Girl, Serpent, Thorn(35)

When Tahmineh finally stood to leave, Soraya couldn’t help feeling relieved. “I need to check in on the bride and make sure she’ll be ready,” Tahmineh said. She tried to sound as if it were an obligation, but Soraya heard the pride and excitement in her mother’s voice. This was the kind of relationship she wanted to have with a daughter—why, then, would she have condemned her own to the shadows?

At the doorway, Tahmineh turned back to Soraya and said in a lowered voice, “I know how disappointed you were about the div, but I know it wouldn’t have helped you. You can’t trust anything they say.”

“I know, Maman,” Soraya said.

Tahmineh smiled. “I’m glad you understand. And even if you don’t, trust me now and you’ll understand one day.”

Soraya nodded, but once her mother was gone and the door was shut, she felt a scream building inside her chest. How can I trust you, she’d wanted to say, when I don’t know what the truth is anymore? And yet, her mother was right—Parvaneh had destroyed her with a single word, a single suggestion. Soraya would never fully believe Parvaneh, but she would never be able to stop wondering, either.

Before she even realized what she was doing, Soraya went to the hidden door by her bed and stepped into the passageways. She had to do something to either confirm this suspicion or forever dismiss it. Since she couldn’t bring herself to ask her mother directly, she would have to go digging through her rooms for evidence instead. Her mother would be with Laleh now, and then they would all go out to the garden for the ceremony—her rooms would be empty, and so Soraya could sneak in and out unnoticed.

Only when she arrived at her mother’s antechamber did she hesitate. The room was empty, but her mother’s jasmine scent was in the air, and as always, Soraya felt like an intruder.

But she had come there with no other intention but to disturb this room’s peace, and so she began her search, beginning with the antechamber. She gingerly turned over cushions and peered inside empty vases, still feeling as if she were contaminating everything in the room.

There weren’t many places to hide anything here, so she moved on to the bedchamber. As her search went on, she grew less careful, less reverent. She looked under beds and chairs and even rugs, inside drawers and jewelry boxes and the wardrobe, pushing aside her mother’s gowns with a roughness that felt strangely satisfying. She looked everywhere, without even knowing what she was looking for.

She was searching for some sign that her mother knew what had happened to her, but apart from a written confession, she couldn’t imagine what that sign would be. And perhaps that was the reason she had chosen to snoop through her mother’s things: not to prove Parvaneh right, but to prove her wrong.

And only when she realized this did she find something.

In her search, Soraya had taken down a tapestry hanging against the wall across from her mother’s bed. As she went to replace it, she noticed that one of the stones on the wall was different than the others—it was scored, like someone had chipped at it. She went to her knees and examined it more closely. It was loose, and so Soraya removed it, still telling herself that it was simply a loose stone her mother had covered with the tapestry because it marred the beauty of her room.

She was halfway convinced of this until she found something inside the wall—something her mother had clearly wanted to hide. Whatever it is might not be hers, Soraya told herself. It might have been here for hundreds of years before us. Soraya reached into the wall and pulled out what appeared to be a bundle of rags—bloodstained rags.

Soraya unwrapped the bundle and laid it out flat on the ground. And then she let out a moan and covered her face with her hands.

It was a blanket, and yes, it was stained with blood. But beneath the blood, dust, and grime, she saw the fading pattern on the soft, thinning cotton: a pattern of stars.

She breathed in, and the smell of esfand seemed to be all around her as she heard Parvaneh’s voice saying, She brought you to the pariks wrapped in a blanket of stars and asked for this curse.

The pieces began to join together in Soraya’s mind. The pained, guilty look Tahmineh always wore when she saw her daughter. Her insistence that Soraya not see the div in the dungeon, and her panicked insistence at knowing what Parvaneh had told her. Her dismissal of all of Soraya’s questions when she was a child. The ways of divs are mysterious and unjust, she had always said, to cover up any cracks in her story.

Soraya heard her own breathing, sharp and quick, as she tried to read a different message in the pattern of stars. But they spelled out only one truth, over and over again: She did this to me. She knew all along.

Soraya still didn’t understand why her mother would bring such suffering onto her daughter, but she couldn’t deny this blanket, still stained with blood from a div’s heart.

Why me and not Sorush? She couldn’t help asking the question that had plagued her since childhood. Why was she cursed, but not her twin? Why did she have to hide in the shadows so that he could grow in the light? Why had she chosen not to take the feather for his sake, when her family had never once done anything for hers?

She heard Parvaneh saying, Are they truly your family if they’ve failed to accept you as their own? If they cast you out and treat you with disdain?

She heard Azad’s gentle voice promising, Our story isn’t over yet, Soraya.

She heard their voices so clearly, but when she tried to think of her mother, her father, her brother, or the people of Atashar—all she heard was silence.