Girl, Serpent, Thorn(67)
“After he was deposed, I managed to escape and return to the pariks for a time. But when he grew in power and began to hunt us down, I had to tell them what I did. They exiled me, and told me I could only return to them when I had undone my mistake. The Shahmar caught me soon after that, and I thought that he would kill me, but instead he took his anger out on me in other, smaller ways.” Her wings twitched. “I told myself then that I would stop at nothing to defeat him and undo my foolish, reckless mistake.”
The words resonated more deeply than Soraya wanted to admit, and she stared down, hunching over into herself as she had always done before to find comfort when there was no one to give it. Parvaneh’s bare feet approached her, and then Parvaneh’s hands gently unwrapped Soraya’s arms from around her waist, and held Soraya’s hands in her own.
Soraya lifted her head to meet Parvaneh’s intense, amber stare. “Do I have your forgiveness?” Parvaneh said. “Are you still with me?”
It seemed a simple enough question, but Soraya found it to be as tangled and impenetrable as a thicket. She and Parvaneh and Azad—their choices, their mistakes, their ambitions—were all entwined, inseparable from each other. How could she forgive Parvaneh without forgiving Azad? But how could she forgive Azad without forgiving herself? Maybe they all deserved nothing but one another, a constant cycle of betrayals.
“I don’t know,” Soraya said hoarsely. It was the truest answer she could manage.
Parvaneh waited for her to continue, and when Soraya didn’t, she nodded and looked away, letting Soraya’s hands slip out of hers.
22
Soraya was beginning to become as nocturnal as the divs, sleeping through the day to make the time pass faster. She woke groggy and irritable after having another one of her usual nightmares. But this time, Soraya was the Shahmar, scales spreading down her arms instead of veins, and when she looked up, it was Parvaneh who was watching her transformation with a satisfied gleam in her eye. Parvaneh opened her mouth, and Soraya thought she would laugh, but instead she only said, Are you still with me? before dissolving into a flurry of moths that surrounded her and then fell one by one, dead to the ground, as soon as they touched her.
With a weary groan, Soraya rose from her makeshift bed and tried to run a hand through the tangled mess of her hair. She went to the table, toward the smell of food, but her eyes passed over the dishes laid out for her, distracted by the sight of something more familiar.
Draped over the table was one of her gowns from her wardrobe at Golvahar. It was one of the finest she had, delicate purple silk brocade etched with gold roses. She had never worn it, but she took it up in her hands and breathed in the slightly stuffy scent of her wardrobe as if it were the fragrance of roses from her garden. Home.
On the floor was a pair of matching slippers. Beside the gown was an array of jewelry that also came from her collection, as well as a glass bottle of rose water and a folded note leaning against it.
There will be a banquet in your honor tonight. Ready yourself and I will send someone to accompany you.
She crumpled the note, the sound of it reminding her of crushed wings, and sat down to eat. I won’t dress for him, she told herself as she folded a piece of lavash over quince jam. But it would be nice to have a change of clothes, especially clothes from home, she thought after one bite. And until I find the feather, I still need to play along with his games.
By the time she finished eating, she decided to compromise. She would wear the dress as a welcome change, as well as the slippers since hers were nearly worn, but not the jewelry, which felt too ornamental. After another internal debate, she uncorked the bottle and scented her hair and wrists with rose water. She wore it not to please Azad or anyone else, but because when she closed her eyes and took a breath, she could almost fool herself that she was standing in the golestan. Since she had no sense of time, she kept a nervous eye on the door as she changed out of her old dress and into the gown.
After she finished dressing, she didn’t have to wait long until the door to her room opened unceremoniously, without even the courtesy of a knock. Soraya stood tall, ready to reprimand Azad for being so uncivil, but it wasn’t Azad who had opened her door. It was a div with sharp quills all along his skin. In a flat voice, he said, “The Shahmar sent me to fetch you.”
Soraya followed the div out into the long pathway. Whenever other divs glanced at her with curiosity as they passed by, Soraya huddled closer to the div beside her.
“Here,” the div said at last. They emerged from the tunnels into another enormous cavern, much like Azad’s makeshift throne room. Soraya braced herself, but this time, she didn’t see anything like the div training grounds or the pit from Duzakh. What she saw felt like … home.
Long trestle tables holding plates of food were set out throughout the cavern, and Soraya inhaled the smell of lamb and buttered rice, along with mint and saffron and wine—the kind of meal she would expect at Golvahar. A bonfire burned at the center of the cavern, filling it with light, and rugs were scattered over the ground around it. Azad had promised her a banquet and he had given her one, exactly as she would have imagined it, except that every guest here was a div.
They were seated on the rugs, eating their food, or milling about the banquet tables with goblets of wine in their hands. Soraya recognized those goblets—as well as the tables and plates holding the food—from the palace, and the sight of them enraged her. As soon as she had found her clothes laid out for her, she had known that Azad was trying to give her pieces of home to make her more comfortable here, to confuse her into a sense of belonging. But that was only half of his plan. Because he had brought her a dress that she had never had occasion to wear before. He had issued her an invitation she would never have received. And now she was the guest of honor at a banquet that she would never have attended. This was a version of Golvahar that had never existed, because it was a version of Golvahar where she was allowed to exist. He was trying to tempt her with the promise of a life she had never had.