“I know you spoke to Rabia,” Gulshera said, watching Arwa admire the ring. “I’m glad to see you recovering, Arwa.”
Recovering. As if Arwa’s grief were a spell of illness she would rise out of, with careful enough tending. Forcing herself not to speak, she raised her tea to her lips.
She had her mouth on the rim of the cup when she heard a sudden shriek. The cup jumped from her hands; hot liquid spilled over the table and the hem of her robe as she scrabbled back, cursing sharply. Gulshera rose to her feet.
“What on earth,” she began.
There was another yell. A rush of footsteps. Without another word, Gulshera turned and strode sharply from the room, turning toward the source of the noise.
Arwa kneeled, wringing liquid from her hem. One of Gulshera’s letters had fallen to the floor in the chaos, and was sodden. She lifted it up. Paused.
The seal was already broken, neatly parted.
Without pausing to think—this, after all, was the kind of opportunity she’d been waiting for—Arwa opened the letter.
Dear Aunt,
If your widows mention unrest in the southern provinces, write to me immediately. Matters between Parviz and Akhtar are not proceeding as I hoped—
Parviz. Akhtar.
She knew those names.
She turned the letter over again, pressing the seal back into place. Her fingers were steady. They should not have been.
Footsteps thudded outside the door. Arwa dropped the letter, back to the floor where she had found it, and left the room.
Other widows were also following the sound of shrieking and yelling. They walked toward the prayer hall. Its entrance was already stoppered up by a crowd of other curious women. Arwa tried to peer over their heads.
“Step back, step back!” Roshana yelled, striding forward. For once, her voice was not soft with feeling. Her habitual worry had alchemized into an air of authority that made the crowd part unthinking around her, allowing her access into the prayer room. Through the gap, Arwa saw Gulshera already standing there, and the source of the noise.
One of the two women who regularly drank and slumbered at the back of the prayer room was crying out hysterically. She was gabbling, fierce words tumbling from her mouth as she pointed at the lattice wall with one shaking hand.
“It was there,” she was saying. “There, right there! Behind the lattice. Right there.”
“You didn’t see anything,” another woman said to her, cutting through her words. “By the Emperor’s grace, if you insist in drinking as you do, of course you’ll imagine things—”
“I know what I saw!”
“Dina,” Gulshera said, placing a hand on the hysterical woman’s shoulder. “Tell me what happened.”
“Please, dear,” Roshana added gently.
Dina sucked in a shuddering breath. She dabbed the edge of her shawl hastily against her eyes. “It was just like the stories my mother told me when I was a little girl,” she said. “Just like that.”
Arwa’s stomach clenched. Her face felt strangely numb.
“It had black wings,” Dina was saying. “Gold eyes. Exactly how my own mother described it. It was a daiva. I know it.”
Arwa took a small step back. She reached for her own shawl and drew it up around her face, as if she could ward off the press of eyes with cloth alone.
“Did you see anything?” Gulshera asked the other elderly lady, who was standing back, bewildered, the bottle clutched in her hands.
“No, I… I don’t know,” the woman said, nonplussed. “What was I meant to see?”
Roshana focused on the task of calming Dina down, as Dina began to yell again that she was not lying, not drunk, that she knew what she had seen and why wouldn’t anyone believe her? The women around Arwa were muttering, their unease palpable.
Arwa was not uneasy. She was not anything. Her mind was a perfect void of sound and light. She turned on instinct alone, easing her way through the crowd, slipping between bodies until she was free of them, alone in the hallway, walking soft-footed toward her room.
She walked. And walked. And then she began to run.
She flung the door to her room open. Nothing had moved. The bed was undisturbed. The lantern was unlit. She went to the window and lifted her own small effigy. The line of blood beneath it was undisturbed.
She breathed in and out, in and out.
The smell hit her a moment later: sweet and cloying, as rich as smoke and perfume on water.
Incense.
She shuddered and bent forward, sucking in great gouts of breath, letting them go. Her ribs ached. Her mouth was full of the scent of incense, the iron of blood.
This was what she’d been waiting for, wasn’t it? She’d waited in Chand, when the courtiers had interrogated her and her mother had shorn her hair; waited in her palanquin, with blood daubed behind her ear and nausea roiling in her stomach; waited in the valley with a bow and arrow in her hands.
She’d known, in her heart of hearts, that she could never run far enough. She’d always known.
The daiva had found her again, after all.
Arwa did not go to meet Gulshera. She lay in her bed, shivering, the embroidered blanket drawn up over her. It was easy to convince the maid who came to sweep her room that she was unwell, and to pass her apologies on to Gulshera. The maid returned later with lentil broth and bread for lunch, which Arwa left untouched. Hunger felt very far away from her.
She lay still, as the sun faded from the sky and sunset colored the room in rose hues. She listened to the widows walk outside her room, voices hushed.
She thought of all the secrets she’d carried all her life. She thought of the weight of her own history, always heavy upon her shoulders. She thought of Darez Fort.
Gold eyes. A hand on her sleeve. A circle of blood.
A scar on her arm, silver in the lantern light.
When the darkness finally came, and the hermitage fell silent, Arwa slipped out of bed. She tightened her sash around her dagger. She grabbed her bow and placed her quiver on her back. Last of all, she slipped the bone ring around her thumb. She had never been more armed in her life.
Arwa looked out the window. She saw nothing swoop through the air, saw no flicker of eyes, or wings rustling in the black. But she saw bright points in the dark, and knew she was not the only woman with a lantern lit tonight.
She thought of Rabia’s hand on her own, and Roshana’s damp worried eyes. She thought of Gulshera. Asima. A dozen grave-tokens, and a dozen more women clustered in the foyer on the night she arrived, staring at her with curious, bright eyes.
She did not love these women. Not a single one. There was no love left in her to be spared. But she would not allow this hermitage to become the next Darez Fort.
She stepped out of her room and closed her eyes. Her blood was pounding in her ears. She sucked in a breath and moved, one foot in front of the other, following the scent of incense, the tug of something beyond sense and flesh. Something in her blood.
CHAPTER FIVE
When Arwa was a small girl, she’d had a sister.
There were many things that Arwa was taught not to speak of, after her family’s fall from imperial grace: the loss of her father’s governorship; the severity of his illness; the faults in her own nature. But her sister had always been the greatest silence of all.
Her sister, after all, was the reason their fall had begun.