Girl, Serpent, Thorn(88)

Azad was lifting his dagger over Parvaneh, and Soraya knew that she would need to do more than grab his wrist, as she had done with the yatu. She threw herself down over Parvaneh, shielding her with her body, and looked up at Azad with all the defiance she had been holding back.

His arm still in the air, Azad froze, his slit pupils becoming razor-thin. Slowly, he lowered his arm. “You care for her, don’t you?” he said, sounding despondent. “All this time, you’ve been working against me.”

Still keeping her eyes on Azad, Soraya’s hand found Parvaneh’s, waiting until she felt Parvaneh’s fist close over the simorgh’s feather. “Are you truly surprised?” she said. She started to rise from the ground, keeping herself between Azad and Parvaneh. All around them was violence and destruction, and yet the two of them might have been far from it all, Azad’s attention focused purely on her. “You’ve used me from the start. You used me to hurt my family—”

“You made that choice on your own. All I did was refuse to hold you back.”

“No,” she said forcefully, satisfied when he took a startled step backward. She had blamed herself so many times for what had happened, for the choices she had made, but at the root of every misguided choice, every terrible consequence, was one name. “If I have to bear the blame, then so do you. I thought it was my fault for trusting you, for being such an easy mark for you,” she said, moving steadily toward him, her fists bunched in the skirt of her gown. “But you were the one who betrayed that trust.” With each step she took, he retreated back from her, and it made her feel dangerous again. “I put out the fire, but you were the one who attacked Golvahar and made my brother kneel in front of you. My mother cursed me, but you were the reason why. Everything that happens to you now is your own—”

“Enough!” Azad barked, reaching to grab her by the shoulders. “None of this matters,” he said to her through clenched teeth. “You won’t win. Every div killed here today will be replaced in my army. All you’ve done is sentence your family to death.”

Soraya offered him a cold smile. “Your army won’t follow you for much longer.”

“And why is that?”

But she didn’t need to answer, because while they were speaking—while Soraya had kept him distracted—Parvaneh had risen from the ground and begun to circle around them. Soraya saw her now behind Azad, a flash of green in her hand. And immediately after Azad spoke, Parvaneh leaped onto his back and plunged the sharp end of the feather into his neck, burying it in a patch of exposed skin not covered by scales.

Everyone in the garden—div and parik and human alike—went still as the Shahmar let out a scream of rage and pain before falling heavily to his knees at Soraya’s feet, just as Parvaneh had promised.

As he’d fallen, Parvaneh had pulled out the feather and jumped down from his back, breathing a sigh of relief, her mission finally fulfilled. But now she was watching Azad in awe along with Soraya and the rest of the garden—because something was happening to the Shahmar. His scales rippled over his skin like they were eating him alive, and then, slowly, they began to recede, leaving him a mottled mixture of scale and skin, demon and man. He covered his face in his hands, and Soraya watched as those sharp nails became blunt, and the scales on his head were replaced with hair. He still had his wings, but when he looked up at her in despair, his eyes were human.

He looked so exposed, so vulnerable, kneeling in front of Soraya without his armor. She remembered that strange sense of emptiness when she realized the poison had left her, and she couldn’t help feeling a twinge of sympathy.

He rose on unsteady legs, and even though his transformation was still incomplete, he was human now in a way she had never seen him before. There was a murmur of discontent coming from the garden as the divs realized that their leader had become useless to them, but Soraya kept her eyes on Azad, willing him to ignore the divs. She held out her hand to him, and when she said his name, he looked at her, eyes wild and pleading. “It will be over soon,” she said softly. It was not a boast of victory, but an assurance, an attempt at comfort. His fight—with her, with himself, with fate—was over, and he could be free.

Soraya never knew what choice Azad would have made, because the silence between them was interrupted by sounds of battle coming from the back of the garden, near the palace gates.

People were surging onto the grounds—people from the city, bearing torches that shone against the darkening sky, bearing weapons they had forged and hidden away. The simorgh’s cry must have let them know that the time had come to fight. Soraya thought of the people she had seen in the city, seemingly defeated but in truth waiting for the right time to strike, as she had done, and she felt a surge of pride at their boundless resilience. The battle began anew, but it was clear now that the divs would be outnumbered.

She had lost her tentative connection with Azad, whose eyes were wide with panic. “Azad,” she said again, but when he turned to look at her, there was a familiar cold glint in his eyes. Ah, there he is, Soraya thought. She unconsciously recoiled from him, which seemed to awaken his remaining predatory instincts. Soraya saw the flash of his dagger in his hand before he lunged toward her. Parvaneh immediately bolted for him in response, but before either of them could reach their target, someone roughly shoved Soraya to the side.

Tahmineh now stood where Soraya had been, and so it was Tahmineh who ended up in Azad’s chokehold, with his dagger poised across her throat. “No!” Soraya shouted, and behind Azad, Parvaneh froze, afraid to provoke him.