Arwa had known how the Hidden Ones afforded to adhere to their scholarship and mysticism, independent and unseen. But it still surprised her to hear a dancer’s bells in distant corridors or in the courtyard during the quiet daylight hours, followed by a heated discussion of theories of the afterlife, of new manuscripts traded by Hidden Ones from eastern Chand, of women moving through the finest households of Jah Ambha and collecting knowledge alongside their gold. In the households of the nobility, the Hidden Ones had the positions of influence and invisibility. They were as clever and vicious and charming as any noblewoman Arwa had ever encountered—and they were thriving.
Her mother Maryam had always taught her that fallen women were to be derided—that her own concubine birth mother had been a low, corrupting influence for reasons beyond her Amrithi blood. An influence Arwa had to rise above.
Maryam had been wrong.
There was so much Arwa did not know. The breadth of her ignorance was staggering. Her life was so small and insignificant in comparison to the scope of the world. And yet she had believed if she acted a certain way—reshaped her nature and molded herself into a true Ambhan noblewoman, worthy of an Ambhan marriage—she would matter.
There are so many ways to live, Arwa thought. And I know only one, and I am no good at it.
Applause broke her out of her reflection. A woman below had finished dancing, her skirt of mirror-glass whirling to stillness around her. She laughed and bowed her head, black hair a curtain around her.
With the performance over, Arwa slipped away from the window.
Their section of the haveli was small, but had one particular benefit: a ladder that led to the roof. She climbed it and rose into the cool night air.
Zahir was sitting on the edge of the roof, near a bare sleep mat. He was staring out at the flat roofs of Jah Ambha, at the scattered lights of the houses and businesses that made up the city, and beyond them—set upon its inky expanse of water—the imperial palace.
She approached him. He near jumped out of his skin when he heard her footsteps. He reminded her for a moment of the mangy, wary cat she’d found in her garden as a child. Then just as swiftly he calmed, hands unfurling, some of the panic fading from his eyes.
“Arwa,” he said. Strained. “You shouldn’t have come up here. You need to regain your strength.”
“Climbing a ladder is hardly going to exhaust me. Besides, I am not the one with the wound in my side.”
She sat down on the ground near him.
Zahir spoke.
“I feel more at home here than I did in all my years at the palace.” He sounded contemplative. “I thought I had forgotten my childhood. But now I’m here, I remember it very well.”
“What do you remember?” Arwa asked.
“My mother had her own establishment. But this place… it reminds me of her own. Of a time when life was—different.” His fingers twitched, as if searching for the coin he’d twisted in his hands, when he had told her his brother Akhtar was dead, his brother Parviz crowned. “I remember the meetings the Hidden Ones held. Women from across the city would gather at her salons, and share their knowledge. And argue.” A smile. “They loved to argue. Though knowledge was shared, each woman had her own understanding of truth, and feelings often ran high.”
“What did they debate on?”
“Theories. The right wording for a poem. Politics. They often discussed the Emperor. His advisers. Strategies to win him—and them—to the Hidden Ones’ cause.” He shrugged. “I barely remember. I was only a boy. But I always wonder what I would have been, if my mother had not offered up her knowledge to my father. If she had chosen a different way, and I had continued to be my mother’s son. In time the Emperor would have ensured I had a suitable post and a suitable wife, I expect. But no more than that. Perhaps that would have been…” He trailed off. Exhaled. “Different,” he said finally. “It would have been very different.”
“Yes,” said Arwa. She could not imagine what Zahir would have been like, raised without tomb walls and the threat of his own death hanging over him. That saddened her. “I expect it would have been.”
For a long stretch of time they sat in silence. Finally, in a low, serious voice he said her name.
“Arwa. I need to understand how you saved us.”
“I told you what I know.”
“My mind isn’t at its best,” Zahir said, mouth a brief, bitter curl of a smile. “But I would appreciate your patience. I’d like to understand.”
Taking a deep breath, she told him what she could of Darez Fort, and the nightmare and daiva she had seen there. She told him of what the ash had taught her of blood and vows, of rites of worship and sigils as language. She told him how she’d used the knowledge of the ash to save them both.
“Before we entered the realm of ash, before I found the Amrithi dead, I believed I was cursed,” she admitted. “Cursed with a daiva’s presence. It followed me to the hermitage. It followed me to the palace. I thought it was a murderer, that it killed everything I loved. I thought it was my ruinous blood that brought it, and that only my blood could keep it at bay.”
“You believed your cursed blood drew the daiva and repelled them?”
“I can see the illogic of that now, Zahir, but fear is not a beast of reason. But…” She swallowed. “I know the daiva are no curse, now. And neither am I.”
Zahir was quiet. Arwa looked at him, his ink-black hair, bare of a turban. His eyes, near colorless in the dark.
“So,” she said, “now you know everything about me.”
“No,” he said softly. “I know only the barest part of you, still. And everything I learn, I marvel at. Have you carried this burden entirely alone? Since your husband passed?”
“Gulshera knew of it. Somewhat.” Arwa shrugged. “I did not need a confidante.”
“Arwa,” he murmured. “Thank you.”
Together they stared at the black sky, the glittering city, in companionable silence. For a moment.
“Is there a daiva here now?”
“Gods, Zahir, there’s no need for more questions, is there?”
“I can ask tomorrow instead, if you prefer.”
“You could not ask me at all.”
“That… is an option.” His voice sounded a little strained.
Ah, how he hungers, she thought. For knowledge. For hope. She shivered.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“How can you not know?”
“I am not its master.”
“Could you call it to you if you wished, using your sigils?”
“Possibly,” said Arwa with a shrug.
“Why does it protect you?”
“I don’t know, Zahir.”
He shook his head, and she glared at him.
“I don’t think on it much,” she said.
“A spirit follows you and you don’t think on it?”
“Of course I have. I do. But I’ve been preoccupied with finding the Maha’s ash, just as you have been, Zahir.”
“We can study the question together,” he said. “If you’d like to. We can try to find out why this daiva seeks to keep you safe. Aliye has books we can use.”