“And waste all our work, our sacrifice, on my cowardice, my fear of becoming too much the scion of my father’s blood?” He shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Zahir.” She spoke his name as if it would quell him, comfort him. She did not remind him of the price the realm of ash would demand of him. She did not tell him she feared seeing him lost. Her heart ached.
They both knew the risks that lay before him. They had come anyway.
She pressed her forehead to his. They remained like that for a long moment, no breath between the hewn glass of their souls, the Maha’s silent ash towering above them.
She felt him freeze. Felt him pull back, just a little, eyes open.
“Arwa,” he said. “Do you hear that?”
Her storm was wavering about them. Silent, wheeling. But…
Yes. She heard it.
“Is it the sound of the trees?” she asked.
“No,” he said. He stood. “No. Those are voices. And I… I think I can hear my mother’s, among them.”
The wind was moving through the trees, setting the skeletal branches wavering. But the wind was not simply wind. It was a great, sinuous blade, paring the trees down to ribbons of darkness. The dark unfurled, liquid as water and just as river quick, streaming across the sand in great skeins of words that moved and whispered. Arwa recognized those words: They were poetry of the Hidden Ones. The poetry of a lineage that lived in Zahir’s blood and in his soul.
Zahir hesitated for only a moment. Then he placed a hand to the sand. He raised his palm up, and watched the words slip between his fingers. The voices shimmered, sweet echoes that fell to the sand and curled into silence once more.
She stared. They had walked so often among the ink-dark trees of his path, his neem and peepal and ashoka. She had not realized, all this time, that they carried his grief within them, just as her desert carried her own.
“Of course I would find her here,” he murmured. He raised his head, looking at the sharpened, richer beauty of the realm of ash in Irinah’s palm. His smile was sad. “I hear so many voices, and yet I still recognize hers among them. I thought I had forgotten it, Arwa. But I remember now.”
The voices whispered and shook and tangled about them. Words bloomed through the sand, and seeped like great pearls of sap from the trees of ink. The whispers rose and rose, the words spilled and unfurled, and Arwa and Zahir kneeled beneath the Maha at the nexus of it all, haloed by the roar of a thousand voices.
Voices. So many voices, and all of them like a single wave. Perhaps it was the voices that whispered in her ear, then. Perhaps not.
She thought of the tale of the Maha’s heir: how it had slipped free of the Emperor’s grasp, taking on a vicious life of its own, reared and fed by the faith and discontent of a thousand whispering voices. She thought of the widows and pilgrims who had softened a nightmare, saving themselves unwittingly with worship and grave-tokens alone. She thought of the prayers of Zahir’s followers, their voices rising together and winding and winding into a sound greater than the sum of its parts.
Their voices had sounded like hope.
It hit her like a great fist to the stomach:
The flat, resigned acceptance of death in Zahir’s eyes, when his father named him Maha’s heir.
The leaden weight of her own heart, when she’d pressed a flower behind Zahir’s ear, and tried to forget what was to come.
This is wrong.
Together, they rose to their feet. They had to rise together, bound as they were by blood roots, but Arwa rose numbly, helpless in the grip of her own thoughts.
Zahir, the first moment she’d seen him. Already entombed, his home wrapped around him like a promise of death, the moonlight a blade upon his neck.
Zahir standing before the pilgrims as they prayed, his hands in fists, his eyes fixed on her as if she were his guiding star, and without her he would be lost.
“Arwa,” he said. Just her name. As if it would give him the strength to go on. Then he kissed her forehead, one brush of cold lips, and took a step toward the ash. “All will be well.”
He reached out a hand. The Maha’s ash was a reflection before him, deep and dark. One touch—the barest touch of his hand—and they would be joined.
There was no more time to be numb. She sucked in a sharp breath, her distant lungs aching, and wrenched at his arm. She pulled him back, throwing her own body in front of his.
Behind her, she heard the whisper of ash falling to the earth. Zahir hissed, startled.
“What—”
“No.” She hadn’t known she could sound as she did in that moment: so furious and so very afraid. “No, you may hate me for it if you wish, Zahir, but you can’t. You can’t.”
“Arwa,” he said. Tender, his voice was so tender, as if he understood. He gripped her arms. “Let me go.”
“No.” She tightened her grip on him in return. “Will you push me aside?” she demanded. “Will you let go of my roots, and break yourself upon his ash on your own? No, you need me. And I am not moving.”
“You know this is necessary,” he said, with that same terrible tenderness—as if he had expected this and was prepared to refuse her.
“I’m not sure that I do,” she whispered. “I can still hear the poetry, Zahir. I can still hear your Hidden Ones. And I hear the tale Aliye told me. A tale of a doe and an arrow and a sacrifice for the good of love, because the story lives inside me. And in you.”
The ink wrapped around their feet. Words upon words.
“We have been taught all our lives that we must destroy ourselves in order to be worthy. To have purpose. Have we not, Zahir?” She looked up at his face. The hewn glass of his soul, flayed open before her own. “Jihan taught you so. The Empress taught you so. Your mother. The Hidden Ones. So I was taught, by my mother too. But we don’t. We don’t. We do not have to lay ourselves at the Maha’s feet.”
He looked at her as if she had wounded him, as if she had his blood on her hands.
“There is no other way,” he said. “Arwa. You know there isn’t.”
“There is,” she said sharply. “There is. For all your logic and your precision, Zahir, you can’t see beyond the Maha. He is like—the sun. All this time we have loved him and hated him and chased him because we have been told he lies at the heart of everything, that he is all light and without his knowledge we will be left to die in the cold. But he isn’t the sun. He is dead, only dead, and we don’t need him. We have prayer. We have Amrithi rites. We have knowledge enough, knowledge we can share, and with it we can save the world.”
She stopped, her body’s heart racing, the air wavering about her.
“People will die this way,” he said, in a voice she did not recognize. Too hollow, too old. “The slow way may see so many, many people dead. We may fail them all.”
“I know,” she said. “And yet the slow way, perhaps, the world heals. Perhaps the slow way is the only way. The Maha broke the world. To heal the wound he made will take… time. And knowledge shared. And hope, even in the dark.”
He tried to turn from her, to blot her words out. She gripped his face.
“You’ve searched so long for the Maha’s ash. You listen to the Hidden Ones. You listen to your mother’s ghost. Now, please, listen to me,” she said softly, her fingertips points of light against his cheekbones. “You told me I have you. You gave yourself to me, Zahir. And I tell you now, if you walk this path you will not be mine anymore, and you will not be your own. You will be his creature, just as you feared, and I…”