Send him away, she’d said instead. He has betrayed your trust, husband, and betrayed his duty. A beat. Fear a sudden flutter in her throat. That is, if you so will it…
And Kamran…
Kamran had looked at her as if he did not know her, looked at her with fresh, uncomprehending eyes.
My wife is wise, he’d said eventually—always so achingly formal, this man who shared her soul, whose marriage seal she wore around her throat. I will see him gone.
And he had. He had.
“Maha save us,” she whispered.
“Aunt Madhu doesn’t extend an invitation to join us to just anyone,” Diya said then, sudden and sharp. “We have a good arrangement here. We’re safe, we have enough food and coin, we can protect each other. You may be usefully young and pretty, sister Arwa, but our aunt also worries for your safety as a woman, with things as they are now. Think on her offer, will you? If the soldiers decide to make things difficult, if their captain…” Diya huffed out a breath, nostrils flaring. “Well. At least they pity us widows. They will not pity all the pilgrims, or all other women who carry out their business along the road. Think on it.”
Diya grabbed the frayed grave-token. Held it out to Arwa as if it were a weapon, precious and fierce.
“For luck,” she said. “Take it with you when you go back to your kin. We’ll be waiting for you.”
Arwa took it. Clutched it tight. Felt the crumbling dirt on her hands.
“Thank you, Diya,” she said. “I will.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The itch of fear at the back of her skull. The tension in her chest, a band steadily pressing the air from her lungs. These were signs and omens, of a kind. She should have recognized them. She should have known.
She had felt this before, in Darez Fort, on the day of the massacre. Felt it as she’d touched her fingers to the window lattice and watched the soldier throw back his prisoner’s hood.
Fear. Unnatural fear.
It can’t be happening again. It just can’t.
There were differences. She looked at them for comfort. In Darez Fort it had risen with awful swiftness. Here, in the caravanserai it moved slowly, building within her. Within all of them.
She thought back to Eshara’s fear that the crowds upon the pilgrimage route were dangerous—the keen edge of her fear, too sharp by far. She thought of the way they had all stumbled and trembled, huddled together like children, after finding the bodies of the dead. She understood now: There had been a ghost of unnatural madness, crouched in the dust of the pilgrimage route. There had been one among the trees. There was one here now too.
The madness was an invasive crop, a blight that had taken root and spread across the Empire. Darez Fort—and the sheer, bloody scale of its savagery—had only been the start. The death Zahir had predicted, the price of the Maha’s ill magic, was now suffused in the Empire’s soil, and here in the Grand Caravanserai it was near full bloom.
When it flowered, they would all die.
The knowledge filled her with a feeling of suffocation. Screaming babies. Wide-eyed children. Groups of men hunched together, and women curled against walls, already staring at nothing. Market stalls with cooking fires and sharp knives and vats of hot oil. Pilgrims with daggers and bows and scimitars at their hips. Sharp fingers for gouging. Teeth for biting. Bodies, vulnerable and vicious by turns. Their lodging was full of the presence of people. As Arwa passed through the curtains, she felt as if she were slipping between a dozen shrouds, waiting to be laid.
The fear in the Grand Caravanserai was like rainfall on bitter earth, seeping into the soil, rising out of it so insidiously that a person would only realize too late that a flood had come, and they were caught within it. No escape.
There were so many people here, and so many weapons they could turn on one another.
Part of her—the part that had splintered from her the night of the Emperor’s death and remained still in the realm of ash—had known the curse was here. She’d fallen into the realm. Half dreamed, half walked. She’d seen that familiar face of bones. The realm had warned her.
Diya had felt the fear too. Eshara had trembled, unwilling to be alone. Someone had died beyond the caravanserai’s walls, left to rot. All these were entangled together, a great skein of terror.
They needed to get out, no matter what it took.
“Talking to the soldiers,” Zahir said flatly. They were sitting across from one another, face-to-face in their makeshift room, and his displeasure was impossible to miss. “That’s what you’ve decided is best?”
“What else can we do?”
“I understand taking risks. Reasonable, measured, calculated risks. This is not one of them, and you know it. What do you think you’ll accomplish?”
“The widow told me who to speak to,” Arwa said determinedly. “I’ll find the two soldiers she suggested—I’ll plead with them, convince them. I have to try.”
“Don’t you think your widow friend would have spoken to them herself, if she thought they could help her escape?” Zahir asked.
“Perhaps Arwa does stand a chance,” Eshara interjected.
She was sitting with her back to the curtain, slowly sharpening the edge of her scimitar. The hiss of steel on stone cut through the air. She had begun sharpening the blade the very minute Arwa had warned her of what the widow had said about the captain, as if a blade would be anything but a detriment, as if the hiss of metal didn’t sharpen the edge of leashed violence in the air to a terrible point. “Their ilk listen to well-bred women, sometimes. Something about treasuring them.” She shrugged. “She’s a noble and pretty. She might be able to sway them.”
“Or their captain may cut off her head and place it on a stake outside the caravanserai’s walls,” said Zahir. His eyes were keen blades, his voice equally sharp. Everything was sharp now. Even the thud of Arwa’s own heart in her chest. Even the breath in her lungs. “Isn’t that what your widow friend said he does to heretics?”
“He may also cut out my tongue,” said Arwa. “You forgot that.”
Zahir swore an oath.
“Arwa, you’re cleverer than this.”
“And what do you think we should do instead?” she threw back. “This captain cannot be bribed, and we have little coin left anyway. We can wait here until we’re freed—but when will that be? Will we be freed at all?” Arwa threw her hands wide, all feeling. “There are no clever options available to us. There’s only this.”
“There’s no reason it has to be you,” Zahir said. “I could speak to them.”
“You’re mildly less pretty,” Eshara said, squinting down at her blade. Zahir gave her an irritated look and Eshara added, “And I’ve never cajoled anyone. It isn’t my nature.”
“We can go together, then,” Zahir said. “All three of us, if need be. Arwa. Please. See reason.”
She shook her head wordlessly, and Zahir leaned forward, clear light blazing in his eyes.
“You can’t truly think they’re going to let us go,” he said. “You can’t. Please. Be honest with me?”
It was hard to be barbed or secretive in the face of that naked want—that hunger for knowledge and truth that blazed in him always, like a great light.