert, to travel with her clan and children, to avoid the Ambhan authorities, who had no love for her people. She knew how to barter with local villagers, offering them her blood as defense against the daiva in return for food and resources. She knew how to dance rites of worship.
She knew what it meant to have been born both gifted and cursed. As a child, she had watched a storm of dreamfire with her clan. Reached for it… and felt the dreamfire reach back.
She’d known then that she possessed the gift ofamata.
Some Amrithi women and men had too much daiva blood still in their veins. Some, like their daiva ancestors, could not make vows without the weight of those vows being burned into their skin and souls. Some could move the dreams of the Gods to their will, if they knew the way, if they were willing to indulge in a terrible world-breaking heresy.
How her mother had wept, when it was discovered that Nazrin was one such Amrithi.You are something the Maha will steal from me, she’d said.He will make you vow yourself to him and use you to crush the ill dreams of the Gods and make them dream unnatural glory for his Empire. I know it.
Nazrin had insisted he would not. He would not steal her like he had other Amrithi with her gift. She would hide her power. She would be clever and canny and quiet. She would not show her face in villages too closely allied with Ambhan officials in search for her kind. She would survive. She told her mother so, but her mother only shook her head and wept all the more.
The monster will destroy you, one way or another.
Nazrin knelt upon the sand, weeping. Remembering her mother. Her nose was clogged. She could not move her arm to wipe it. She needed her left arm to hold herself up from the ground. She needed her right to hold her blade, which was at her own throat. Closer, and she would cut herself; farther away, and one of the figures surrounding her would take it from her, and then she would be lost.
“Woman,” said the mystic. His face was wrapped in blue cloth. His eyes were terrible, compassionate and unyielding. “The power in you belongs to the Empire and our Maha. Lower your blade.”
Nazrin thought of her children. She was grateful beyond measure that neither of them possessed theamata. She had taken them into a dreamfire storm, watched, heart in her throat, for any sign they shared her burden. There had been nothing. Although they would face the same dangers all Amrithi did, the same persecution, they would never kneel, as she did. They would never be forced to make the inevitable choice: slavery, or death by their own blades.
I am Amrithi, she reminded herself.Amrithi, and my freedom is my right.And yet her heart quailed; she wished for something—someone, anyone—to save her.
But there was no one, and as the mystic drew toward her, she drew the blade firmly across her own throat.
Flicker. Ash, sweet as wine.
