The sight of the effigy’s blank face—of the eternity of its varnished, bare surface—brought Arwa an immense sense of comfort that she couldn’t fully explain. Perhaps it reminded her of kinder times during her childhood, when she’d prayed at her mother’s side, for the sake of the Empire and for its future glory. Perhaps it merely helped her believe that all suffering was finite, and even the anger and grief coiled within her now would one day fade to the void.
There was no one to see her, or to scold her. So Arwa took another step forward and placed her hands against the smooth face. The feel of it reminded her of the opal in her dagger hilt: smooth and somehow achingly familiar against her palms. It was absurd to find as much comfort in her heathen blade as in the Maha’s holy effigy, but that was the way of it, for Arwa. She could not change her nature. And ah, she had tried.
She let out a slow breath. Some of that awful tension in her uncoiled. She stepped back and kneeled down before the altar.
The ground was cold. She sang a prayer, soft under her breath so as not to disturb the sleepers behind her. At the feet of the effigy was incense, and a cluster of flowers, freshly picked. Tucked discreetly at the base of the statute were tiny baskets, woven of leaves and grass and filled with soil. Arwa paused in her prayer, thoughtful, and touched one with her fingertips.
She knew what they were. She had seen them on dozens of roadside altars, on the journey through Chand to the hermitage.
Grave-tokens.
Tokens of grief. Symbolic burials, for the Maha, who had died when Arwa was only a girl. Four hundred years, he’d lived, some claimed. And then he had died, and the Empire had been falling to curse and ruin ever since.
Since his death, mourning had been its own kind of prayer. Widows grieved him like a husband, for grieving was their holiest task. Pilgrims traveled across the provinces to the desert where he had died. The nobility wept for him. But all the while, they whispered too, planting the seeds of almost-heresies, unsanctioned by the Emperor, and dangerous for it.
Perhaps, they whispered, he would one day return. Perhaps he had never died at all. Perhaps an heir would rise to take his place, a new Maha to lead the faith of the Empire and lift the Empire from the curse that his death had laid upon it. Politics and faith, tangled together as they were, were never far from the minds—or tongues—of the nobility.
She wondered sorely if she was going to be privy to heated exchanges of faith here too. No doubt a hermitage of widows was rich soil for questions of death and mourning. Rabia was clearly one of that hopeful number who believed the Maha was not truly gone, and she was equally clearly stupid enough to announce her views to strangers like Arwa. Fool.
To speak of the Maha was to court danger. Arwa’s husband had always been careful only to air his views with his closest compatriots, men he could trust not to mark his many fears of a world without the Maha as a kind of heresy. Arwa had been more careful still, and not spoken of faith at all. Were the widows truly so safe from the world, here, that they had no need to fear the danger their own voices could bring down on them?
A noise dragged her abruptly out of her reverie. Someone had rapped their knuckles deliberately against the doorframe, startling one of the elderly women mid-snore into wakefulness.
“Wh-what is it?”
“Nothing, Aunt,” said Gulshera. Her eyes met Arwa’s. “I’ve come for the girl. Rest.”
The woman mumbled and subsided back into sleep. Arwa stood.
“Please come with me,” Gulshera said.
Arwa followed her out.
In the morning light, Gulshera’s hair was as pale as snow, her skin the lightest shade of brown. As a young woman, she must have been considered the epitome of Ambhan beauty, despite the severe shape of her mouth and the way she held herself, with a ramrod-straight posture reminiscent of a military-trained nobleman’s.
“You ate nothing this morning,” Gulshera said, gesturing for Arwa to walk with her down the corridor. Arwa obeyed. “Roshana worried.”
Arwa did not think it would take a great deal of effort to worry Roshana.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry anyone. I only wanted to pray.”
“You’ll have plenty of time for prayer here,” said Gulshera. “Right now, we need to get you some food. The tables have been cleared, so we’ll see what the cooks have left.”
“If you direct me to the kitchens, I can go on my own,” Arwa said with studied politeness.
“Ah, I see.” Gulshera’s voice was terribly matter-of-fact. “You want me to leave you alone.”
Yes, thought Arwa.
“Not at all,” she said. “I simply don’t want to trouble you.”
“Indeed. Well, perhaps I want to be troubled.”
She took Arwa’s arm imperiously.
“Come,” she said. “A servant always brings hot tea to my room in the morning. You’ll share it with me.”
There was no way to refuse her now, so Arwa didn’t try to. She allowed herself to be led.
Gulshera’s room was a cluttered, lived-in space, with a low dining table by the lattice window, and large sheaves of paper stacked neatly on her writing desk. Arwa saw silk-bound parchments, marked with the unfamiliar seal of a noble Ambhan family, balanced precariously on the edge of the bed. Letters. So, the widows weren’t so remote from the world after all.
A set of bows hung on the opposing wall. The largest of them caught Arwa’s attention and held it, drawing her focus away from the letters upon the bed. The bow was taller than her—tall as a grown man—its surface gilded with mother-of-pearl. Arwa had never used a bow, but she itched to hold it. It was astonishingly beautiful. Its ends were shaped like the mouths of tigers, with serrated teeth stretched into an open snarl.
“It’s a relic,” Gulshera said, startling Arwa back to reality. “It takes a full-grown man all his strength to string and shoot an arrow from it. My husband was full proud of it. But of course, it’s only good for display now.”
Gulshera was already seated by the window. There was a tray set before her.
“Sit,” she said. “You can pour the tea.”
There were herbs steeped in water, a small bowl of honey, and a shallow tray of attar-scented water. Next to the tea were vegetables fried golden in gram flour. Arwa poured the tea and heaped in honey for both her and Gulshera, then took a quick sip from her own cup that was burning sweet.
“You didn’t sleep,” said Gulshera.
It wasn’t a question. “I slept a little,” Arwa said anyway.
“No food, and no sleep.” Gulshera sipped her own drink; steam rose up around her face in coils. “I see.”
Arwa picked up a fritter and bit into it pointedly, resisting the urge to bristle. No doubt Gulshera thought she was a fragile creature, a young and witless thing fueled by love and religious fervor, shattered by what she had seen that day and night at the fort a mere handful of months ago.
Let her think it. It was better than the truth.
She waited for Gulshera to begin lecturing her. She stared down at her oil-stained fingers in silence, as Gulshera sipped her tea and took one of the fritters for herself.
Instead, Gulshera said, “Eat. Drink your tea. Then go, when you like.”
“Go?”
“When you like,” Gulshera repeated. She soaked her fingers in the attar-water, then stood, leaving Arwa alone with her tea and the cooling fritters, under a pale slant of sunlight pouring in through the window. She heard Gulshera settle at the writing desk. The sound of rustling paper followed.