Girl, Serpent, Thorn (13 page)

They went together to the low hill behind the palace. Azad offered to take the urn from her, but she refused; she wanted something to hold on to. They did encounter a few palace attendants on their way, but they were all so preoccupied with the wedding that they hurried past Soraya and Azad without a glance, never noticing the way Soraya's hands were trembling, or the dark green lines spread out over her skin.

They ascended the stairs cut into the hill, and when they reached the top, they came face-to-face with the only other two people in Golvahar not attending the wedding.

Soraya had been right that the priests would be in the garden, but she hadn't considered that there would be guards watching over the fire in their stead.

Azad, however, didn't seem surprised at all. “I'll handle this,” he murmured to Soraya, and he went forward with a wave to approach the two guards. Soraya exhaled in relief, thankful once again for Azad's special status among the azatan. He was better than any key.

She watched Azad greet the two men, putting his hand on the shoulder of the guard on the right as he continued speaking. And then she saw him reach for something at his side, something tucked away in the folds of his tunic—something that glinted sharply in the white spring sun.

Azad struck so quickly, so smoothly, that when the guard on the right let out a cry of surprise and clutched at his side, staggering to his knees, the other guard didn't realize what had happened. He hadn't seen the edge of Azad's dagger find its way in the gap between the first guard's armor plates, digging into his flesh. But Soraya had—and she was frozen in horror even as she knew what would happen next.

The second guard knelt down to inspect the first, and before he could see the blood seeping through the injured man's fingers and know that he'd been stabbed, Azad struck again—this time for the throat.

The second guard fell to the ground instantly, and while his life bled out of him, Azad finished the first guard with another slash to the throat. By the time he returned to Soraya's side, both men were dead.

Azad put a hand on her shoulder, and she flinched violently and rounded on him. “What did you
do
? I thought you were going to
talk
to them and get us inside the temple, not slaughter them!”

“And then what would have happened?” Azad shot back. There was a smear of blood on his cheek, but he was otherwise unaffected—there was only conviction in his eyes, cold and determined. “Do you think they would have let us simply walk away once they found out what we had done? I asked if you were ready for the consequences, Soraya. And some part of you knows I'm right, or else you wouldn't have stood there and let me do it.”

Whatever argument she wanted to make died on her tongue. He was right, of course—she had seen him take the dagger from his tunic, and she had said nothing, done nothing. She had let it happen as if it were unavoidable, because she knew that if she stopped him, they would fail before even entering the temple. No, it wasn't that he had killed them that bothered her—it was that he had done it so
well.

She nodded to him in concession, and without speaking again of the dead men on the ground, they continued into the fire temple.

Soraya saw the flicker of the Royal Fire in its silver urn behind the iron grate, and she felt the flame inside of her, too, burning her from the inside out.
This is a mistake,
the fire was warning her, but if she turned back now, those two guards would have died for nothing. It was too late for regrets.

Azad remained outside the temple entrance, both keeping guard and giving Soraya some privacy, as Soraya walked up to the grate and slid it open. The smell of esfand and sandalwood was almost overpowering as she stepped onto the pedestal and felt the heat of the fire on her face. She looked into the heart of it, searching for some sign of the simorgh's feather embedded in the flames, a mother's protection for her son.

The thought made her bristle, and her anger from this morning flared up again, replacing the dread that had begun to creep over her when she saw the fire. All these years, she had tried to be a good daughter, a good sister. She'd made it so easy for her family to forget and ignore her existence, folding herself away without
complaint. Even as she had tried to find a way to lift this curse, she had told herself that she had been doing it in part for her family, so she would no longer be a shadow over them. But she could no longer lie to herself. If she put out the Royal Fire, it would be an act of pure selfishness, designed to benefit herself and no one else.

And just this once, she wanted to be selfish.

She raised the urn full of water over the fire and poured. The water hit the fire with the hiss of a serpent, and steam immediately billowed around her. When it cleared, the fire was gone, leaving only ashes. The urn fell from Soraya's shaking hands and shattered on the ground. Before she could think too hard about what she had done, Soraya dug her hands into the ashes, her gloves becoming streaked with soot.

