Girl, Serpent, Thorn(5)

Yes, she was sulking. After her mother’s announcement, she had promised herself she wouldn’t sulk—it would be too easy to sink into envy, to let that kind of poison into her heart as well as her veins. And yet here she was, alone on the roof once more, sulking.

Soraya sighed and leaned forward, her arms folded on the edge of the parapet. Whenever she was on the roof, she liked seeing the way her long dark brown hair spilled down against the wall, because it reminded her of one of her favorite stories. A princess had a secret lover who came to her window to see her. She let down her hair for him to climb and reach her, but he refused. He wouldn’t harm a hair on her head, he told her, and he sent for a rope instead. Soraya had revisited that story over and over again through the years, wondering if she would ever look out her window and see someone waiting for her, someone like that young man, who would care more about her safety than his own.

A foolish thought. A pointless wish. Soraya should have known better by now than to indulge in such fantasies. She had read enough stories to know that the princess and the monster were never the same. She had been alone long enough to know which one she was.

Soraya started to turn away, but then something else caught her eye. A group of young soldiers in red were standing together, gathered around one man in particular. On a second look, she confirmed her initial suspicion—that the young man in the center was the same man who had noticed her during the procession a few days ago. He was now dressed in the red tunic of the azatan, a privilege most were born into. Elevation of a commoner to the azatan was customarily the shah’s reward for those who performed great feats of courage in service to the crown. If this young man had joined the azatan, he must have performed such a feat.

Curious, Soraya took the opportunity to study him more closely. At first glance, he might have blended in with the other soldiers perfectly in their matching red tunics, but he wasn’t built like them. The others were broad-shouldered, arms roped with muscle, while this young man was tall and lean. Sinuous, Soraya thought. There was a grace to him—in the tilt of his head, in his stance, in the way he held his goblet of wine—that the others lacked, like they were all as solid as heavy wood while he was shifting liquid.

“Soraya?”

Soraya straightened at once, turning toward the hesitant voice. She felt strangely guilty, as if she had been caught eavesdropping—but then she saw who had addressed her, and all thought of the young man left her mind.

“Laleh,” Soraya said.

With the fire behind her accentuating the golden tones in her brown hair, Laleh appeared luminous, a dark red-orange sash the color of saffron draping down from her shoulder over the lighter hues of her gown. Of course Laleh was marrying Sorush—she already had the appearance and manner of a queen.

“I saw someone on the roof, and I thought it might be you,” Laleh said. She spoke with the polish of someone who was used to making conversation, but there was a note of uncertainty in her voice as well.

“My mother told me the news,” Soraya said. “I’m glad I have the chance to congratulate you in person.”

Soraya didn’t think she sounded particularly convincing, but Laleh smiled, her shoulders relaxing. She came to stand beside Soraya at the ledge, and Soraya felt a pang in her chest, because Laleh had made no effort to count the steps between them or to look down at where Soraya’s hands were. Laleh had always been the only person to make Soraya forget she was cursed at all. Soraya turned her face so that Laleh wouldn’t see her eyes.

“I was thinking the other day of how we met,” Laleh said. “Do you remember?”

Soraya tried to smile. “Do I remember tumbling into your room by accident? How could I forget?” When she was a child, Soraya wasn’t as adept at navigating Golvahar’s secret passageways as she was now. She had miscounted a door once and ended up emerging from a secret door in the wall to Laleh’s bedchamber, tripping over her feet in the process. Soraya still remembered the baffled faces of both Laleh and Ramin, the two of them bent over some game when a strange, gloved girl fell into their room out of nowhere.

“I didn’t see you come in through the wall,” Laleh said, “so I thought I was dreaming until Ramin went over to you.” She shook her head in irritation. “And of course his immediate reaction was to try to confront you—as if an assassin would have sent a seven-year-old girl to attack us.”

Soraya smiled thinly, but as much as she loathed to admit Ramin was right about anything, he wasn’t entirely wrong to sense danger from her. While she had fumbled to open the wall panel again, Ramin had started coming closer and closer to her, asking her who she was. He had reached out a hand to her, and in her panic, she had told him not to touch her—that he would die if he did because she was poisonous. She wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, but the words had rushed out of her before she could stop them.

“I was so scared he wouldn’t believe me,” Soraya said softly, looking down at her hands on the ledge. “I thought he might want me to prove it, and that I would have to kill something before he would leave me alone. But then you pulled him away, and you asked me if I wanted to join your game.” Soraya looked up, determined to meet Laleh’s eyes. “You were the only person who ever made me feel like I was the one worth protecting.”

Laleh was silent, and Soraya traced in the slope of her mouth and the droop of her eyelids the way her thoughts went from pride to pity to guilt as she realized what Soraya had said—you were, not you are. Soraya hadn’t realized it at first either, and she frantically thought of some way to lift the shadow that she had created. “You’ll be a wonderful queen,” she said. “Sorush is lucky.”