She recalled the guardsman’s comment on blood-worshipping heathens with bitter humor.
If only you knew, she thought, that you carried one on your shoulders all along. Oh, you would have tossed me over the cliff edge then, and you would have been proud of it.
Once in her palanquin, despite the risks, she’d made a small cut to her thumb, and daubed blood behind her ear, in the manner mothers daubed kohl behind children’s ears to keep the evil eye at bay. She’d hoped it would be enough, and perhaps it had been. She’d seen no shadows. Felt no evil descend, winged and silent. But every night she had lain awake, listening and waiting like a prey animal braced for the flash of a predator’s wings in the dark. She had imagined in great, lurid detail all the things that would happen if her meager scrape of spilled blood was not enough: Nuri’s body cut open from neck to groin, her insides splayed out around her body; the guards turning on one another, their scimitars red and silver and white as bone in the bloody dark.
Darez Fort, all over again.
And all that time, Nuri had known what Arwa was. All that time. If Arwa had only known—if she had been able to employ Nuri to distract the guards, so that she could reach her blade…
Well. No matter now. The journey was done, and soon Nuri would be gone. Useful though Nuri perhaps would have been, Arwa was grateful for that. She did not want someone to fuss over her with worried eyes. She wanted no spy from her mother, sent to ensure that she was suitably quiet and secretive and safe. The thought of Nuri remaining here made her feel suffocated.
Her mother—Emperor’s grace upon her—could not shield her. Nuri could not shield her.
Only Arwa could do that.
Once the blade had cooled, she placed its sharp edge to a finger, and watched the blood well up. The cut was shallow, the pain negligible. She placed her finger against the window ledge and drew a line across its surface.
The lantern flame flickered, caught by a faint breeze. Arwa watched it move. She thought of her husband. Of Kamran. Of a circle of blood, and a hand on her sleeve, and eyes that gleamed like gold. Her stomach felt uneasy again, roiling inside her. Her mouth was full of the taste of old iron.
Curious, how even when the heart was silent and the mind declined to recall suffering, the body still remembered.
She wiped the dagger clean on an old cloth and pressed the material to her finger finally to stem the last of the bleeding. She looked at the window. The blood was still there, illuminated by her lantern, a firm line demarcating the dark and the light, the safety of the room, and what lay beyond it.
She sat on the bed, curling up her knees. She placed the dagger by her feet, and watched the flame move. Waiting.
The night remained silent.
Nuri’s voice rose up in her. You… you need someone to take care of you. To protect you.
And who, Arwa thought, not for the first time, as sleep began to creep over her, will protect everyone from me?
If there was an answer to that question, she had not found it yet. But she would. She had to.
CHAPTER TWO
A noise woke her in the night, hours before dawn. She opened her eyes. Held her breath. Her heart was a pulsing fist in her chest. There was a call, hollow and cold, beyond the window. The flutter of wings.
It was just birdsong. There was nothing here. She could smell no incense in the air. See no eyes in the dark.
Feel nothing burrowing into her skull, cold-fingered and deathless.
Still, she rose to her feet. Her legs felt like water. She stared through the light of the candle. On the walls and beneath her feet the shadows flickered like beasts, unfurling with the bristle of blades and broken limbs.
It was not here. It was not here.
By the Emperor’s grace, let it not be here.
It cannot cross the blood. You’re safe, she told herself. Safe.
The air was ice around her, as she knelt on the ground, beneath the pooled light of the lantern.
“It is not here,” she whispered to herself. Out loud this time, as if her voice would cut through her own terror. It did, a little. “Not here. Not here. And it—you cannot hurt me.” She raised her head to the light. “If you are here, you cannot cross my blood. I know what you are.”
She held on to the words—and the dagger—until the sky bled pale rose with dawn.
The walls of the hermitage were thinner than they first appeared. She could hear women chattering as they headed to breakfast. The widows, it seemed, were early risers. Once the corridors were quiet again, Arwa dressed and left her room. The night’s bitter chill had softened, and now the indoor air of the hermitage felt no more than pleasantly cool on her skin. She drew her shawl loosely around her head and her shoulders, her bare feet moving soundless across the stone floor.
She found the prayer room much more quickly than she’d expected to. It was set farther down the corridor from where she’d slept, the scent of incense wafting from its open doors inviting her in. She had hoped it would be quiet, now that many of the women were breaking their fast, and it was. Two very elderly ladies were asleep against one wall, leaning against each other with their shawls tucked up to their chins. Apart from them—and their gentle snores—the room was empty and silent.
Arwa did not know if the women had come to pray at dawn as the most pious did and fallen asleep shortly after, or if they’d come here to surreptitiously share the carafe of wine she could see tucked between them. Although her guess was firmly on the latter, Arwa was just grateful they were not awake to speak to her, to question her or pity her with soft eyes.
Quietly, so as not to disturb the widows, she crossed the room. Behind a curtain, in a nook, lay a small library. Widows were dedicated to prayer and solitude, and were accordingly scholars of a kind. She had hoped there would be books. Books on faith and prayer; books by the Maha’s greatest mystics and the Emperor’s advisers, on the nature of the Empire’s strength and glory. Books that would show a wayward, cursed noblewoman a path out of the darkness she’d found herself in.
But there was nothing. Not in the first book, or the second, or the third. They were nothing but staid religious tracts, the kind Arwa had learned by rote as a small girl, so old that they still spoke of the Maha as living and the Empire as timelessly glorious. Arwa did not curse, but she did bite down on her tongue and press her head to the spines, tears threatening sharply at her eyes. She would not weep. Not over something so trivial. But ah, she was so tired of her own secrets and her fear. She was tired of bracing for the return of the dangers of Darez Fort, with nothing to hold them at bay but the shaky defense of her own cursed blood. If faith could not help her, what could?
She returned to the prayer room, looking around herself slowly as she breathed deep and slow to ease the furious beating of her own heart. One of the walls was a latticed screen, carved to resemble tree roots and great sprouting leaves. The light poured through it in honeycomb shadows. Before the screen stood a statue as tall as Arwa herself. She drew her shawl tighter around her and approached it.
The statue was of a male figure, garbed in a turban and robes. Its upraised palm held the world inside it.
It was a statue of the Emperor—of all Emperors, past and future—and their blessed bloodline. It was a statue of the Maha, the Great One and first Emperor, who built the Ambhan Empire and then raised a temple upon the sands of Irinah province, where his power and piety had ensured the blessings of the Gods would shower for centuries down upon the Empire and grant him a life span far beyond mortal reckoning.