And there, buried under the ashes, was a flash of color. Soraya brushed aside the rest of the ash and uncovered the simorgh's feather, mostly green but tipped with vibrant orange. It was unburned and unstained, as if it had just been plucked from the simorgh herself.

Soraya removed her gloves and gently lifted the feather, holding it across her palms like it might crumble into ash—as punishment, perhaps, for this ultimate betrayal.

But no, she wouldn't think of that. She couldn't think of it now, when she was so close to freedom.

Soraya remembered the yatu's instructions. Hardly breathing, she pressed the pad of her finger against the sharp tip of the feather, hard enough for a bead of blood to appear, like a single pomegranate seed.

At first, she felt no different, and she wondered if this entire ordeal had been for nothing. But then a shudder ran through her, and her heart began to beat so fast—faster than the usual rapid pulse of fear or exertion—that she couldn't catch her breath. Colors blurred around her, and she felt like she was blurring, too, her body losing its solidity, her insides draining away. It wasn't painful, but
it wasn't comforting, either, and she wondered if anything would be left of her once the poison was gone. Light-headed, she held up her hands and watched as the dark green lines running down her wrists faded to a faint blue-green tinge under her skin.

As her veins finished fading, her heart gave a last lurch and returned to normal, a steady beat in her chest that echoed through her ears. Her vision steadied, her blood stilled, and she knew it was over. The poison was gone.

A strange, muffled sound between a sob and a laugh bubbled out of her. She could
feel
the poison missing, but to her surprise, the absence felt cold, like a draft blowing through an open window, like the chill of regret. Soraya shook the thought away. She wouldn't regret this decision, not once she told Azad or tried touching something. She tucked the feather into her sash in case she needed it again. When she was sure its effects were permanent, she would find a way to send it back.

Stumbling down from the pedestal in her haste, Soraya ran to Azad, who turned at the sound of her footsteps.

“Your face,” he said, his eyes wide. He took a step into the temple. “Your veins…”

“I think it worked,” she said, fighting to keep calm, to think rationally. “But I have to test it first, I have to touch something and see if—”

But before she could finish speaking, Azad had taken her face in his hands and crushed his mouth to hers.

Oh,
Soraya thought.
Oh.

It was the first touch she had ever known, and it consumed her. There were too many new sensations—his lips on hers, his hands on her face, his heart beating against hers, the heat rushing through her veins—and so she couldn't focus on just one. It would have been like trying to feel a single raindrop during a storm. Instead, she gave herself up to it—to
him
—and stopped thinking at all, letting long-dormant instincts take over. Her hands did what they
had itched to do from the beginning, and wound around Azad's beautiful neck, pulling him flush against her. And all the while she was thinking,
He's still alive. I'm touching him but he's still alive.

There was a sudden flash of pain like a pinprick on her bottom lip, and she let out an involuntary muffled cry—whether from pain or pleasure, she didn't know. Her skin felt raw and sensitive, like it had been scoured clean, and so the line between pain and pleasure didn't exist anymore. There was only
touch,
so overwhelming that it was almost unbearable.

But Azad must have thought he hurt her, because he drew her away from him, untangling himself from her hungry grasp. Soraya tried to catch her breath, and her eyes slowly fluttered open as she looked up at—

No.

The blood drained from Soraya's face as she looked up,
up,
at a figure a head taller than Azad, a creature that wasn't Azad but was horrifyingly familiar.

Her first thought was that she had done this to him. She had transferred her curse to him somehow. But the hideous scaled monster standing before her wasn't at all surprised by his transformation. That neck that she had always admired was covered in patches of coarse green and brown scales. The hands that had just been on her skin were now longer, with spindly fingers tipped by sharp, curved nails like the claws of a lizard. His hair was gone, his head ridged and scaled like the rest of him. From his back emerged two large, leathery wings. And his face—his face was smiling, sharp, curved fangs showing between thin lips.

Soraya's knees buckled, but she fought to remain standing, not wanting to be on her knees in front of this creature from her nightmares. “What are you?” she said, her voice escaping in a gasp.

