Girl, Serpent, Thorn (18 page)

“Give me your hand,” Parvaneh said. Soraya shyly threaded her fingers through Parvaneh's, and then they waited—waited until
Soraya adjusted to the presence of touch, until her heart slowed and her breathing became normal. It was like sinking into a hot bath, the water gradually becoming bearable against sensitive skin.

“I'm ready,” Soraya said.

Parvaneh led the way through the tunnels, using their joined hands to indicate which direction she wanted them to go. Soraya kept her eyes down so she wouldn't trip over the cloak's hem. They passed other divs on their way, but none of them glanced at the unwieldy shape beneath the cloak.

Once they had returned to the long hallway, Parvaneh led them down—the way Soraya had been planning to go before she'd become lost. But when they reached the end of the path, at the base of the mountain at last, Soraya saw that she would never have managed to make it out of the mountain alive.

At the base of the mountain was the largest cavern that Soraya had seen yet—it was larger than the palace gardens. They stayed close to the wall, still hidden under the cloak, and Soraya's hand tightened around Parvaneh's. Through the fabric, she saw mostly shapes and shadows, but it was enough to let her know she was looking into the hellish heart of this mountain.

There were divs lounging throughout the massive cavern, some drinking or eating, many sleeping, and others just watching. In the center of the cavern was a wide pit, and from its unknown depths, more divs climbed out at irregular intervals.

“Is this some kind of test?” Soraya asked, thinking of the training grounds.

“This is his throne room,” Parvaneh said, gesturing to the far wall of the cavern. There, a massive throne had been carved into the rock. It was empty, of course, its usual occupant currently visiting a different throne. “And
that,
” she said, pointing to the large pit, “is Duzakh.”

Soraya shuddered at the word. “That's the home of the Destroyer,” she said, remembering the yatu.

“When the Destroyer releases us into the world, this is where we emerge,” Parvaneh said. “When a div dies, the Destroyer feels it, and he sends out a replacement, a druj for a druj, or a parik for a parik, and so on. That's why the Shahmar always captures pariks but never kills them.”

Soraya's eyes were locked onto the mouth of Duzakh as a wolfish head emerged from it. A div similar but not identical in appearance to the one who had perished in the sparring pit crawled his way out. As soon as he was fully above the surface, a wiry druj came to his side and led him away—recruiting him to the Shahmar's cause, Soraya guessed. She thought of all the battles her brother and the shahs before him had led, all the divs they had killed, not knowing that each victory was only temporary.

“Will the same thing happen if we kill the Shahmar?” she asked. “Another div will rise to take his place?”

“Not exactly,” Parvaneh said, her voice strained. “Some of us tried to kill the Shahmar in the beginning. But something about his human origins has interfered with the usual process. When he's struck a mortal blow, he doesn't die—he regenerates. His scales spread out and close over any wound. I think the div in him only grows stronger with each attempt. In order to truly defeat him, we must make him human first—and to do that, we need the simorgh's feather.”

Soraya's hand went to her sash again, a hollow feeling growing in the pit of her stomach.

 

From Azad's throne room, Parvaneh led her back into the tunnels. She mentioned something about a secret escape route known only to pariks, but Soraya only half listened. She was too busy arguing with herself.

Tell her about the feather,
one part of her was saying.
Tell her now.

If you tell her now, she'll never help you,
the other insisted.
She'll leave you here in the tunnels to be torn apart.

They stopped in front of a blank wall, Parvaneh looking around before she dug her fingers into a crease and pulled open a heavy slab of rock. She removed the cloak from around their shoulders, and both of them took a breath. “Watch your head,” Parvaneh warned, and they ducked into a narrow passage. Once they were inside, Parvaneh pulled the hidden door back in place, leaving them in total darkness.

Soraya tried to straighten up, but her head met the rock above
with a dull thud. This passage was clearly smaller than any of the others; she felt more like she was inside the passages of Golvahar than the finely carved halls of Azad's mountain palace. But the darkness of Golvahar's passages was far more familiar to her, and she tried to find the wall with her hand to give her something solid in the nebulous dark.

Something brushed her hair, and she let out a small yelp.

“It's me,” Parvaneh said in a hushed voice. Parvaneh's hand found Soraya's, and Soraya gratefully latched on to it. “We're in a part of Arzur that only pariks know about,” Parvaneh explained. “Keep your head down and don't let go of my hand.”

