Amrithi. Dead Amrithi. Ah, Gods.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Her sister. Her sister.
It was as if the loss of Mehr were a book, a great tome, like the ones in Zahir’s library. But half the pages had been ripped out brutally, pointedly. The rest were in a state of ruin: water-damaged, mold creeping up their edges, the words smudged to indecipherability. Arwa could only read a sentence here or there, piecing together a patchwork grief.
She knew Mehr had revealed her Amrithi-ness. She knew the Maha’s mystics had taken Mehr. She knew Mehr had died.
Now here she was, the damaged fragments of a dozen other tales strewn in her lap. Tales of persecution and death; tales of Amrithi with a gift calledamata, a gift that allowed them to control the dreams of the Gods, stolen by the Maha for their power. Stolen by the Maha, in order to shape the Empire’s glory.
Just as she and Zahir had worked to piece together an image of the realm of ash, so too was she forming a picture of Mehr’s true fate, and true death.
Arwa had witnessed a dreamfire storm, and soon after her sister had been taken. Had her sister called the dreamfire to her—revealed a seed ofamatain her blood?
Her sister had told her she was getting married. She had given Arwa her Amrithi blade, and told Arwa not to fear, and told her she would see her again. And then Mehr had gone to the Maha, and died. But she had not simply died. She had been used and enslaved and forgotten. Her gift—her Amrithi gift ofamata—had been used to manipulate the dreams of the Gods, suppressing dreams that would bring ill fortune, raising up dreams that would continue to burnish the Empire’s glory.
After the night her father wept by her bed, Arwa had heard no more of her sister. Once, she had asked her mother Maryam about her, tentatively questioned where Mehr had been buried. Her mother had gone quiet, and cold, and told her not to ask again.Some things, she’d said,will only hurt you. Let it be, Arwa.
Arwa had grieved for Mehr, but she had blamed her too, for the fall of their family into disgrace. For being so Amrithi, when she could have made the choice Arwa had made, to mold herself into a quiet Ambhan daughter and wife. She had blamed Mehr because she had been ignorant. Because she’d known nothing.
But now Arwa knew. And she was hurt—yes, as her mother had told her she would be hurt. But she was also furious she’d been denied the right to that pain. To the truth.
You were stolen, Arwa thought.You were stolen, and no one told me. I did not know. Oh, Mehr.
Mehr had died because of the Maha. Her father had tried to bring Mehr home, and in return the Maha—his Empire, his nobility, the world he had carved—had flung her family into disgrace. The blame for that lay at the Maha’s feet too. Not Mehr’s.
And Amrithi—generations of them, beyond Arwa’s graceless understanding—had been enslaved or died by their own knives. Over and over again. The Maha had used them. Taken their magic. Built the Empire’s glory upon their bones.
Her sister. Her poor sister. Arwa retched again, a visceral reaction.
Her head was full of ash, full of flashes of preserved memory, sharp as splinters. She was Arwa. She was Arwa.
Nazrin. Ushan. Tahir.
Arwa made it back to her room somehow. She was glad not to see Eshara or Reya patrolling the halls. She reached, fumbling, through her own trunk of possessions, between pale folded tunics and sashes, trousers and scarves until she found her own dagger and held it in her hands. Trembling, she unfolded it from the protective casing of fabric that surrounded it.
She thought of her sister, again: of being raised to put aside her Amrithi-ness; of carrying the shadow of it inside her nonetheless, the ghosts of all the people who had come before her, buried and lost, in a desert of the Maha’s dead. She thought of the history and the people she had never known, the culture of her birth mother that had been stolen from her, cleaved straight from her body. She thought of the Arwa she was not: the shadow Arwa fashioned from all the Amrithi things she had taught herself not to be. The Arwa she had yearned to be, once.
She barely slept.
In the morning she washed herself, and then took her own shears to her hair. Looked at herself in her mirror: her sand-brown skin, her deep brown eyes, large in her fine-boned face. She looked like an Ambhan woman. She knew it. It seemed almost cruel, after all, that she could see nothing of her sister in her own face.
We have the same blood, her sister had told her once. Arwa had no vows burned into her skin, had said her marriage vows without ancient magic binding them to her soul and flesh. She had noamata.
And yet she couldn’t help but think of the Amrithi families that military commanders like her husband had driven out of villages. She thought of the warnings her mother had pressed into her of the suffering of faceless Amrithi, and how Arwa had thought:That could be me.
I cannot allow that to be me.
She remembered Mehr’s smile. The sound of her singing a lullaby. The feel of her arms, as she held Arwa close.
The same blood. They all had the same blood.
The heretic mystics were put to death. The women of the imperial household were not expected to attend, for which Arwa was grateful. But Jihan, as Emperor’s daughter, was expected to witness. Gulshera accompanied her, as did Jihan’s closest noblewomen.
Arwa waited for their return for a time. She thought of death. Of Amrithi. Of Darez Fort. Of soldiers, and their fears. She searched through her belongings and left her room.
She found Gulshera in her own chamber.
