“You have a more appropriate term?”
“We’re keepers of a lost art,” said Arwa. “We are not Hidden Ones, I think.Iam not. But I suppose we are… a mystical order.”
“Of two?”
“Yes. A mystical order of two. It isaccurate, don’t you agree?”
They were smiling at one another.
On the edge of death, and we’re smiling, Arwa marveled. She clutched the book tighter, butter-soft leather yielding in her grip. Its weight was significant, despite the way it fit easily into her hands.
“I should let you rest,” she said.
“Yes.” The light in his face dimmed a little. “Take the book with you. If you like.”
He turned from her then, rolling the cuff back into place, head lowered.
She looked at his lowered head. She thought about how easily her hands would fit to the back of his neck: how warm his skin would be, and how soft.
She turned and left.
Unsure she would sleep, she lay on her bed, lantern precariously close to her, and read.
In small, painstaking writing—so laborious and so terrifyingly neat that it could only be Zahir’s—lay a record of his lessons. Images painted on separate scraps of animal skin and paper. Tucked between the pages, perilously likely to come loose, was poetry from the Hidden One, and lesson notes from his own tutors.
She traced his words with her fingertips. Watched the confidence in his script grow. This was no diary of feelings, but a scholarly record. Mantras, too, and scraps of knowledge sewn together. Ever since the Maha’s death, Zahir had searched for answers, as much a Hidden One as his mother—or as much as he could manage to be behind the palace’s walls. And in her time in the palace, Arwa had done the same. She had come a long way from the widow crying tears of frustration in the library of the hermitage’s prayer room, full of questions without any access to answers. She had new questions now.
They truly were a mystical order of two, she and him.
One of the final images was not copied art, but something Arwa knew could only have come from his own hand: a human built of pale lines and the silver of glass, run through by great roots, red and deep as blood. He must have drawn it after Arwa arrived at the palace, after her blood opened the doors to the realm of ash. She looked at it a long moment.
She heard a noise, and looked up from her book. Froze.
At the end of her bed, shadowed by night and candle glow, sat a figure small enough to be a child.
It raised its head. A child’s face, carved from shadow, looked at her. Eyes like fractured silver. As she watched, heart in her throat, its face fractured too, skin unfurled, peeling away, to reveal a face beneath it, flat as bone, a nightmare made flesh—
Her lungs filled with rattling fear. She woke up, shooting into heart-pounding awareness. The room was entirely dark.
Even the lantern had guttered.
It took her a moment longer to realize the lantern should not have guttered, that she had grown adept at knowing how to keep a lantern burning all night long, the necessary measure of oil to wick.
It took her a moment longer, still, to realize there were thin facets of light winking in and out of sight. That there was something concealing her lantern with the shadowy bulk of its body.
Daiva.
She rose onto her elbows. The shadowy bird-spirit bristled upon her lantern. When she moved, it lifted its wings and rose, letting the light pour over Arwa’s bed and the book beside her once again. She looked around herself, careful.
The walls were covered in shadows. No Darez Fort child-nightmare in sight. But that did not matter. Arwa knew what she had dreamed, and what lay before her now. Hundreds of bird-daiva upon the windows and walls.
Arwa rose to her feet. Carefully, ash whirling through her mind, she shaped a sigil of respect, a hint of a question in her stance. The tilt of her body. The turn of her head.
The daiva broke into wisps. Coalesced into one formless being, that took her arms, shaping them, then curled over her like a black shawl. Heart still hammering, she repeated the gesture it had made for her.
What had it meant? The ash within her answered.
Blood.