They continued on, and when the ground beneath them started to incline upward, Soraya hoped they were near the end. The air here was thin and stale, and not being able to see made her feel untethered, with Parvaneh's hand as her only anchor.

Finally, Parvaneh told her to wait as she took back her hand. Soraya heard the sound of rock scraping against rock, and shortly afterward, a stream of air and moonlight bathed her face, as pure and refreshing as any river.

Parvaneh emerged first, and Soraya followed. Outside the mountain at last, Soraya stood with her head back and filled her lungs with the night sky. And then she looked around her and was convinced she had stepped into a different world.

“Where are we?” Soraya asked with a mixture of alarm and awe.

“The forest, of course,” Parvaneh said flatly.

But Soraya had never seen forestland like this before. She had never been inside a forest at all. From the roof of Golvahar, she could see the sparse forestland at the south of the mountain—where her mother had first encountered a div. But the land there was dry, with clumps of trees scattered across the landscape, more brown than green. That was not the forest Soraya was standing in now.

The trees here were so tall, so densely packed, that Soraya could barely see more than a short distance in their direction. She didn't even recognize these trees, with their long vines and leaves hanging down and their trunks twisted into different shapes. Even in the moonlight, she could tell how green it all was—it
felt
green. It smelled green. The air was thick with moisture, and everything around her felt vivid and alive, like she was standing on a pulse. It reminded her of being in the golestan, except the golestan was only a shadow of the lush forest around her.

“I didn't know such a place existed in Atashar,” she said, walking toward the forest. She took slow, hesitant steps, like she was afraid of waking something up.

“This is the forest to the north of the mountains,” Parvaneh said behind her. “Few humans have walked here.” That explained why Soraya had never seen it from the roof. The mountains had always blocked her view of anything farther north.

A sound like fabric tearing made Soraya turn back to Parvaneh, and again, she was struck with awe. Parvaneh's face was tilted up to the sky with a look of pained joy, like she thought she'd never see it again—and Soraya understood now why keeping her buried in a dungeon had been a terrible punishment for her. Parvaneh seemed to be made of the night. She wore it like a gown, draped over skin that shimmered in the moonlight. The sound Soraya had heard must have been Parvaneh making a tear down the back of her shift, because now her wings were free and unfurled. The moth patterns on her face were almost luminescent, not dull and faded as they appeared in the dungeon. Strands of moonlight caught in her black hair like ribbons of silver, and her eyes—those hawk's eyes—burned like firelight. Soraya had never seen her look so inhuman—or so beautiful.

That could have been me,
she thought. If she had stopped trying to hide the veins of poison under her skin, if she had pulled back her hair and shed her gloves and not been ashamed to look anyone
in the eye, then would she have had this same aura of majesty? She felt a pang of resentment toward her mother, not for cursing her, but for hiding her away and not telling her the real reason why—for letting her think she was made of shame instead of beauty.

But resentment was a familiar path, one she had already taken further than she had ever thought she would, and it had brought her to this prison. If she kept taking it, where would it lead her next? As if answering her question, she heard Azad's voice:
Do you want to know why I brought you here? Because I know
this
is where you belong.

“Where should we go now?” she asked loudly, trying to drown out that insidious voice in her head.

“I'm not sure,” Parvaneh said with a note of worry. “I know he keeps the pariks here, but this is a large forest, and we don't have much time.”

“We don't have to find them tonight,” Soraya offered. “Az—the Shahmar won't know I'm gone until he returns tomorrow night.”

Parvaneh shook her head. “You haven't considered something. When the Shahmar returns to the palace, he'll likely notice I'm missing. And once he does, he won't leave the pariks unattended, or he might move them somewhere else entirely. This is our only chance.”

Parvaneh charged into the forest, and Soraya was glad to let her take the lead, because as soon as the trees enveloped her, she knew she could easily forget her purpose and wander deeper and deeper into this forest until it swallowed her whole. The beams of moonlight filtering through the canopy draped over the trees like pale silk or cobwebs, giving the forest the impression of being ancient and untouched.
But I can touch it,
Soraya thought. The leaves and roses of her golestan had cradled her since childhood, never refusing or shying away from her touch, and so when Soraya reached up a hand to pass through the leaves dangling above her head like diamonds, she felt like she was greeting a dear friend.

