Girl, Serpent, Thorn(26)

“Is this where the tanning bazaar is?” she asked Azad, and he looked at her in surprise.

“The butchers and the tanners are down there,” he said, pointing to a set of steps that led to a narrower alley. “This is where the rug bazaar would be.”

These stalls were all empty now, but she imagined this street lined with rugs and tapestries—the bright colors of the dyes, the sound of looms clacking as they turned bolts of raw silk imported from the east into the beautiful patterns of the rugs Atashar was famous for.

“I wish I could see it,” she whispered into the night.

The night didn’t respond, but Azad did. “You will. I’ll show it to you when your curse is gone.”

He led her down another set of streets, past flat-topped houses with walled orchards. She heard the sound of children laughing from behind one of them.

“We’re almost at the city walls,” Azad said. His grip on Soraya’s hand was tight, his gaze focused ahead, his gait steady and quick. Soraya’s heart lurched. It had been easy to forget their real destination—that they were leaving this hub of life and light for a place of death and shadows.

But Soraya wasn’t capable of fear right now. She had been afraid to come into the city at all, but this outing had quickened her blood and quieted her fears. She was here, outside the palace, in the world, and she had harmed no one. She could live without someone or something dying for it.

“You’re not tired, are you?” Azad asked her, his pace slowing slightly.

“No,” she said. “I’ve never felt less tired in my life.”

She thought she saw a flash of a smile, and they continued on.

They moved toward the setting sun, and by the time they reached the large wooden door set into the eastern wall of the city, that sun had nearly dipped below the horizon. The night guard took a glance at Azad’s red tunic and let them pass without question.

It would be another hour’s walk to reach the dakhmeh, which stood alone on a low hill, a safe distance from the living. Azad had brought a lantern with them, and as the sun disappeared, he lit and raised it to light their way. The light didn’t extend to the dakhmeh, however, and so all it did was illuminate the dry, cracked ground around them.

Soraya had thought moving through the city would be the hardest part of this journey, but with each step that took her farther away from the city walls, her breathing became more and more labored, as if a weight were pressing down on her chest. She tried to look back to see how far they had come, but the city was lost to the night now. Outside the lantern’s wavering ring of light, there was only darkness all around them, stretching on without end.

On the roof, the whole world had been laid out in front of her, and she had been able to map the distance from the city to the dakhmeh easily. But now that she was no longer watching from above, she felt like she had shrunk down to the size of one of the insects in her garden, walking an impossibly long trail in a world that was too big for her. Had she found the boundaries of her room and her garden suffocating before? Had she felt she couldn’t breathe in the passages behind her walls? She could have laughed at herself—first it was not enough, and now it was too much.

Azad must have heard her increasingly ragged breathing, because his voice broke through the silence and the darkness, saying only, “Tell me a story.”

His words brought her out of her head, and she looked at his profile, lit softly by the lantern light. He was trying to distract her, to make the journey shorter, and she was grateful to him for it.

And so she told him the story of the princess who let down her hair for her lover to climb, and when it was over, Azad asked for another. This time she told the story of a brave hero stronger than ten men who bested dragons and rescued a foolish shah from the hands of divs.

She waited to hear him ask for yet another story, but this time he said, “Tell me your favorite story. The one you’ve read over and over again.”

Soraya wanted to protest that the first story she’d told had been her favorite—but it wasn’t the one she’d revisited the most over the years. It wasn’t the one that haunted her dreams night after night. It wasn’t the one that she felt was a part of her, so much so that she hesitated now, in case it would reveal too much of herself.

But as always, once the Shahmar entered her mind, she couldn’t think of anything else.

“There was and there was not,” she began, in a voice that seemed both hers and not hers, “a prince who was what every young man should be. He was handsome and courteous and brave, but he was also proud and curious. One day, the prince captured a div, but he didn’t vanquish it. Instead, he kept it locked up in a cave, and visited it every day, demanding the secrets of its knowledge.”

She paused, knowing both of them must be thinking of Soraya’s visit to the div locked away in the dungeon.

“Before long, the div convinced the prince that he would make a better ruler than his father or his elder brothers. And the young man agreed—after all, didn’t he know even the secrets of the divs? And so the prince slew his father and brothers, and took the crown for himself.

“The prince—now the shah—ruled for a time in peace, despite his bloody coronation. But he still visited the div, and over time, the prince noticed that he was changing. His bones shifted, his skin grew scaly and rough, and his heart grew violent. He hungered for war, for destruction, and he began to rule by terror and force, demanding the senseless sacrifice of two men every month to quench his desire for bloodshed. The act of murder that had made him king had now also twisted him into a div himself—”