Girl, Serpent, Thorn(64)
“Are … are those…?” Soraya couldn’t finish the question, unsure of what reaction it would draw from him.
“My father and brothers,” Azad said.
“Was this before you were born?”
He snorted. “No,” he said. “I was the youngest, still a child, but that’s not why I’m missing. All five of my brothers were destined to rule—the eldest as shah, the younger four as satraps of rich provinces. But I was born under bad stars. The astrologist told my father that if I ever ruled even the smallest province, dire consequences would follow. My father took this advice very seriously. While I watched my brothers become the princes they were meant to be, I was allowed no battle training, no education in affairs of state, no sense of my future at all.” He kicked the tapestry aside, letting the edges curl up over his dead brothers’ faces. “I wanted so much to prove the stars wrong. I used to stay up through the night and read in secret or practice on the training grounds on my own, desperate for any opportunity to impress my father. He was never cruel to me, but I knew how he must have seen me. I knew that I was…”
He trailed off, unable to find the words, and so Soraya provided them: “You were your family’s shame.” No wonder he had found her so easily at Golvahar. He knew where to look for someone who felt unwanted.
Something strange happened then. Perhaps Soraya only imagined it, but for a moment, Azad’s eyes changed—no longer cold and yellow, but the rich brown she remembered. And in that brief time, she saw in them the kind of self-loathing that seemed exclusively human. Once more, she became aware of the patches of skin showing through the scales, the pieces of Azad that refused to be swallowed up by the demon. She wondered if his transformation was even complete, or if he still woke sometimes to find another patch of skin covered in scales, another piece of himself gone.
“And then I met the div,” he continued, his voice hardening. “It’s much as you once told me—one night, when I went out riding in secret, I caught a div. But I didn’t want to take her to the palace with me yet. Instead, I kept the div trapped in a cave, and I returned every night to learn her secrets, hoping that I would discover something invaluable to present to my father. But you know as well as I do that when you learn a div’s secrets, the div learns your secrets, too. The div became my most constant companion, and so when she began to tell me that I would be a better ruler than my father or any of my brothers, I believed her. When she told me how furious I must be at my treatment, I became furious. She made me question whether the astrologist’s warning was even true, or if my father was lying to me for his own purposes.” He took a halting breath before continuing. “And so I approached a faction of powerful nobles and soldiers opposed to my father’s rule, and suggested they should help me replace him. I had decided that if I could not rule with the blessing of my father or the stars, I would defy them all, no matter whose blood I had to spill.”
Soraya didn’t know where to look—everywhere, she saw Azad, and so everywhere, she saw herself. She shut her eyes, but in the darkness behind her eyelids, she saw the young man she had known with blood on his hands, slaughtering everyone in his path to the throne. She tore her mind away from the image, reminding herself of her plan to find the feather.
She opened her eyes and asked, “And how did you … When did you become…?”
He hesitated, and when he spoke, his voice was hushed, like that of a child telling a secret. “I asked for this,” he said. “After my father’s and brothers’ deaths, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep control of Atashar. I had so little education on the subject, so I asked the div what I should do. She told me to tear out the heart of a div, and to bathe in the blood from that heart. I didn’t want to kill the div I had, and so I hunted down another, one with scales and claws and wings. I didn’t realize what would happen. I didn’t know…” He looked down at his hands—clawed and scaled, gnarled and bloodstained—and then looked up at Soraya, eyes pleading for understanding.
And she did understand, of course. It was so easy to imagine their places switched. She knew, too, why he had been so affected on the night of the dakhmeh, when she told him his story. Because it was not just his story that he heard, but his fears, his own strangled heartbeat, echoing back to him from someone else for the first time.
“You appeared as a human to me,” she said, returning to her plan. “Why don’t you do so all the time? Why would you choose to live as a div instead of a human?”
From the way Azad avoided her eye, she could tell he didn’t want her to know the answer. “I tried, for a time,” he said. “But the effect is temporary, and the price is not always easy to obtain.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“The blood from a div’s heart made me a div. I thought, then, that the opposite might be true as well.”
“The opposite—?” Soraya’s eyes widened in understanding. “Blood from a human heart?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “And it did work, but as I said, only for a short time. Little more than a month before I would need to repeat the process.”
Soraya grimaced and covered her mouth with her hand, remembering one of the more gruesome parts of the Shahmar’s story—that he would demand the sacrifice of two men every month, seemingly for no reason. And in a strange way, Soraya was grateful for the knowledge. The image of the ill-omened boy had become too strong and too familiar in her mind. She needed a reminder of his blood-soaked reign.