Girl, Serpent, Thorn(27)

Her voice broke, and she froze where she was, trying to collect herself, her throat burning as she tried to hold back angry tears. From beside her, she heard Azad say, “I’ve heard the rest. You don’t have to go on.”

The rest of the story was about her ancestor, the adopted son of the simorgh, who had led a rebellion against the Shahmar and chased him off into exile, where he was either killed by other divs or lived long enough to take his revenge against the simorgh, depending on which version you believed. And yet, even though that was her family’s origin, that wasn’t the part of the story Soraya felt most connected to.

“Why does that story affect you so?” Azad asked her, his voice gentle.

She didn’t want to answer, but she wouldn’t have begun the story at all if she hadn’t been prepared to face this question.

She held her arms out to him, pulling back her sleeves so they both could see the dark green veins running down her wrists. “Do you have to ask?” she whispered. “Doesn’t it sound familiar to you?” She pulled her sleeves back down. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve wondered if the same thing would happen to me—if the poison was only the beginning, if I was going to grow more and more dangerous until I wasn’t human anymore.” She had thought she would have to fight to get the words out, but she found now that it was easy to say them. They were less frightening aloud than they were in her mind.

“And so I told myself,” she continued, “that as long as I was good, never angry or envious, I wouldn’t become a monster like the Shahmar.”

Azad swallowed, his eyes moving over the veins on her face and neck. “And have you been successful?”

She lowered her head, looking for reassurance from the cracks in the earth. But the way they branched out reminded her too much of her veins and the poison inside them. “I don’t know,” she said. She thought of all the dead insects in her garden, of the night she had been tempted to hurt Ramin, of amber eyes staring in the dark. “I try to hold myself back from doing any real harm, but sometimes I feel like my thoughts are steeped in poison, and that it’s only a matter of time before I lose control over them … or over myself. I dream about it sometimes—I see myself transforming into something else, and the Shahmar stands over me, laughing—” She shut her eyes, but in doing so, she only conjured up the image of the Shahmar.

She hadn’t realized she’d been plucking at her gloves until Azad put his hand over hers, stilling her anxious movements. “Look at me, Soraya.”

Her eyes opened, and instead of the Shahmar’s triumphant face, she saw only Azad. His gaze was focused on her with an intensity that made her breath catch, the flame from the lantern flickering in his eyes in a way that reminded her of Parvaneh. The furrow in his brow made him seem almost angry, and she tried to look away, but his hand tightened over hers and she held still. “Stories lie,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “You’re not a monster.”

She shook her head. “You don’t know me,” she said, even though he knew her better than most by now. “I must seem so small to you, so insignificant, hiding behind walls and layers of fabric, more a story than a person. But there are parts of me you don’t know, parts you haven’t seen.”

“I don’t think you’re small or insignificant,” he said. His gaze softened, solemn rather than fierce. “I think you have so much power within you that it scares you, and that you make yourself small on purpose because you don’t know what you’ll become if you ever stop.”

He let go of her hands, and neither of them spoke as they continued on toward the dakhmeh. Their trek was almost over, and before long, Soraya saw the shadowy cylinder on a hill up ahead. The sight of it should have filled her with dread or disgust, but she barely paid it notice. She was repeating Azad’s words to herself over and over again until their cadence matched her heartbeat.



* * *



It was only when they had come to a stop at the foot of the hill that Azad’s words lost their enchantment. The dakhmeh loomed over them, and Soraya’s stomach lurched in revulsion. The wrongness of being here—of being here alive—settled over her, coating her skin like fine grains of sand. She was breathing shallowly, not wanting to inhale the contamination of death in the air.

As they neared the top of the hill, Soraya saw a pale orange light glowing from inside the dakhmeh. I was right, she thought. She supposed it could be a different yatu, someone other than the false priest, but she couldn’t help feeling that whoever was inside had been waiting for her all along.

She kept expecting Azad to tell her she could turn back, that she didn’t have to go through with this, but he didn’t, and she wasn’t sure she wanted him to. Instead, to her surprise, she was the one who offered a way out. “You should wait here.”

Azad shook his head. “I can’t do that. We both go in or we both go back.”

There was the excuse she’d been waiting for to turn back, but Soraya knew she couldn’t take it, not when they had come this far. “My curse will protect me,” she argued. “I want to go in alone.” As soon as she said it, she knew it was true. There was an intimacy to this unraveling of her life that she didn’t want to share with anyone else.

He frowned at her, but he must have believed the resolve in her voice, because eventually he nodded. “I’ll stay close. If you need me, call for me.”