“If you know so much,” Arwa said, “what do you want to learn from me now?”
“Only what happened to you,” Gulshera said, as if that were not a great deal to ask for. “No more.”
“I can only repeat what I have already told others before you,” said Arwa. “I don’t see what good that will do you.”
“Knowledge gained secondhand, through gossip and whispers, is never entirely complete. No tale I have heard explains how you survived, when all others died. You were found surrounded by blood, in an unlocked room, but entirely unharmed. How did that come to pass, Arwa?”
Arwa sucked in a sharp breath.
“Luck,” Arwa lied. “It was luck. What else could it have been?”
“Nonetheless, I’d like to hear what happened in your own words. Perhaps then I will come to understand how you survived.”
Arwa hadn’t been unharmed, no matter what the older woman had heard. She’d made a cut to her arm, that day in Darez Fort—made it too long in her panic. It had bled hard, but it had been shallow and had healed to nothing but a faint silver scar in days. She could only see it now when she held her bare arm up to the candlelight just so.
She didn’t tell that to Gulshera. For a long moment she said nothing at all.
She thought of Kamran.
“The family I am loyal to,” Gulshera said into the silence, “seek a cure to the curse upon the Empire. Your story may help them.”
The hand on her sleeve. Those eyes—
“I wish I knew why I survived,” she whispered.
She scrubbed her eyes with her sleeve. She realized she was crying.
“It started,” she said, “when a patrol returned from a nearby village.”
Darez Fort had been a new military fort, built hastily like so many others to manage unrest in villages and towns distant from the imperial control of the great provincial cities. But it had been better equipped than most, properly fortified, with an experienced nobleman as its commander. Kamran had served in Durevi in his early youth—later, he’d fought the unrest brought on by the Maha’s death at the Haran border with Irinah, the blighted desert land where the Maha had met his end. He’d known how to manage a subdistrict boiling over with unrest: good pay for the soldiers to encourage obedience, and the instillation of regular patrols through all local villages.
“The patrol returned late,” said Arwa. “Hours late. My husband was less than pleased. He valued discipline in his men. And when they arrived…” She paused. Swallowed. “They had it with them.”
“The daiva?”
“Yes.”
Arwa hadn’t known it was a daiva at first. She’d been on the upper floor of the fort, in the women’s quarters. It had been deep midday, sweltering hot, and she’d been standing in the shade by the window lattice, watching the fort’s great doors as they opened to let the patrol enter. The men entered on horseback. One of them had been carrying a large bundle on the saddle in front of him.
She’d been relieved to see the patrol return. Kamran’s mood had grown blacker as each hour had passed, and she hadn’t been looking forward to trying to cajole him into a better one. She’d already sent a message to the kitchen asking for his favorite dish to be made for the evening meal, and advised one of the maids to bring up a tray of wine and sweets swiftly, should her husband choose to visit her quarters. It was tiring to be a good wife. When her husband was in an ill mood, the job became much harder. Arwa had learned it was best to be prepared.
She’d seen her husband stride out to meet the patrol, flanked by two of his best men. She could remember the grim line of his shoulders, the way they’d announced his displeasure far more loudly than words. She remembered how one of the patrollers had jumped down from his horse, and gestured frantically back at the bundle, as the doors clanged shut behind them.
Arwa remembered seeing the bundle move.
The cloth had slid back.
She’d seen a head. A neck curled forward. Skin like black smoke.
The smell of incense, sudden and overpowering, had filled her nose, her throat. She’d known, then, what it was.
She’d seen such flesh before, smelled that unnatural sweetness, sacred and strange. Some things were impossible to forget.
“I had seen a daiva before,” Arwa said. Her voice came out of her thin. “Before his—disgrace—my father was Governor of Irinah.” Arwa did not like to dwell on what her father had been before disgrace, but it was important. Irinah’s holy desert was the place where daiva lived, and the place where the Maha had died. “I thought they’d captured a child. For what reason, I couldn’t imagine. The cloth slid back, and I saw—a face. I think I saw a face. But it… its face moved, as if I were looking at a reflection on water. And its eyes…”
It had looked around the dusty yard, still swaddled in the soldier’s arms, and cocked its head to the side with the animal inquisitiveness of a bird or some loping, sleek-furred predator. It had looked human enough, with two eyes and two ears, a neat mouth and two dark hands bound before it, not quite concealed by cloth. But its eyes had reflected the light of the midday sun back, flecks of shattered glass in its wavering mirage of a face. As Kamran had taken a step back—as the soldier who had jumped down from his horse began to speak, swift and panicked—the daiva had looked about, for all the world like a feral thing caged. It had struggled. Twisted.
Its face had cracked, the jaw parted to reveal a thing that was all bone and howling teeth, brilliant and pointed as blades. An utter nightmare.
There had been horrified yells, down in the courtyard. Someone had drawn a blade.
“I don’t know why they brought it to the fort,” Arwa whispered. “Fool men. I think they thought it was harmless—a child of its kind. I think they sought my husband’s advice. They’d wrapped it up and chained its wrists, but it broke the chains as easily as paper. I saw it do so. And I remember… My husband, he looked up at the window where I stood, right before…”
Arwa stopped again, swallowing hard. She didn’t want to remember the way Kamran had turned, the tilt of his head, the sun turning his face to shadow, as the daiva had flung off its shackles and stretched itself free from its human form. She didn’t want to remember the screaming that had followed, or how she had turned from the window, running. How she had chosen not to watch him die.
She’d learned later that Kamran had died a hero, protecting the doors of the fort. He’d died trying to stop any of his men from leaving and taking their unnatural, nightmare-driven bloodlust with them. But Arwa had not seen it. She’d chosen not to.
“Go on,” prompted Gulshera.
“It only looked human for a short time,” Arwa managed to say, remembering the way its whole body had yawned, cracking open its child-form like a shell, or a closed jaw, peeling free to show the serrated teeth beneath. “When it changed—when it grew—something happened to me. Something happened to all of us.”
“Tell me what happened,” Gulshera prompted, soft now. “Tell me what you felt.”
“It took something from us. It… it changed us.” How to explain the feel of it—like cold claws had been set inside the base of her skull, ripping a seam in her soul, letting the dark within her spill out? “It was a nightmare. It felt like being trapped in a nightmare. I remember nothing but fear after that.”