“No more.”
Zahir said it quietly enough, but his voice was so cold and hard that it silenced the room.
“I find,” he said, “that I am growing tired of being a tool in the vast games of others. And the players seem to keep dying. Aunt Aliye, Eshara, it’s your division that makes me doubt the worth of placing the Maha’s knowledge in your hands. I revere the work of the Hidden Ones, but I won’t break myself upon this cause if it will all come to nothing.”
Aliye sighed. Her eyes were sad.
“Then what would you do, Zahir? Stay here? Take up your mother’s profession perhaps?”
“You think to shame me into going?” He sounded incredulous. “Do you think so little of my regard for you? For my mother?”
“No. I only think to remind you that your skills have been honed to this purpose, and this alone. Pursuit of knowledge. Service to a higher power. Sousethem, dear one. Try to save the Empire. And trust that the Hidden Ones will do all in their power to use your knowledge well, and see it placed in the wisest hands.”
“I need time,” he bit out.
“Go, then,” said Aliye. “You have it.”
Zahir left. Without pause, Arwa turned on her heel and followed him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
He was on the roof once more. The sunlight was blazing now. It took Arwa a moment to adjust to it—to blink the painful burst of new light from her eyes and fix her gaze on Zahir, sitting on the edge of the roof, his head in his hands.
Arwa sat down beside him.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I’m not doing anything,” she replied. “I’m just sitting here.”
She kicked her feet idly back and forth as she stared across the city in daylight. At night, it glimmered. In the day, the bright paint of the buildings of the pleasure district was clearly peeling. The streets were festooned with burnt-out lamps. People milled about, bullocks and carts, food traders; there was the smell of flowers in great baskets, and sweets and fried dough. The air was rich with noise and life.
“Jihan may be dead.”
It startled her, when he spoke. Her legs froze mid-kick. She lowered them and turned a little to look at him.
“After my mother’s death, she arranged my tutors. My housing. My life. And now she may be gone. Arwa…” Exhale, shaky with feeling. “I know I have a duty to the Empire. To do what’s right. And it’s time. My wounds are healing. But.” Voice a whisper. “My soul feels like a thing splintered. I do not think it is strong enough for the Maha’s memories. Grief has undone me.”
Arwa swallowed. Her throat, her heart, felt full of grit.
“I know something of grief,” Arwa said.
“Yes,” Zahir murmured. “Do you miss him, your husband? Mourn him still?”
He’d never asked her about Kamran. But she was a widow, of course. Some things were inviolable.
She thought of Kamran. Of trying to be worthy of love. Of meals carefully arranged, and papers tidied; of his careful eyes on her, seeking to read her, to understand her, always finding the void where their natures could not meet.
It had not hurt, trying to be a good wife. Given the chance she would have done it all her life without considering how carefully she had to fold her true nature away—her fire, her biting tongue, the mercurial sweetness of her own joy—and how the folding erased her, piece by piece. Being a good wife to Kamran had felt like a success in its own right. She had won her family a future: reputation, a measure of honor. Bartered herself, but for an outcome she’d considered worthy of the cost.
“Yes,” she said finally, into the silence left by his voice. “I mourn him still. Just not as he deserves to be mourned. I loved him. Just not as he deserved to be loved. We weren’t well suited to one another. He was older and… he didn’t know me. I think in truth I knew little of him. We shared one soul, one duty, but we were strangers to one another.”
“Arwa,” he whispered. “I am sorry for that.”
Arwa shook her head.
“You shouldn’t be. It was my fault. I wasn’t—right, Zahir. I was too angry. Too mercurial. Too… Too much myself,” she said. “Kamran thought he was marrying an impoverished noblewoman who would love and obey him and instead he had… me. But he tried to be good to me. He did what he could. It was love of a sort.”
She swallowed. Ah, the way grief burned. “In truth, it’s my sister I still mourn. Ever since I saw the Amrithi dead in the realm of ash, her death has felt like a fresh wound all over again. Sometimes in the realm of ash, I’ve seen her,” Arwa admitted. “I know she is dead, and yet to me she looked soalive, Zahir. I couldn’t help but think if I reached out and touched her I’d feel real flesh and she would be right there, alive before me. But I knew she would have just turned to ash in front of me and it would have been like death all over again. So I just—looked at her. And loved her. And missed her. And it—hurt me.”
