Girl, Serpent, Thorn(81)

Soraya listened in fascination, understanding now the secret that the divs had been sharing with her ever since the night of the banquet, the one they reflected back to her in their nods and smiles. The Shahmar thought he ruled the divs—that they were instruments of his vision, his purpose—but in truth, the divs were using him.

“Now you, on the other hand,” Nasu said, drawing Soraya’s attention back to her. “The divs are all very interested in you.”

“Because I betrayed my people?” Soraya said, her throat tight.

Nasu shook her head. “I was there the night of the banquet, when you stepped out into the crowd and let them tear off pieces of you. Even those who weren’t there have heard of it by now. It was … rapturous. You gave yourself to us that night.” She took a step closer to Soraya and raised her hand to hover over the base of Soraya’s throat. “There’s something restless growing within you. We’re all very curious to see what happens when it breaks free.”

Soraya looked down at the hand that was not quite touching her, fighting a primal instinct to flinch away from it. But it was surrender that the divs demanded. Soraya had felt that pull not only at the banquet, but in the pariks’ forest, too. That was the other secret that Azad didn’t understand. There was no ruling the divs—there was either surrender or destruction. She wondered which would befall him in the end, and then her head snapped up, her eyes meeting Nasu’s as the thought struck her: If the divs were more aligned to her than to him now, perhaps she could use that to her advantage. “Would the divs be willing to help me? To fight him?” she asked urgently. But she regretted the words as soon as she’d spoken them. What if Nasu told Azad she was plotting against him? His final threat still rang loud in her ears.

But Nasu didn’t seem shocked or aghast at her questions. She only shook her head with a confused frown as her hand fell away. “We aren’t finished with him yet. Why would we want to fight him? Why would you want to fight him? He wants you to rule with him, doesn’t he? Isn’t that why we’re delivering you to the palace?”

“He’ll kill my family if I refuse him.”

“Then don’t refuse. You’ll be in a far better position to protect anyone you want to protect if you’re his consort. The choice seems simple to me. Either you’re his prisoner while he does as he pleases, or you’re by his side, with the power to influence him. Perhaps he could be useful to you as well.”

Soraya didn’t respond. The advice chilled her, because she heard the truth in it and knew that she might have no better choice. The other div returned with the horses then, and Soraya returned to her litter with the still-untouched basket of bread and cold meats that Nasu had given her.



* * *



They didn’t stop again until they reached Golvahar.

Soraya had shut the curtains of her litter to block out the sun, but when she could no longer feel the sun’s heat, she pulled back one of the curtains and saw the walls of the city approaching, the shape of Golvahar rising up at its center.

She hadn’t known how she would feel upon returning to Golvahar, but when she saw the city, she heard screams in her head, and a knot of guilt formed in her stomach. I’m going to put it right again, she promised the terrified voices in her mind. But she still had no idea how she would manage to accomplish that, and the more time that slipped away, the louder Nasu’s voice grew in her head.

She kept the curtain open now, wanting to see if the city had changed since Azad had taken control. She had hoped the damage wasn’t too severe, but as they wound their way through the city streets, the knot of guilt only tightened.

The last time she had gone through these streets, she had been struck with a sense of possibility. The world had seemed so wide, so expansive, that she thought surely there must be room for her in it. But now … now there was rubble crowding the streets, remains of the damage done on the wedding day. Some of the homes were charred and half burned, with chunks of wall or roof missing. It reminded Soraya of the way melted wax figures might look right before they collapsed into shapelessness. The air was full of dust and ash, and Soraya had to cover her nose and mouth to keep from coughing.

And then there were the people. Azad had promised Sorush that if he bowed to him, the townspeople would return to their ordinary lives. He hadn’t lied, exactly. The townspeople were free to go where they pleased. Shops were still open, and vendors still set up their stalls in the bazaar. But Soraya noticed that they all walked quickly through the streets with their heads down, not wanting to attract the attention of the divs who patrolled the streets as the new city guard. Their faces were ashen, and on the few occasions when people did look up to see who was being carried through the streets like royalty, there was a haunted look in their eyes that soon hardened into anger when they saw her. Soraya didn’t think they recognized her by sight—few people had ever seen the mysterious princess—but they saw a human treated like a queen by the divs, and that was enough for them. They knew a traitor when they saw one.

Soraya wanted to let the curtain fall, but she couldn’t make herself do it. She had to see—both because she deserved their scorn and because she needed to remember why she couldn’t let Azad win.

As they reached the center of the city, Golvahar loomed ahead, and Soraya’s eyes went to the roof, wishing she were still standing there alone. Would it always have happened this way? Even if Azad had never come, if she had never spoken to Parvaneh, would she still have reached the threshold of her patience one day and lashed out at her family? Yes, said a voice from deep within. She couldn’t have lived that way forever, not without understanding why or how. It was inevitable that she would have begun to rattle the bars of her cage, and that all her buried frustration would have found a way out. That girl on the roof was gone, and though Soraya wished over and over again that she had chosen differently, she knew that the girl she had been would never have been able to love her family or her people the way Soraya did now. She had been too full of poison, too afraid to let herself feel anything.