A marriage made after a husband’s death could not be a true Ambhan marriage, but Arwa could well imagine that any woman with the opportunity to begin again would put aside the poverty of her widowhood and embrace a new beginning.
But Arwa was not one of those women. She was not ready or able to put her life aside. She knew what she was, for good or ill.
“The mirror would be helpful,” she said.
Aliye brought her the mirror and helped her set it against the wall of her sparse room. It was an old thing and traditionally wrought, no more than a great piece of beaten metal, polished until it shone. Arwa thanked Aliye for the metal and for the loan of a sharp knife, and Aliye let her be.
She thought of her Amrithi dead. They had never had to contend with the strictures of a noblewoman’s life, or of a noblewoman’s widowhood. What would Nazrin have thought of her shorn hair, her unwillingness to loosen her grip on mourning, even now, when her noble life seemed like a distant memory?
This isn’t the Amrithi way. We don’t make vows. We understand the power of freedom.
Arwa turned her head to the left and to the right, cutting as neatly as she could. Then she froze.
It was a strange thing, to always need to be alert to wrongness in the air: the scent of incense, a too-long shadow, black ash rising in your blood. But vigilance had trained her body, which knew even before her mind did that something in her reflection was… off.
Those are not my eyes, Arwa thought.
But of course, they were. They were upon her face, so they had to be her own eyes. It was her reflection that was tricking her. After all, nothing looked quite correct in a mirror. On the polished metal, her skin was strange, silvery; her hair was too black, her eyes…
She leaned in closer.
Her eyes were gray as ash, far beyond the locus of each iris. Ash from end to end, swallowing the whites of her eyes.
She blinked. Her eyes were her own again.
She flinched back. Lowered the knife. She felt a horrible urge to smash the mirror flat to the floor, but instead she stood and walked out of the room, refusing to turn back.
She should have told Zahir. She knew it.
He had warned her of the dangers of consuming ash. He had stared at her, horrified, when she had forgotten herself after they fell and flew from the dovecote tower. She had brushed off his fears, and his grief had distracted him from pursuing the truth further, but that did not change the truth. The ash had done something to her.
She knew now that reaching for the ash repeatedly had consequences. She measured it with the care she used for all theories put to the test. Consequence one: Reaching for the ash risked making her forget herself.
Consequence two: Reaching for the ash had resulted in the realm of ash closing in upon her. The realm of ash was close to her all the time, now. In Jah Ambha, when Zahir had guided her through the city, she had slipped in and out of it as easily as one donned a veil. The taste of ash—smoke and dying—came to her mouth now and again, unbidden.
Consequence three: When she drew upon her ash, her eyes clearly altered, clouding with it. Was that a new development? She did not know. Could Zahir have missed the sight of it, in the dark of the tomb? Or were the consequences of the ash growing worse with time?
She fretted, examined the problem, and fretted some more. But she did not tell Zahir.
If she told him, what would he do? What could he do? He had none of his books, and no time for study and contemplation. No firepit, no opium-laced tea, no sister with financial and political clout to protect him. He had nothing but his keen, clever mind and his bare-boned hopes of finding something—anything—in Irinah that could save the Empire from its painful stumble toward death.
She vowed to herself that she would simply stop reaching for the ash. No more sigils. No more rites. No more recalling memories that were not her own. She would, in short, avoid plunging to her death by sensibly avoiding the cliff edge before her.
Instead she focused on practicalities. She dressed as a pilgrim—face uncomfortably bare, a shawl drawn over her short hair—and tied a pack of supplies to her back. She waited until dawn had almost arrived with a quiet Eshara and Zahir, and then bid farewell to Aliye. The older woman led them out of a servants’ exit from the pleasure house, which was still full of music and bursts of laughter.
“You’re so like her,” whispered Aliye to Zahir, clasping his face between her hands as they stood, all four of them, in the corridor, huddled uncomfortably close together. “Go well, dear heart. May the lamp burn for you.”
Zahir murmured something in response, and Arwa looked away.
No, she decided. She would not tell him.
The homes of respectable men and women were still closed for the night’s rest, but despite the hour—and the unease brought on by the Emperor’s death—the streets were crowded. Young men and old, women in huddled groups, wealthier women on horseback in saddle palanquins that wavered unevenly—they were all pilgrims and mourners, ready to begin their dawn journey to the Maha’s grave.
“It’s busier than I thought it would be,” murmured Eshara, neck craning as she strove to keep an eye on all of them and the crowd simultaneously, still a guardswoman to the core. “The Emperor’s death has made everyone more pious, I think. Good for us.”
“I doubt Parviz’s hatred of heresy helps,” murmured Zahir, and Arwa nodded in agreement. Traveling to Irinah was not an entirely sanctioned act, and no one yet knew what this new Emperor would decide to do with the mourners his father had tolerated. But there was an answer, of a kind, on the city’s walls, where heads of the heretic mystics were still hung, reduced now to gristle and bone.
Although there were soldiers on the streets in significant numbers, soldiers at the city’s walls, none looked their way. They were far more concerned with inspecting new arrivals to the city for sickness. For now, at least, Akhtar’s policies of cleansing against the nightmares remained. The three of them passed makeshift tents and great drums of water, huddles of merchants and farmers with their carts, waiting to be assessed, and—Gods be praised—passed by them all unseen, carried by the mass of pilgrims out of Jah Ambha, and onto the first steps of their journey to Irinah’s sands.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
In mere weeks, they would reach Irinah. But Arwa could not imagine it. Irinah felt like a place that lived in her childhood memories alone. Irinah was the Governor’s palace: great marble corridors, and the flickering candlelight on the pillows in her own nursery; her father’s footsteps, firm and sure, and the whisper of her sister’s voice, murmuring stories in her ear. It was like the realm of ash, gossamer and strange but not a thing of the world.
Appropriate, then, that their journey was a tough and slow thing, a true test of her will. Arwa had traveled long distances before. She’d had to, as a commander’s bride. But she had traveled in the relative, if nauseating, comfort of a palanquin. She’d been tended to and guarded. Now she was a pilgrim, unveiled, her shawl knotted over her hair, walking. And walking. And walking.
Every painful step—beat of the sun on her forehead, sweat sticky at her neck and her back, her leg muscles aching—felt as if it were building the realness of Irinah. The desert was the thump of her heart and her parched throat and the hungry twist of her belly. It was a place that demanded body and bone to be reached, no different than traveling to the realm of ash.