“I am so very sorry,” she whispered.
“I do not know if he died peacefully, but you saw him near the end. No doubt Masuma saw to his care. But after he died, it seems Parviz was not willing to let the Emperor’s decision stand. He…”
Zahir bowed his head once more.
“Akhtar is dead,” said Zahir. “Nasir—I don’t know. But it was Parviz who arranged for their deaths, and my own. I’m sure of it. No traitors have been arrested, and only Parviz has loyal soldiers at his beck and call. Lady Arwa, he has proclaimed himself Emperor. He has had new coins struck to honor the dawn of his reign.” His restless fingers paused then. She knew now he held the new coin between them. “He has taken the Empire, against the wishes of his father, and claimed it is because the Gods blessed him with the power and might to do so.”
He clenched his fist around the coin.
“It is strange, to try to piece the truth of that night together,” Zahir said, a sudden bite in his voice. “I am used to mending knowledge, taking fragments and making them whole. But this…” He sucked in a breath. “I do not know Nasir’s fate. I do not know Jihan’s fate. I know only what Aliye has gleaned from patron gossip and from the Hidden Ones, what has been announced in imperial proclamations, and what I—we—saw on that night. Nothing, Arwa. I knownothing.”
Gulshera. If she had seen the soldiers walking the corridors, what would she have done? Had Parviz planned to lock Jihan and her women into their rooms, ensuring they would be under his direct control? Had all the women survived—Jihan’s attentive noblewomen, her widows?
So much unknown. All she and Zahir had was the knowledge of dead servants, and soldiers with bloody weapons, and the choice they’d made between certain death and a literal leap of faith.
He was right. They had nothing.
“I am not sure how to make my knowledge whole. And I am afraid if I do… Arwa. I am afraid of what I will find.”
There were tear tracks on his face. He did not even seem to be aware of them.
“You’re crying,” said Arwa.
“Ah.” He touched the back of his hand to his cheek. “I am.”
Arwa did not think. She placed her hand on his arm. Her head on his shoulder.
“I am so sorry,” she whispered, as if her apologies had any weight, any power to comfort him. “Weep, if you want.”
“I don’t want to weep.”
“Better to tell yourself it’s a choice,” she said. “Grief will drag you under whether you like it or not. So weep, Zahir. You have the right.”
He was frozen for a long moment, as if he couldn’t accept the comfort of her touch, or bring himself to move away from it. Arwa understood. Neither of them was good at the business of being vulnerable, of letting the softest blood of grief rise to the surface.
And yet the softness bloomed within her regardless, more easily than it ever had before, something gentle born from pain that had little place in the hard forge of her nature, when he leaned his chin against her hair, and breathed slow, ragged breaths, wet with grief.
One breath. Two. Three. Four. His breath finally softened.
They remained like that for a long time. How long, she didn’t know.
Eventually he lifted his head, and she lifted her own. His eyes were sticking with the salt of tears, his face wan from pain both physical and quite beyond the flesh.
“So,” Arwa said finally. “What will you do now?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and there was something strange in his voice. “I don’t know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
They healed, and hid. Once Arwa regained a measure of her normal strength, she began to learn and explore the small segment of the haveli she and Zahir were limited to: a few small rooms, a collection of carefully tended to books, and a narrow corridor with finely latticed windows that overlooked the central courtyard of the haveli beneath it.
From evening until daybreak the haveli courtyard was full of laughter and music. At night the women of Aliye’s house entertained men in the haveli’s rooms or danced for their entertainment in the central courtyard. Dancing girls and female musicians—all courtesans by trade—were hardly an unusual sight in typical women’s quarters, and certainly not unusual in the imperial palace. But Arwa had never had the opportunity to watch courtesans who were also members of an ancient mystical order perform. So she sat at the window lattice, chin on her knees, and watched the women sing and dance.
Arwa had known how the Hidden Ones afforded to adhere to their scholarship and mysticism, independent and unseen. But it still surprised her to hear a dancer’s bells in distant corridors or in the courtyard during the quiet daylight hours, followed by a heated discussion of theories of the afterlife, of new manuscripts traded by Hidden Ones from eastern Chand, of women moving through the finest households of Jah Ambha and collecting knowledge alongside their gold. In the households of the nobility, the Hidden Ones had the positions of influence and invisibility. They were as clever and vicious and charming as any noblewoman Arwa had ever encountered—and they were thriving.
Her mother Maryam had always taught her that fallen women were to be derided—that her own concubine birth mother had been a low, corrupting influence for reasons beyond her Amrithi blood. An influence Arwa had to rise above.
Maryam had been wrong.