He tilted his head, the curve of his neck painfully familiar to her. “I'm hurt, Soraya,” he said in a mocking tone. It was the same voice, the same cadence, but deeper now, like she was hearing
Azad calling up from the bottom of a well. “I would have thought you'd know exactly who I am.”

Yes, she knew who he was. She knew even before she had asked. She knew when she had looked up and seen him in place of the young man she had expected.

But he still told her anyway.

“I'm your favorite story,” said the Shahmar.

 

Soraya prayed that she was dreaming, that this was yet another nightmare. After all, she had never heard of a div being able to appear as human, or to resist the effects of esfand. But in her dreams, she always woke soon after the Shahmar appeared—just when the dream turned into a nightmare.

This time, the nightmare didn't end.

Azad—the Shahmar—took a step toward her, and for the slightest moment, she forgot to be scared. She forgot that she no longer had poison to protect her. And then the memory of Azad's hands on her face, his mouth on hers, came back to her, and she shuddered—not from repulsion or regret, but from a fear she had never known before.

For the first time in her life, she was completely defenseless.

The Shahmar lifted one clawed, scaled hand to hover over her cheek, and Soraya froze, years of habit forcing her to stay still when
someone came too near. She looked for the eyes she had known before, but now they were yellow, the pupils vertical slits—the eyes of a serpent.

“Brave, ruthless Soraya,” he said, an oddly tender note in his deep voice. “I'm much fonder of you than I thought I'd be.” His hand fell away from her face, and she fought down the instinctive disappointment she felt, her traitorous skin still longing for touch, even from a monster. “I have other matters to attend to,” he continued, turning away from her. “Stay out of the way, and you'll be safe.”

Before she could find her voice, he had stepped out of the fire temple. His wings spread out to their full span, each one the length of a human body, and carried him up into the air.

Soraya recovered at last and ran outside, looking up at the shape of the Shahmar soaring overhead. A shadow fell over the palace—he had paused in front of the sun, his wings blocking its light. She gazed up with a mixture of terror and awe, wondering how this fearsome creature had ever contained himself in the shape of a human, how he could have fooled her so utterly.…

Then the screaming began.

The screams seemed to surround her, a wave of terror crashing over her from every direction. And soon she knew why. From her vantage point on the hill, she could see the northwest quarter of the city. She saw the fissures running down the streets, splitting open to release a horde of divs in a kind of hellish earthquake. She saw people run screaming through the streets, trying not to be trampled underfoot or crushed by falling rubble from overturned buildings.

He promised he would show me the city during the day,
Soraya remembered. But would there be anything left to see?

She had been frozen, numb with horror and shock, but now she ran. Soraya tore down the hill and around the side of the palace, going in the direction of the nearest screams—to the wedding
party in the garden where the most important people in Atashar were all currently gathered like a herd of sheep. She had been so shocked by the revelation of Azad's identity that she had forgotten the reason for the entire pretense.
He made me put out the fire,
she thought. Never mind that she had put it out willingly, that in fact she had convinced
him
to come with her—the truth was that he had been leading her to this moment step by step. He had been waiting for her to find the feather so that he could strike.

And now Soraya's family—her entire
country
—was in danger because of her. Because of her one selfish action.

Even as she ran, her chest stinging from breathlessness, she wondered what use she would possibly be now that her only weapon was gone. She could do little more than warn people of a threat that was already upon them.

As if echoing her thoughts, a shadow fell over her, and she didn't need to look up to know it was the Shahmar, circling the palace like a vulture over the dakhmeh. He was signaling the divs, she realized, purposefully making himself visible to let his accomplices know when to strike. But how had they been able to attack from below?

Soraya heard the answer to her question in her own voice—an innocent, thoughtless remark from nearly a month ago.
There used to be tunnels underneath the entire city,
she had told Azad. Either he had already known from the days of his reign, or she had handed him a way for the divs to infiltrate the city. He had planned everything so thoroughly, and it all depended on Soraya, on his certainty that she would make the wrong choice again and again. He had made a traitor of her, and she hadn't even known it.

