“Jihan thinks I am soft-natured. Akhtar thinks I am a stain upon his name. My father thinks I am a pretty, troublesome trinket, like my mother was to him. But they do not know my nature as I do.” His voice was low now, almost contemplative. “I am nearly certain I could have found the Maha’s ash long ago, if I had allowed myself to take the logical steps that lay before me. All it would have taken was a handful of unwilling Amrithi. Jihan could have smuggled them in as servants. The bodies of the dead, to be consumed or burned, to build a bridge. Experiment after experiment, until the Maha’s ash was found. It would have been a swifter way, albeit bloodier. But I would have told myself it was for the Empire’s good, and I would have slept well enough in time.”
He looked up at the sky. The dark of it reflected back in his eyes.
“But I kept my theories to myself. I only told Jihan that I would try starvation. She pressed for more. I told her an Amrithi-blooded apprentice, a person trustworthy and clever, would perhaps be of help to me. I told her, if you cannot trust my soul to them, they will not do. And I thought she would find nothing.”
But here I am, thought Arwa. She could not speak. Horror had stoppered her throat.
“You have shown me what the Maha is, Lady Arwa. All my life I have worshipped him, revered him. I thought he was greater than all of us—infinitely wiser in all ways. And now I know better. I fear…” He paused, holding his breath for a moment, as if he did not want to let the words go. “I fear how like him I am, in the precise and cruel part of me that I revile. I fear that in my nature, he and I are the same.”
“You are not,” Arwa said sharply.
He lowered his head and looked at her with an expression that was entirely vulnerable, entirely flayed open, as if he were the gentle child who had wept on his mother’s death, and not the sharp-edged not-prince he was, built for learning the world by paring it down to its bloodied bones.
“You don’t know that. You don’t know my heart.”
“When you indulge in slavery and cannibalism, I’ll rethink my assessment.Evidence, my lord. You know the value of it.”
“Experience of thought and feeling is evidence in its own right.”
“Do you want me to provide you forgiveness for your thoughts? Because I will not. You will need to make peace with your own heart, Lord Zahir. It’s no business of mine.”
Arwa was no stranger to dark thoughts, to fury and viciousness and bloodlust. But his confession should nonetheless have made her flinch. But she could not. She had read books at his side, worn a shawl embroidered by his hands. He had taught her and studied with her and held her when she woke screaming, the dead in her skull. And more than that—more than all of it—he had treated her as an equal. Apprentice, he called her, but in the white-gray expanse of the realm of ash, he had wound his soul’s roots with her own, and in the world of nighttime and lantern light he had listened to her theories with the respect due to a fellow scholar.
Zahir inclined his head, a gesture of acknowledgment. Still, he looked troubled.
“My father has attempted to weave a trap for me,” he said eventually. “He thinks I will fail, that I will prove myself unworthy of the title, and my death will end all rumors surrounding my name. Akhtar will rule without rumors to hound the stability of his throne. Even if I succeed and find the Maha’s ash, it will not be enough. Akhtar will take my knowledge, and ensure I die swiftly. I am a threat that cannot be allowed to remain. To survive, I would need to be—worshipped. Holy. And powerful, drenched in terrible magic, in blood, the leash of faith in my hands. I would need to be the Maha’s heir in truth. Whatever you may say, Lady Arwa, I know what I am capable of. If I wanted to—if I chose to—I could do it. I could prove myself to be his scion. And that, Lady Arwa, I cannot do. Iwillnot. I would rather embrace death.”
Zahir might have thought his father had set him a trap, but Arwa could only think of the whispers of the nobility and the gossip of the widows, the fears the people of the Empire suffered, in the void left by the Maha’s death. Their faith needed a focus. They needed someone to believe in—something to hold at bay the terrors of the curse that lay upon the Empire.
Zahir did not see it, perhaps. He had not walked the political realm as Arwa had. Even now, he did not see his own family, the beating heart of imperial politics, with eyes unclouded by hunger and love.
The Emperor had named Zahir Maha’s heir, and now no other claimants would be able to rise and seize the faith and power the Maha had once commanded. Whether Zahir failed or succeeded, they would use him all the same: make a hollow puppet of him, a symbol and a tool to support their power. They would hold the tale—and the flesh—of the Maha’s heir in their chains.
Arwa swallowed. Her chest felt very tight.
“Then what,” she said, “will you do now?”
They walked into his workroom together.
“Lady Arwa.” Zahir’s own voice was careful. “Your father. Would you return to him, if you could?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I am not—entirely without resources,” he said. “I could arrange—that is. The possibility of you returning home. Despite appearances, I have not always been enclosed here. When my mother was the Emperor’s mistress, I was raised among her own people. Until the Maha’s death, and her own, I lived outside the palace.”
He turned to her. The lamps were guttered. She could not see his face any longer and that was… strange.
“I am admitting something to you that even Jihan does not know,” he told her. “From time to time I still communicate with my mother’s people. The Hidden Ones. There is a servant who…” He shook his head, suddenly guarded once more. “No matter. But if you wish to leave, if you wish to survive—as I hope you do—it can be arranged.”
“A kind offer, I think,” said Arwa. She tried not to think of her father. Her mother. “But my father has already paid the price, once, for protecting an Amrithi-blooded daughter. I won’t ask him to do so again.”
“Lady Arwa.” A released breath. “If you will not return to your father, I can still arrange for you to leave. You deserve to survive.”
Would she die, if she remained? She had no worth in the tale of the Maha’s heir. No worth beyond her use as a resource: a vessel of blood. A lever to ensure Zahir’s compliance.
Perhaps, then. Perhaps.
“I hope you wish to survive too, Lord Zahir,” she said. “If you have the means to leave here, you should.”
