Arwa bit her tongue hard enough that she tasted iron. That is not what happened, not at all. She must have moved, must have flinched, because Zahir was turning toward her, mouth parted, a furrow between his brows—then Jihan touched his face, and held him still.
“Zahir. Look at me, dear one.” Her voice softened. She clasped his face, ever so gentle. “Ever since your mother passed, I have tried to protect you. I always have, have I not?”
“You have.”
“I have only ever wanted to protect you: from our father, from court, from yourself. In truth, I have kept secrets from you because I am soft too,” she confessed. “I couldn’t bear to see you—hurt. Or burdened. As I am burdened. I wanted to protect you from this as I have always protected you from all things.”
Arwa looked at Jihan’s glistening eyes, the softness of her face.
Oh, the princess was a politician in truth. She lied so very beautifully.
Zahir nodded, once. It was enough. Jihan lowered her hands.
“Besides,” she said. “The knowledge of how the Amrithi were utilized—that secret belongs to select people. The imperial family. The mystics. Our Maha. No one else.”
Zahir did not flinch.
“Not to the Maha’s heir, Jihan?”
“Find his ash, and then you’ll be his heir. I’ll lay all the knowledge you like in your hands, then.”
“I am curious,” Zahir said. Voice smooth as stone. “What if I find the Maha’s ash and discover he had nothing to preserve our Empire but Amrithi magic? What then, Jihan?”
“He knew everything,” she said. “He created the Empire from nothing. The Gods gave him the Amrithi. He was blessed. He will have answers for us, Zahir, you know it must be true. After all, who else is there, who can possibly save us?”
“That, I don’t know,” said Zahir.
“Please just find answers from him in the place beyond. Please.”
“Of course, Jihan. It has always been my goal.” He lowered his head, avoiding her gaze. His brow was still furrowed, jaw tight.
“Will you give your all to save the Empire, Lady Arwa?” Jihan asked.
Ah, you remember me, thought Arwa. But she did not allow herself to be viperous. She lowered her own eyes demurely.
“Princess, I will give everything.”
“Good.”
Jihan did not touch Arwa, but her voice was cold-fingered regardless, and made Arwa shiver as if a chill, proprietary hand had passed over her soul. “You should give everything, Lady Arwa. Your fate and Zahir’s are intertwined now, after all. Whatever befalls him, befalls you.”
It was a threat. And a promise.
Your fates are intertwined.
She should have realized the significance of the easy way Jihan had allowed her to see Akhtar’s furious ugliness, the cracks in his nature; her own drunken mirth; Zahir’s vulnerable throat.
She had never planned for Arwa to leave.
Arwa had not known. She had not considered it, in truth, only thrown herself headlong into her own destruction. Even now she could find nothing inside herself that called her to fear for herself. Instead she felt strangely hysterical, as if grief and horror had carved away what little good sense she had.
“All this time,” murmured Zahir. “All my study, and yet Jihan hid the truth from me. How did she expect me to save the Empire, when I worked with nothing but a shadow of knowledge?”
Arwa laughed. She couldn’t help but laugh.
This, at least, she could answer.
“Because you are a tool, Lord Zahir. A tool does not need to know why it does what it does. It need only—be used.”
Oh, Arwa knew all about being fashioned into a thing that had utility. A good noblewoman had to be useful, or so she had been taught, all her life. And she had embraced her utility, after the hermitage—embraced a soldier’s purpose, one that provided her direction without demanding thought from her.
“Too much knowledge gives a person power,” she added. “Too much knowledge forces people to think. And choose.”
“A tool,” he murmured. There was a long silence. She listened to his breath, the tread of his footsteps, as they walked across the gardens. “I suppose that is the price of a—home.”
Arwa laughed again. Soft, almost drunkenly. She felt dizzy with strangeness.
“You live in a tomb. That is not a home.”
“Don’t,” he said. “Please.”
Arwa fell silent. She could not say she was sorry. She wasn’t. She was still uneasy with him, after their last night in the realm of ash. But she had seen the way his father had treated him. She had seen how Jihan loved him. Used him.
You deserve more than this, she wanted to say. But she already knew he would not agree, and there was something brittle about his face and the turn of his head that kept the words from passing her lips.
“Jihan likes to use my tears as evidence of my softness,” said Zahir. “She doesn’t understand that I wept when my mother died not out of grief alone, but because I wanted the Empress to pity me. I needed her to consider me valuable, but I could not make the mistake of my mother and be too strong, you understand? I had to be weak enough to keep. And to love.”
“I understand that very well,” Arwa said.
“Jihan thinks I am soft-natured. Akhtar thinks I am a stain upon his name. My father thinks I am a pretty, troublesome trinket, like my mother was to him. But they do not know my nature as I do.” His voice was low now, almost contemplative. “I am nearly certain I could have found the Maha’s ash long ago, if I had allowed myself to take the logical steps that lay before me. All it would have taken was a handful of unwilling Amrithi. Jihan could have smuggled them in as servants. The bodies of the dead, to be consumed or burned, to build a bridge. Experiment after experiment, until the Maha’s ash was found. It would have been a swifter way, albeit bloodier. But I would have told myself it was for the Empire’s good, and I would have slept well enough in time.”
He looked up at the sky. The dark of it reflected back in his eyes.
“But I kept my theories to myself. I only told Jihan that I would try starvation. She pressed for more. I told her an Amrithi-blooded apprentice, a person trustworthy and clever, would perhaps be of help to me. I told her, if you cannot trust my soul to them, they will not do. And I thought she would find nothing.”
But here I am, thought Arwa. She could not speak. Horror had stoppered her throat.
“You have shown me what the Maha is, Lady Arwa. All my life I have worshipped him, revered him. I thought he was greater than all of us—infinitely wiser in all ways. And now I know better. I fear…” He paused, holding his breath for a moment, as if he did not want to let the words go. “I fear how like him I am, in the precise and cruel part of me that I revile. I fear that in my nature, he and I are the same.”
“You are not,” Arwa said sharply.
He lowered his head and looked at her with an expression that was entirely vulnerable, entirely flayed open, as if he were the gentle child who had wept on his mother’s death, and not the sharp-edged not-prince he was, built for learning the world by paring it down to its bloodied bones.
“You don’t know that. You don’t know my heart.”