Soraya tore through the orchard that bordered the garden, then stopped to catch her breath and observe the damage she had caused.

At first glance, the garden seemed to have descended into chaos.
Large pits spotted the garden where the openings to the water channels had been, and divs appeared from these enlarged tunnels as well as from the now-battered palace walls. Tables of food had been overturned, entire trees uprooted, and rugs trampled over. The panicked wedding guests were running in all directions, but none of them made it beyond the garden borders, because at every turn, a div was there to stop them.

Not even Soraya's visits with Parvaneh had prepared her for seeing a div attack. None of these divs were pariks, with their mostly human forms. Instead, they were beastly in appearance, like the illustrations she had seen in books. They were as varied as they were terrifying, some with scales and fangs like the Shahmar, others with long tusks and bristling fur growing over their bodies. Though some were of human height, many towered over the guests like giants. A few had wings like the Shahmar, and they hovered overhead or scaled the walls of the palace, throwing down chunks of stone to block the paths of the panicked guests.

Soraya ran farther into the garden, trying not to notice the corpses—crushed and broken bodies of soldiers and palace guards, their skulls caved in and limbs snapped to reveal the white of bone, their torsos ripped open, staining the grass red with blood. People kept brushing past her in their attempts to run to safety, reminding her of what she had done—of the price she had willingly paid to be able to stand here in a crowd and be harmless.

She heard the sounds of battle and turned to see one of the remaining soldiers lunging at a furred, fanged div with his sword. His back was to her at first, but then she caught a flash of his profile and inhaled sharply in recognition.
Ramin.
His expression was fierce and focused, but the div easily blocked the sword with a large plank of wood torn from one of the banquet tables and used it to wrench the sword out of Ramin's hands. Defenseless and unarmored, Ramin began to retreat, looking around him
for a weapon, and his eyes caught Soraya's. In that brief, surprised pause, the div struck, his claws raking against one side of Ramin's waist. Soraya's hands covered her mouth to hold back a scream as Ramin fell heavily to the ground, his life's blood flowing out of him.

Soraya turned away, feeling no right to witness his last breaths. Hadn't she fantasized about killing him only weeks ago? Wasn't she responsible for his death now? He never would have fallen so easily in a true battle—none of the azatan would—but today the azatan were outnumbered, unarmored, and unprepared, while the divs moved with perfect certainty. Soraya remembered what Sorush had told her about the recent div raids, that the divs seemed to be practicing for something bigger.

The memory cut through her haze of guilt and fear, and Soraya began to notice something about the ensuing chaos—that it
wasn't
chaos at all. She had learned enough about div raids to know that their main goal was destruction and carnage, but most of the dead among them now were soldiers and guards. None of the divs made any move to enter the palace, though a few were still crawling over the surface and the walls, and a group of them was barricading the entrance. She watched as one div with a horn and skin plates like those of a rhinoceros roughly grabbed an elderly man who was trying to sneak inside, but all the div did was add him to a group of people huddled together under the watchful guard of another div. In fact, all around the garden, the divs were herding the wedding guests into small groups, preventing them from escape but making no other move to harm them. And Soraya understood now why she had managed to escape their attention so far—she was neither running away nor fighting, and so they didn't care what she did.

The div guarding a group of people near the palace steps moved to the side, and Soraya saw the agonized face of her mother, her composure fallen away. Soraya didn't think—she ran toward her,
seeking comfort or forgiveness or simply some reassurance that she hadn't brought on the death of her entire family.

As she reached the palace steps, she tripped over her dress, landing on her hands and knees in front of her mother—a fitting position, she thought, to beg for forgiveness.

“Soraya? What are you doing here? You shouldn't be here!” Tahmineh's voice was shrill with panic and utter dismay.

Soraya looked up at her mother—the purple silk of her gown was torn, the jewels in her hair were tangled in her elaborate braids, and her face was swollen from tears. Soraya had always wondered what her mother would look like undone, and now she wished she didn't know. “I'm sorry, Maman,” she said, reaching up to her. “I'm so sorry.”

