Girl, Serpent, Thorn(77)

She had thought that returning to this room, where she had nearly given in to her worst instincts, would be unbearable. But the room around her was nothing like the one from last night. She would have thought she was in the wrong place except for the cool breeze coming in through the window, the only one in all of Arzur, Azad had said. Because the breeze wasn’t the only visitor to the chamber—sunlight also streamed through the window, transforming the room entirely. It was the bright orange light of a slowly dying sun, which meant she didn’t have much time until dusk, and yet she stood enraptured at seeing and feeling the sunlight for the first time since she had been taken from Golvahar. She had never realized how easily hope died when there was no sunlight, how hard it was to believe that another day was worth fighting for when there was only night.

But that sun was also a measure of how much time she had left until Azad’s return, so she quickly recovered herself and started rummaging through the room as she had once done in her mother’s chambers, not long ago. She began with the chest where he had retrieved the rope last night, but it held only tools that were appropriate for living in a mountain—chisels, pickax heads, more rope.

She overturned all the rugs next, careful to replace them when she was finished, then went to the table where the map still lay. She could look at the wooden figures on the map more clearly now, white and red figures clashing at various points along the borders of Atashar. She dimly remembered seeing a similar map, with the same areas marked. Those marks are where the divs have attacked in the last few years, Sorush had explained to her. It’s almost as if they’re practicing for something. Soraya was tempted to knock the map off the table, but she restrained herself, instead carefully lifting a corner to look underneath.

There was a short hall off to the side of the room, which Soraya followed to a doorway at its end. Inside was a smaller chamber, roughly the same size as her own, and nearly as simple—a table, some candles, and a pallet that served as a bed, without even a blanket. This is where he sleeps, she thought. She couldn’t make herself go into the room. There was too much of him there.

Back in the main chamber, though, she had run out of places to search. She walked through the room carefully, checking for anything she may have missed, and stopped at the massive fireplace. Would he have—?

With a growing sense of dread, Soraya knelt down in front of the fireplace and began to sift through the ashes. Would he have destroyed his only chance of becoming human again? He had said he had no interest in living a human life, but his treasury of mementos from his reign said otherwise. Soraya’s fingertips were becoming gray, but she kept digging through the soot, until a flash of green caught her eye, reminding her too much of the last time she had dug this same feather out of the embers of a fire.

Soraya uncovered the remains of the simorgh’s feather, a few green barbs that became ash as soon as she touched them.

It was over, then. Their only chance at defeating the Shahmar—Soraya’s only chance at saving her family and Parvaneh—had crumbled into nothing.

Soraya remained kneeling by the fireplace, looking at the ashes that had once been the simorgh’s feather as if they would regenerate through whatever magic gave the feather its power. It seemed ridiculous that the feather had the power to heal anything except itself. But the yatu had warned her, his words more prophetic than she had known: in any fire other than the Royal Fire, he had said, the feather would simply burn.

She shut her eyes, letting the breeze cool her face, the back of her neck …

Her face and the back of her neck?

Soraya’s eyes snapped open, and she acknowledged that yes, she felt the breeze from two directions at once, both from the window behind her—and from the fireplace in front of her.

She reached a hand out to the back of the fireplace, trying to find the source of the air. Her hand touched brick, and when she pushed at the surface of the wall, it budged. The fireplace was large enough that she could stand inside it at her full height, and so she rose to her feet and walked into the mouth of it, then pressed both hands against the brick wall with all of her strength. The wall moved inward, revealing a dark passage beyond.

A secret passageway, Soraya thought, built by a clever and paranoid shah. She shouldn’t have been surprised.

The breeze was stronger now, clearly coming from the passageway, which meant that there was likely an opening beyond. An escape route would do her no good at this point, but curiosity and desperation led her farther down the passage, keeping her hand to the wall so she wouldn’t lose her way.

It was not as dark as she would have expected, and not just because of the light coming from the window in the room—there was another light source beyond, again confirming her belief that there was an opening at the end of the passage.

There was only the one path, and the light was growing stronger as she continued. Before long, the passage opened up into a cavern, lit from above by a stream of pale orange light coming in through an opening in the rock. Soraya thought the chamber was empty until she heard a sound like the clinking of chains, and saw something moving against the far wall.

Parvaneh, she thought at once, a flutter of hope in her chest. Perhaps she had performed the ritual with the hair incorrectly, and her dream had been nothing more than a guilt-induced fantasy. She stepped forward, toward the beam of light, and the prisoner in the shadows.

And then she saw it—saw her, the shape of her becoming more distinct as Soraya drew nearer. She was so familiar that Soraya knew her at once, even though the truth of it seemed impossible. Green feathers tipped with orange, a long and graceful neck, her head and body shaped like a peacock’s, while her wings had the majesty and breadth of an eagle. All of the theories about her disappearance had been wrong; none of them had prepared Soraya to find the simorgh hidden in this chamber inside Mount Arzur.