His hand moved around her own.
As she watched, their roots coiled together about their joined hands. Winding into a whole, like coils of rope or strands of vegetation lashed together to make a stronger whole. Just as he’d told her.
She did not ask him what greater numbers provided protection from. Howling, strange, laden with the dead—a better question would have been to ask what was safe within this realm. Instead she said, “Show me the way, my lord. I am your obedient apprentice.”
They walked. She felt a moment of dizziness, as if her roots were trying to hold her fast. She felt the tug of another time and place: of lungs rising and falling, of a heart racing. Her body. That was her body.
Abruptly the storm faded. They were beyond the barrier that had previously separated their paths. Here, trees rose around the both of them. Great leaves the color of bird wings; ashen roots and trees, tangling with the ruby gleam of his own roots.
Arwa looked back. Her roots formed an equally tangled path behind her. Body and soul still bound together. She shuddered again, and looked away.
He was looking at her.
“I would like to continue, Lady Arwa.” There was hesitation in his voice, in the clouded marble of his eyes. “But if you wish to turn back, try again on another occasion…”
Arwa shook her head. She did not allow herself to think of an alternative. To consider fear, when adventure lay before her.
“Although I wish you had warned me, my lord, I want to continue.”
He nodded.
“Don’t let go,” he said. “Please.”
“I won’t,” she told him.
They walked farther. There was no sound but their own voices. Not even breath. Where her—path, he had called it—had been all wildness and fury, his was a deathly place, thick with its own growth and silence. In slivers, she saw more trees hidden by the skeletons of the closest: great old banyans, peepal and ashoka, all of them ink dark, incongruously entwined. And between them…
People, she thought. Those are people.
She stumbled, and felt her heart again, a dreamlike flutter. He gripped her hand tighter.
“What happened?” he asked, eyes wide.
It was only then—curse it—that she realized he was meeting her eyes. That he was looking at her bare of any veil—bare of even the protective carapace of her own body. If she looked anything like he did, she resembled herself, but was more glass than woman, more shadow and marble than skin. Still, it was not to be borne.
“Do not look at my face,” she snapped.
He lowered his eyes sharply.
“I—”
“Please,” she said. “No apologies. Explain the people. Among the trees.”
He hesitated. Thinking of his books, no doubt. Searching for answers experience could not give him.
“Most likely my dead,” he said. “On your path, you have your own.”
“Will you look for the Maha among them?”
“He will be far deeper in the realm,” he said. “Not here. Not so close.”
As they walked, the path and the forest around them began to change. The trees grew lush, then withered once more. Shadowy figures moved closer, fingers curled around branches, eyes lambent—and then vanished entirely, behind a mist so thick that it burnished the air a blinding white.
They finally stopped when their path—Zahir’s path—was barred. The trees had formed together before them into an arch. Beyond it lay no forest. Instead the ground beyond the arch was covered in a sumptuous carpet, heavily embellished with birds and flowers, but curiously devoid of the rich colors Arwa would have expected of such an artful masterpiece. But there was barely any color here, and the floor was as much a mirage of ash as everything else that surrounded them.
Zahir stared ahead. He did not move.
“Tests,” he said slowly. “Everything must be tested. The Maha is not here, not in this place, but I believe another ancestor’s memory lies beyond the bough.” There was a pause. “Somewhere my heart is beating very quickly. Do you feel the same, Lady Arwa?”
“Of course,” she whispered. “How could I not?”
“Of course,” he echoed. He looked at their joined hands. “Two ropes twined together are harder to break than one,” he said. She had the sense he was repeating the claim for confidence. “Together, we are less likely to lose ourselves to the path. Lady Arwa, no matter what you see, do not let go of me.”
“What will I see?”
He frowned, the expression forming a luminous crescent on the glass of his brow.
“I don’t know.”
“Ah. Well then, my lord. I suppose we learn together.”
Without allowing herself another thought, she stepped over the threshold, drawing Zahir with her.
They were in a room surrounded by lattice and silk, shawl discarded in a heap of silver embroidery upon the floor cushions. A large divan stood at the room’s center, strewn with pillows. Flowers sat in bowls of water, to sweeten the air.
“This is not a man’s room, I think, my lord,” said Arwa.
“No.” Zahir was looking up, a waver in his voice. Arwa followed his eyes.
The ceiling was covered in stars, tessellated silver-gold. Cloth, she realized, had been pinned to the domed roof, giving the large chamber unusual warmth and intimacy. As Arwa watched, the stars wavered. Moved.
“Are they—?”
“An aspect of dreaming,” said Zahir. “Nothing remains exactly as it should. We do not dream perfectly, as Gods do.”
He stepped forward. Once. Twice.
“She is by the window,” he said softly. “Come.”
Across the room stood the silhouette of a woman. Arwa could not think of her as a woman whole. Even from here, the absences were apparent: no fully formed legs, to shape the hollow curl of her skirt; no face upon that turned head. Her skin was nothing but ash. She was a barely real thing, a scrap of memory carved into limbs and the turn of a head, a soft fall of ash-white hair, bound into a thin braid.
Zahir moved closer to her first—held a hand out toward her, his roots strange and bright, his eyes hollows of feeling.
She heard him whisper a prayer, a mantra spoken at funerals, with grief and love for the dead. Then he curled his fingers, touched a hand to the woman’s ash—and shattered her.
No more woman. Just ash—great gouts of it, swirling about Zahir, about the both of them. Arwa yelped and gripped Zahir tighter. Somewhere, distantly, her jaw was grinding, her hands balling into fists as she slept. But here she only held on to him as the ash surrounded his head in a corona, as ash seeped into his eyes and his ears, as it filled his mouth, consuming him.
Do not eat the ash.
So he had written and yet he was consuming it now, before her eyes. Suddenly, his soul’s skin was burnished with the luster of embers still hot from the fire, of ashes cooling to chalk and amber. Suddenly Arwa’s own head was full of facets of memory, as fragmented as her own unnatural skin. Her hand (not her hand) holding a needle, fine muslin upon her lap; her grandson (not her, not her) pressing his cheek to her knee.
Arwa cursed, revolted, but did not let go, even as the smoke of strange memories coiled around her own head. She felt the distant shudder of her own body, turning upon the ground; smoke in her true lungs, as the fire in its vessel began to gutter and die.