For the first time in her memory, Soraya touched her mother's hands, taking them in her own as if that would explain everything.

Tahmineh didn't flinch or pull her hands away from Soraya's grasp—instead, she immediately gripped Soraya's hands more tightly, like they were locking into place. She didn't even seem to know anything was amiss until she looked down at the bare, smooth surface of Soraya's hands and realized there was no poison under Soraya's skin.

“No,” she said, the word escaping her like it was her last breath. She lifted her head and looked Soraya in the eye. “Soraya, what have you done?”

The words rang through Soraya's head, an echo of the question she had been asking herself from the moment she had stepped back from her first kiss to see the creature from her nightmares.

Before she could answer, something wrenched her up from the ground, its grip tight around her upper arm. The div towered over her, long tusks emerging from his mouth. “I don't remember you,” he growled at her.

“You can't harm me,” Soraya said with more confidence than she felt. All she could think was that if she were still cursed, the div would be dead by now.

The div narrowed his eyes. “I can't
kill
you. I can still—”

But before the div could explain in any further detail what he could do to Soraya, a shadow blocked the sun again, and all heads turned up to see a winged silhouette descending from the sky.

The Shahmar landed at the head of the palace steps, wings outstretched, framed by the ayvan behind him. He was still dressed in Azad's clothing—the red tunic and trousers stretched over his scaled form in a mockery of humanity. The garden was hushed as he walked down the palace steps.

He stopped in front of the div that was still holding on to Soraya's arm. “If you touch or threaten her again, I'll tear out your tusks myself,” he said in a low, calm voice.

The div's hand instantly fell away from Soraya's arm.

The Shahmar turned to Soraya, holding her gaze. And then—to Soraya's surprise—his eyes moved away from hers, to rest on something right behind her. When she turned her head, she saw her mother standing close to her, her face bloodless, returning the Shahmar's gaze with cold recognition.

But before Soraya could begin to make sense of what she was seeing, the Shahmar turned away from them both and swept forward into the center of the crowd. Even the placement of the captive guests in small groups around the garden had been deliberate—the divs had formed an audience for the Shahmar, who now stood on the trampled rug where the bride and groom should have been sitting.

“You know who I am,” he bellowed in his deep, sonorous voice, his arms and wings both outspread to address the crowd. “Many of you have thought me dead, or merely a story to scare your children. But the legend of the Shahmar is real, and I have returned to take back my crown from the line that usurped mine all those years
ago. The descendant of that line is among you now. Bring him forward.”

There was a flurry of movement among the crowd as everyone looked around them for the shah. Soraya let out a long, relieved exhale. If the Shahmar wanted to see her brother, that meant he wasn't dead.

“Here, shahryar,” one of the divs called out. He was standing by the line of cypresses, and she saw that the humans the div was guarding were the injured remains of the king's guard. They all rallied themselves now, but before a fight could ensue, a figure both familiar and strange stepped out from their midst and came forward. Soraya knew that handsome, boyish face, but it was now haggard and ashen. She knew his easy yet dignified gait as he walked out to the center of the garden, but now he seemed so small, so dull, especially as he drew closer to the imposing form of the Shahmar.

“Sorush, the young shah,” the Shahmar said, circling him. “You wear my crown. You live in my palace. You use my title.”

Sorush shook his head. “You lost your right to the throne. None of this belongs to you any longer.”

The Shahmar halted, looming over Sorush, but Sorush kept his gaze ahead of him, not even looking up to meet the Shahmar's eye. “Is that so?” the Shahmar hissed. “And yet
you
were the one to welcome me to your home. You called me a friend and thanked me for saving your life.”

Only now did Sorush's regal mask start to crack. He glanced up at the Shahmar, brow furrowed in confusion—and then his eyes widened in understanding. “Azad?”

The Shahmar put his hand to his chest and dipped his head in a mocking bow. “I owe this victory in part to you.” He pitched his voice louder, so all could hear. “Even now, an army of divs is storming your city. And they won't stop, not until they've laid waste to your entire kingdom—or until I tell them to stop.”