Ahead of her, Parvaneh seemed to feel the same. She had dived
into the forest with purpose, but now her pace was slower, and she often reached out to lay her palm against the thick, knotted tree trunks that they passed. Her dark wings and hair blended into the forest, and she moved around trees and over roots without pause, already knowing where they would be.

Soraya didn't have the same confident familiarity, and yet she didn't mind when she stumbled over the uneven ground or when her hair became tangled in the slender branches of a birch tree. These brief stumbles only brought her into closer contact with the forest, allowing her to know the paper-like texture of the bark under the pads of her fingers, the rich, earthy smell of the soil, the brush of leaves against her cheek—the forest returning her caresses.

They started to pass through rows of trees with twisting trunks, their thick, ropy branches reaching across to each other, creating a kind of latticed arch overhead, when Soraya called for Parvaneh to stop.

Parvaneh turned to her. “What happened? Is something wrong?”

Soraya shook her head, but she couldn't speak, the tears stinging her eyes threatening to overflow. She only gestured to the scenery around them—to the clumps of moss glowing in the moonlight against the dark wood of the trees, and the silhouettes of the branches tangled with one another. Somewhere in the distance, an owl was hooting, low and reverberant.

Parvaneh's face softened, and she nodded. “I understand.”

A few stray leaves had wound themselves into Parvaneh's hair, and her eyes glowed with bliss and moonlight. Her wings fluttered behind her, the sound as soft as the rustle of wind through the trees. If Parvaneh told her she was the forest made flesh, Soraya would have believed her.

Unable to look away from her, Soraya murmured, “I've never seen anything so beautiful.”

Parvaneh started to come toward her, the air around them heavy
with dew and silence—but then she stopped and turned to her right, suddenly alert. “The wind just changed,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Soraya asked, feeling slightly breathless.

“Can't you smell it?”

Soraya lifted her head and inhaled deeply, and a familiar feeling of safety wrapped around her.
That scent
 …

“Esfand,” Soraya said, her excitement building. “If the pariks are being held prisoner—”

“The Shahmar would need esfand to weaken them and keep them from transforming,” Parvaneh finished for her.

Parvaneh took the lead again with renewed purpose, and Soraya followed, struggling to match her quickened pace in the dark. But even though her skin was damp from perspiration and the humidity in the air, and she kept scratching herself on branches and shrubs, and she heard the ragged sound of her own breath, Soraya wasn't tired. On the contrary, she was invigorated, like she was coming to life with every step deeper into the heart of this forest.

“We're getting closer,” Soraya said. “The smell is getting stronger.”

“I know.” Parvaneh panted beside her. “I feel weak. You have to go on without me.”

Soraya spun in the direction of her voice with a disbelieving glare. “You're going to leave me?”

“I'll wait right here. But you have to put out the esfand first—I can barely breathe. As soon as you do, I'll find you. I promise.”

It was foolish to trust the promise of a div, but Parvaneh hadn't broken a promise to her yet, and Soraya was the one with a secret. Soraya nodded and walked ahead, following the scent of the esfand.

To her immense relief, she went only a little way farther before she stepped out into a clearing where the moonlight streamed down unfettered. But there was more than moonlight floating in the clearing.
Smoke,
she thought. The entire clearing was thick with smoke and scent.

And yet it was empty. Soraya walked to the center of the clearing, waving the smoke away, but there was nothing there for the smoke to be coming from.
Help me,
she asked the forest.
Show me what doesn't belong here
. But the forest didn't answer, of course, and she made it to the other side of the clearing without finding the source of the esfand.

And then she heard a strange noise from above, like a sigh, and she looked up.

The smoke was thicker here, but through it, she saw an iron cage hanging from the high branches of a tree. Hanging below the cage was a brazier, the smoke wafting upward to surround the cage. The brazier was clearly the source of the esfand—although it couldn't have been the only one, given the amount of smoke and the strength of its effect on Parvaneh—but it was the iron cage that caught Soraya's gaze, because through the veil of smoke, she saw someone asleep inside it.

Soraya backed away toward the center of the clearing again, and now that she knew where to look, not even the smoke could hide the truth from her. All around the edge of the clearing was a ring of cages. There were a dozen of them, each hanging from a tree, and each with a brazier of esfand pouring smoke from below it. And inside each cage was a sleeping form. Long hair spilled from some of the cages, and Soraya thought she saw the shape of wings in others.

The pariks
. She had found them.