“We’ll start with the grip,” Gulshera said. She took her bow from her shoulder, an arrow from the quiver at her back, and demonstrated the proper way to nock the arrow. Arwa copied her. She showed Arwa how to hold the bow and how to steady the arrow with a grip that balanced the arrow shaft on her thumb, so that it would remain steady even if Arwa were in motion, on horseback like a soldier or veiled within her palanquin like Empress Suheila on her mythical hunt. Both options were laughably unlikely.
“I wish,” Arwa said, “that you would just ask me your questions and be done with this farce.”
“What farce?” Gulshera tapped Arwa’s back. “Straighten up. You’ll get nowhere slumping. I genuinely want to teach you.”
“Why?” Arwa asked, frustrated.
“Because I can’t teach you how to use a sword, or fight bare-handed,” said Gulshera. “Because you’re angry, and your anger is going to gut you if no one gets it out of you. You need a way to set it free, and this will do well enough.” A beat. “But ah, I forgot. You asked me not to mention your hunger.”
Arwa closed her eyes tight. She could feel the terrible, tense strength of the bow in her hands. The arrow shaft, steady in her grip, against her thumb. One beat of her heart. Another.
“I told you,” Arwa whispered. “I don’t want to play games.”
“This is no game, Arwa. You frightened Rabia.” Gulshera’s voice filled up the darkness. “She came to me, after you scared her. I can’t have fear in this hermitage. I won’t allow it.”
Your Rabia is as easily frightened as Roshana is worried. The spiteful words bloomed to life easily in her throat, ready to be spoken. Arwa swallowed them back and opened her eyes, meeting Gulshera’s own. So many poisons lived in her. She would pick the one that burned most sharply on her tongue, and leave the rest be.
“Did she think me tainted by Darez Fort?” Arwa asked bitterly. “Did she claim that I had unnatural madness in me—something strange in my eyes, an evil pressed into me by the curse upon the Empire? I know people fear it’s within me. Rabia told me herself. She told me the widows all came to greet me to see if I was normal. Normal. Do she and her ilk fear I’ll suddenly turn and rip their throats out with my teeth? Or—no.” Arwa shook her head. “Perhaps she thinks I will infect you all and let you destroy each other. That is the way of the unnatural madness, after all.”
“You have a normal enough anger in you,” Gulshera said evenly, which was no answer at all.
“You thought giving an angry woman a weapon was the best thing to do?”
“I thought teaching you how to direct your anger was the best thing to do,” said Gulshera. “Besides, you won’t have the skill to put that weapon to any good use for a long time yet. Perhaps by then you’ll be calmer and less likely to murder us all in a fit of unnatural rage.”
“Funny,” Arwa said through gritted teeth.
“I thought so,” said Gulshera. She gave Arwa a perfunctory smile. “Now,” she said. “I’ll demonstrate how to shoot. We’ll aim for the nearest target.”
Gulshera had no trouble setting the arrow against its nocking point, or maintaining its position with the placement of her thumb and fingers. She drew the bowstring in one elegant motion and let the arrow fly. Her hand darted to her quiver; she nocked another arrow and sent it after its sibling.
Both arrows hit their target.
“Now,” Gulshera said. “It’s your turn.”
Gulshera adjusted Arwa’s posture again, and also the angle of her arm and her grip on the bow. She guided Arwa on how to draw the bow, how to pinch the string with only her thumb and aim carefully for the target. After a few torturous minutes of adjustment, Arwa let her own arrow fly.
There was some joy in seeing the arrow soar. There would have been more, if it had even remotely touched its target.
“There,” said Arwa, staring at the arrow, where it had pitched itself into the grass. “I’ve done it.”
“Try again,” Gulshera said, handing Arwa another arrow from her quiver. “This time try to put some of that anger into it.”
Arwa could have done the bare minimum Gulshera had asked of her, and simply shot the arrow at a target, as she had before. But there was iron on her tongue, and a knot of feeling in her stomach. She thought of Darez Fort. She drew the string taut, feeling its coiled strength in the lacquered wood of the bow. Her own arms trembled. She fired.
“Once more.”
“No.” Arwa lowered the bow, then lowered herself. She bent forward, strangely hot and breathless, as if all the feeling inside her had risen to the surface of her skin, drawn up by the feel of the arrow flying from her grip. She felt raw, tender as meat. “No more. I’ve had enough of a lesson. Now tell me what you want to know.”
Gulshera was silent for a long moment. She took the bow from Arwa’s unresisting grip and kneeled down at Arwa’s side.
“I already know, as everyone else does, that there was a massacre,” Gulshera said. Her voice was low, steady. “That the gates of the fort closed, and when they opened again, all of its inhabitants were dead. All, but you. They’d turned on one another. Hadn’t they?”
Arwa swallowed, throat too dry for words. She nodded. Unnatural madness, unnatural rage, the Empire’s greatest and most feared curse. Yes. Yes, they had.
“I know,” Gulshera continued, “that the woman who survived the massacre—you—claimed a dark spirit forced them to it. It crept into all our skulls, you said. It filled us with unnatural rage and turned us against one another. Your claim should have been laughable.” Gulshera smiled grimly. “But it was not. We all know what has become of the Empire, child. The strange horrors that roam it.”
Arwa nodded again, wordlessly. Still, Gulshera continued.
“People have begun to claim to see daiva across the Empire. By the Haran coast. In the forests of Durevi. And now, even in Ambha itself. There have been… instances. Of terror, unnatural and strange, consuming villages and travelers. Only briefly. Only rarely. Until now, of course,” Gulshera said, tilting her head toward Arwa in acknowledgment of the horrors of Darez Fort. “I know pilgrims who go to Irinah’s desert to mourn over the Maha’s resting place return with tales of gold-eyed demons, and palaces spun of glass and sand that vanish in the blink of an eye. I know not all pilgrims return. Arwa… You and I both know a curse sits on our Empire. But the curse is growing worse with terrible swiftness. Someone must find a way to put an end to it.”
For a widow cloistered away in a hermitage deep in the Numrihan mountains, Gulshera knew a great deal about the darkness racing its way across the Empire, fracturing it better than any war of men and metal ever could. Arwa thought of Gulshera’s letters. The family she communicated with had to be strong and old, with eyes and ears in every part of the Empire. Arwa thought of each of the old families in turn—even her mother’s own—and wondered which one Gulshera was loyal to, and what she had learned from the gossip of the widows, the secrets of their blood kin that they so carelessly shared between them, a currency between them that hardened to diamond, priceless in Gulshera’s knowing grip.