Together they stared at the black sky, the glittering city, in companionable silence. For a moment.
“Is there a daiva here now?”
“Gods, Zahir, there’s no need for more questions, is there?”
“I can ask tomorrow instead, if you prefer.”
“You could not ask me at all.”
“That… is an option.” His voice sounded a little strained.
Ah, how he hungers, she thought. For knowledge. For hope. She shivered.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“How can you not know?”
“I am not its master.”
“Could you call it to you if you wished, using your sigils?”
“Possibly,” said Arwa with a shrug.
“Why does it protect you?”
“I don’tknow, Zahir.”
He shook his head, and she glared at him.
“I don’t think on it much,” she said.
“A spirit follows you and you don’t think on it?”
“Of course I have. I do. But I’ve been preoccupied with finding the Maha’s ash, just as you have been, Zahir.”
“We can study the question together,” he said. “If you’d like to. We can try to find out why this daiva seeks to keep you safe. Aliye has books we can use.”
“Maybe,” Arwa said, after a time. “Let me think on it.”
“If I were you,” he said, “I would want to study its relationship to me. My power over it. And its power over me in return. The mechanisms of our relationship. Everything.”
“You’d write a book, I expect,” said Arwa, not without fondness. “You take a joy in scholarship that I simply do not. In that, we differ.”
Oh, she hungered for knowledge. But she hungered for something no amount of study could give her: a history that was not a book with pages ripped out, bare-spined. She wanted to understand the daiva, and rites, and her Amrithi heritage. She wanted knowledge that would lie soft and easy in her bones. A thing that needed no codifying. A thing she had not had to fight for.
Arwa looked behind them at the sleep mat, distracting herself.
“You sleep out here, don’t you?”
“Foolish though it may be, it allows me to feel as if I’m keeping watch. If Parviz—if the Emperor—knows I live… well.”
“You think he knows you’ve survived?”
“I don’t know. Aliye tells me people claim to have seen a dark shadow fly from the palace the night my father died. An ill omen, they call it. So perhaps he does. Perhaps not. All I know is that he is not here, and I hope that does not change.” Zahir’s voice was grim.
Arwa thought of the guards that had watched her and Zahir drop from the dovecote tower. The expanse of wings that had opened at Zahir’s back. She had no words of comfort for him. Only ash in her mouth, and a voice in her ears. Ushan.
“You should rest,” she said.
