The daiva had been a herald of a storm. Mehr had been right about that. Every day the storm rolled in closer, building in waves against the sky. She watched the dreamfire glowing against the horizon, its deep ruby and amethyst flames flickering white at the edges. This was the first storm to reach Jah Irinah in a decade, and it should have been a privilege to witness it.
And yet, all Mehr could think of was Maryam’s sharp words and Lalita’s gentle warning. She couldn’t help it. The memory of Maryam’s nails tightening on Mehr’s jaw tangled together with the memory of Lalita’s voice as she warned Mehr to be careful, leaving a strange, painful dread in Mehr’s heart.
The Emperor was looking for her mother’s people. The Emperor wanted his nobles to drive out her mother’s people in earnest. People like Mehr.
Like Arwa.
Mehr worshipped the Emperor and the Maha, the Great One who had founded his bloodline, when it was expected of her, of course: on the Emperor’s birthday, on the anniversary of the Empire’s founding, or whenever Maryam demanded it. But she had no altar in her chambers, and no particular love of the Emperor in her heart. Her mother had hated him, in her own quiet way. She had refused, when Mehr was small, to worship him at all. I will never pray for him, her mother had said, with a black look in her eyes that Mehr had never forgotten. He has no right to an Amrithi’s prayers.
As a child, Mehr had not understood the weight of blood and history that lay behind her mother’s hatred. It was Lalita who later taught Mehr how the Maha, the first Emperor, had conquered Irinah and raised his temple upon its back. She told Mehr that the Amrithi had rebelled with the help of the daiva. When the daiva had begun to weaken, fading, the Empire had crushed the Amrithi with terrible swiftness. The Amrithi had been reviled for their resistance ever since.
Every time Mehr thought of the Emperor, she remembered that history and felt an echo of the darkness she’d seen in her mother’s eyes inside her own heart. She thought, too, of the way noblewomen would look at her when they visited her father’s palace, and the things the servants would whisper when they thought Mehr could not hear them. That one stinks of her mother’s blood. She’s not really Ambhan. Look at her face. Look at how she behaves.
They believed, just as the Emperor did, that there was no place for heathens in the Empire. If Ambhans were the highest of the high, blessed by the Emperor’s grace, obedient to the laws of an orderly and civilized culture, then Amrithi were the lowest of the races: barbarians, faithless wanderers, who had no respect for contracts or Ambhan law. The people of the Empire’s other provinces—even the Irin, for all their superstitious respect for the daiva—belonged to the Empire in a way the Amrithi never could.
To be visibly Amrithi was to be outcast. Amrithi had no real place in the Empire. Mehr had no place. And if the Emperor’s hate for her mother’s kind had truly sharpened into a deeper and more active loathing, then Maryam was right to be afraid. Mehr had put them all at risk, simply by being who she was.
The Amrithi were hunted by the nobility and hounded to the edges of society, forced to live far beyond the borders of Irinah’s towns and villages, where they could not taint the Empire or its citizens with their alien culture or their heathen rites. Some survived as Lalita did, by hiding their heritage and building new lives. So far, Mehr had been protected by her father’s position and by the walls and veils that defined her life as a sheltered noblewoman. But if the Emperor was encouraging his nobles to persecute Amrithi more aggressively, if their eyes were beginning to seek out her mother’s people in vicious earnest …
Well. Mehr would do whatever she had to in order to keep Arwa safe.
Lalita had found a way to hide her heritage and thrive, taking on a Chand name and practicing Amrithi rites only in secret, behind closed doors. Mehr could do the same if she had to. She would. For her sister’s sake, she would do a great deal. But she had fought very hard to hold on to her heritage, and she would not discard it or make herself small without good reason.
She would need to speak to Lalita and ask her exactly what was happening in the city and in the Empire beyond it. She would bribe the servants who could be bribed, and listen for whispers not intended for her ears. She would arm herself with the knowledge she needed to protect herself and her family.
But first, she’d dance the Rite of Dreaming. That, at least, she refused to sacrifice. She’d hungered for it for far, far too long to give it up now.
Her memories of the last storm to reach the city were vague. She had been nine years old, and her mother had taken her out onto the roof to watch the dreamfire fall. Her mother had lifted her up—she’d been so strong!—and shown her the clouds of lights ghosting across the desert sky.
She’d told Mehr stories about the desert: how it was a special and holy place, the place where the Gods had gone and laid down their bodies for their long rest. In sleep, their dreams were the force that kept the world whole, and shaped the earth’s balance, its many cycles of birth and death, suffering and joy, rise and ruin.
She’d told Mehr what the Amrithi believed: that the dreamfire was their immortal dreams manifest, a sign of their power at work on the land where they slept. When the Gods dream, Mehr, they make and unmake the universe. Dreamfire is the light of their souls—see how beautiful it is, my dove? The dreamfire is pure creation.
Her mother had lowered her down then, and demonstrated the first simple stance in the Rite of Dreaming: hands held aloft, palms cupped together, body bowed and sharp like the arc of a falling star. With her palms cupped against the sky, it had looked as if the dreamfire were pouring into her hands like water.
Her mother had watched Mehr’s delighted awe and smiled.
There, you see, she’d said. Mehr still remembered the huskiness of her mother’s voice, how soft it had been. When you’re grown, we will dance the Rite of Dreaming together. We’ll dance with the Gods, you and I.
And Mehr had looked at the dreamfire, traced it with her hungry eyes, and begun to dream of the moment when she would dance with the dreamfire too, as an Amrithi woman grown. In all the years since, the dream had not faded. Instead it had grown inside her, deepening its roots in her soul.
She would dance the rite as an Amrithi. Just this once. She had earned this, at least. She thought of the way it would feel to lift her arms again and hold dreamfire in her hands. There were no words for how that would feel. Only pure, uncharted emotion, bigger than sky.
In preparation for the storm—and because she clearly needed something to distract herself from the pointless, twisting worry in her chest—Mehr decided to organize everything she would need when the dreamfire finally fell. Apart from her dagger, she kept her few Amrithi possessions in a wooden chest tucked away with the rest of her clothing, where it was unlikely to attract her stepmother’s attention.
Mehr removed the heavy chest from storage on her own, placing it by her divan. Inside the chest, preserved and fragranced by bundles of dried herbs, lay Mehr’s garb for the rites. She lifted each item out reverently.
There was a short, fitted bodice, a fanned skirt, and long lengths of cloth dyed a vibrant indigo that deepened to darkness at the fabric’s edges. Mehr lifted the folded cloth out, then reached carefully for what lay beneath it: small stone flowers, strung on coils of white thread, ready to be wound through her hair, and a faded band of red silk. She held the silk up to the light, admiring the delicate patterns stitched onto its surface in white thread—images of sky and stars, of the heavenly bodies in motion.