Mehr had been ten years her elder. When their father had still been Governor of Irinah, Mehr had been blessed with all the same comforts Arwa still remembered wistfully from her childhood: grand rooms and gold-armored guardswomen; an army of maidservants and silks and jewels in abundance. But Mehr had never been happy. She’d been a watchful and quiet figure, never quite at home in the walls of the Governor’s palace. The maidservants who cared for Arwa whispered about her sometimes, when Arwa’s nursemaid was not there to scold them for gossip. That one has bad blood. She’s no good. Even Lady Maryam can’t set her right.
Mehr had never considered Maryam—their father’s wife, the woman who had raised Arwa as her own—her mother. Mehr had been old enough to remember their birth mother, the Amrithi mistress their father had banished a year after Arwa was born, and she clung fast to that memory. Clung fast, too, to the Amrithi heritage their birth mother had given her: rites of dance to worship the Gods. Rites of blood and dagger. No matter how Maryam punished her, no matter how she begged or cajoled Mehr to see reason, Mehr stayed firm. She would not give them up.
Arwa had been taught from infancy what it meant to have Amrithi blood. Cursed, her mother had called her—out of love, Arwa had known it was out of love. Tainted.
Amrithi were heathens. Barbarians. Blood worshippers. To be Amrithi was to be abhorred by good Ambhan people. To be Amrithi was to bring danger down on the family. So Maryam had always told her.
And she had, of course, been proved correct.
When Mehr revealed her heritage in some foolish way, the Maha’s mystics had come for her, taken her away to his temple upon the sands. And Maryam had spirited Arwa off to Hara. To keep you safe, she’d said. Until all is well in Irinah once more.
But things were never well in Irinah again. Months later, her father arrived in Hara, stripped of his governorship, disgraced for having tried—foolishly, desperately—to convince his fellow nobles in supporting him to bring Mehr home. He’d grown sicker and sicker, shattered by his failure and by an illness no physician could cure, a malady that stole his strength and coordination and aged him, it seemed, nearly overnight.
And then the Maha had died.
Rumors began to swirl that the Emperor was executing traitors and heretics. Even mystics—once the loyal acolytes of the Maha himself—were being removed, if they were considered a threat to the Emperor’s power. Her mother dismissed all but the most trusted servants, closed the shutters, and remained up all night with only a lantern for light, in a vigil Arwa would repeat many years later for very different reasons.
This is your sister’s fault, her mother had told her. Trembling and tired. If she had only been good, only listened to me…
But there was nothing to be done, now.
Arwa remembered the night she thought the Emperor’s men had finally come for her father. She woke to the sound of heavy footsteps in her room and saw the silhouette of a man at the window lattice. She had scrambled up onto her hands, heart in her throat, and seen that it was only her father. He stood on legs that trembled. Stood, and wept.
She remembered—even now—that he held a letter in his hand. A missive crumpled by his fist.
Your sister, he said, is gone. Gone forever.
Then: I am sorry, Arwa.
She had been angry with her sister for months and months before that—heartsick and furious at the way Mehr had failed to be good enough, and had left Arwa to learn to be a good Ambhan woman all on her own. But that night, she felt nothing but grief like a blow to the gut.
For years after, she wondered how Mehr had died. Had she died alongside the Maha, in the unnatural cataclysm that had begun the Empire’s curse, or had he taken her life, as punishment for her heathen nature? She did not know. Her sister was a silence that grew and grew, blotting Arwa’s childhood out to a void of fear and loss.
She grew into a woman sure of one thing alone: that revealing her Amrithi nature would be a death sentence to her family. She had to be the daughter her mother had reared her to be. Her mother’s voice followed her like a cold shadow.
Amrithi have no respect for laws and vows. You must be obedient. Respectful. Lower your eyes, Arwa.
Amrithi worship through frenzied dances and blood, like the barbarians they are. Distaste in her mother’s voice, in the curl of her lip. You must have faith in the Maha and Emperor above all else. Bow your head and pray.
Be good, Arwa. Above all else, be good.
Arwa had been obedient. Faithful. Good. And if she had yearned as a foolish girl to be the Arwa she was not—the Arwa who was everything she had been taught not to be, free and fierce and faithless and Amrithi—she had learned long ago to put that childish want aside.
As Arwa walked through the silent, nighttime corridors of the hermitage, she tried not to think, for once, of the lessons her mother had taught her, about the importance of silence and secrecy, and of shaping herself into something worthy of love. She thought of her sister instead, and of the night she taught Arwa the truth about the daiva.
Her sister had never had the opportunity to teach her much of what it meant to be Amrithi, and Arwa had spent the last decade trying to forget what little she knew. But Mehr had taught her a lesson, on the night a daiva had swept into Arwa’s room in Irinah during her early childhood, gold-eyed and shadow-fleshed. That lesson had grown blurred at the edges, softened by time. But Arwa had not forgotten the bones of it.
Her sister had told her Amrithi were descended from daiva. Their blood lives in us, she’d told her. Just a speck. Their shared blood drew the daiva to them. But their blood was also their defense. Placed upon a door or a window, it could keep the daiva at bay. For all the daiva were monsters, they were loath to hurt their own kin.
Arwa was cursed, in the blood, in a way she could not deny any longer. Her blood had brought the daiva to Darez Fort. But it had also saved her life.
Arwa had remembered that lesson in Darez Fort. She remembered it now.
She stopped outside the prayer room, breath frozen in her chest. The daiva was back where it had been before. In the silence left by the absence of breath, she could hear the rustle of its wings, whisper-soft. She inhaled then, deliberately, and smelled its daiva scent, sweet as incense, a tangle of water and smoke.
It had been waiting for her.
She entered the room slowly. Through the lattice wall she saw its eyes first, bright and golden in its face of velvet smoke. It had great wings that filled the lattice wall in feathered shadows.
“You’re not wanted here,” Arwa whispered, voice shaky. “Go.”
It didn’t move, merely cocked its head, its lambent eyes blinking softly. She realized its wings were not moving, as bird wings moved. It was simply hovering in the air, in defiance of the laws of nature, its vast body stretched elegantly out against the blanket of sky. The sight of it made her stomach roil.
Very, very slowly, she reached into her quiver and drew out an arrow. She pressed the arrowhead to her own skin, just below the elbow. The point drew blood.
Beyond the lattice, the daiva shivered faintly, a great susurration running through its wings.
Arwa placed the bloodied arrow to the bow. In the dark, she had to locate the nocking point with nothing but her fingertips and her memory to guide her.
She raised the bow. The lacquered wood creaked.
She heard an intake of breath from the doorway.
Arwa moved nothing but her eyes, her gaze sliding away from the daiva toward the figure standing in the hallway at the entrance of the prayer room.