Realm of Ash

by Tasha Suri

  She wondered sorely if she was going to be privy to heated exchanges of faith here too. No doubt a hermitage of widows was rich soil for questions of death and mourning. Rabia was clearly one of that hopeful number who believed the Maha was not truly gone, and she was equally clearly stupid enough to announce her views to strangers like Arwa. Fool.

  To speak of the Maha was to court danger. Arwa’s husband had always been careful only to air his views with his closest compatriots, men he could trust not to mark his many fears of a world without the Maha as a kind of heresy. Arwa had been more careful still, and not spoken of faith at all. Were the widows truly so safe from the world, here, that they had no need to fear the danger their own voices could bring down on them?

  A noise dragged her abruptly out of her reverie. Someone had rapped their knuckles deliberately against the doorframe, startling one of the elderly women mid-snore into wakefulness.

  “Wh-what is it?”

  “Nothing, Aunt,” said Gulshera. Her eyes met Arwa’s. “I’ve come for the girl. Rest.”

  The woman mumbled and subsided back into sleep. Arwa stood.

  “Please come with me,” Gulshera said.

  Arwa followed her out.

  In the morning light, Gulshera’s hair was as pale as snow, her skin the lightest shade of brown. As a young woman, she must have been considered the epitome of Ambhan beauty, despite the severe shape of her mouth and the way she held herself, with a ramrod-straight posture reminiscent of a military-trained nobleman’s.

  “You ate nothing this morning,” Gulshera said, gesturing for Arwa to walk with her down the corridor. Arwa obeyed. “Roshana worried.”

  Arwa did not think it would take a great deal of effort to worry Roshana.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry anyone. I only wanted to pray.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time for prayer here,” said Gulshera. “Right now, we need to get you some food. The tables have been cleared, so we’ll see what the cooks have left.”

  “If you direct me to the kitchens, I can go on my own,” Arwa said with studied politeness.

  “Ah, I see.” Gulshera’s voice was terribly matter-of-fact. “You want me to leave you alone.”

  Yes, thought Arwa.

  “Not at all,” she said. “I simply don’t want to trouble you.”

  “Indeed. Well, perhaps I want to be troubled.”

  She took Arwa’s arm imperiously.

  “Come,” she said. “A servant always brings hot tea to my room in the morning. You’ll share it with me.”

  There was no way to refuse her now, so Arwa didn’t try to. She allowed herself to be led.

  Gulshera’s room was a cluttered, lived-in space, with a low dining table by the lattice window, and large sheaves of paper stacked neatly on her writing desk. Arwa saw silk-bound parchments, marked with the unfamiliar seal of a noble Ambhan family, balanced precariously on the edge of the bed. Letters. So, the widows weren’t so remote from the world after all.

  A set of bows hung on the opposing wall. The largest of them caught Arwa’s attention and held it, drawing her focus away from the letters upon the bed. The bow was taller than her—tall as a grown man—its surface gilded with mother-of-pearl. Arwa had never used a bow, but she itched to hold it. It was astonishingly beautiful. Its ends were shaped like the mouths of tigers, with serrated teeth stretched into an open snarl.

  “It’s a relic,” Gulshera said, startling Arwa back to reality. “It takes a full-grown man all his strength to string and shoot an arrow from it. My husband was full proud of it. But of course, it’s only good for display now.”

  Gulshera was already seated by the window. There was a tray set before her.

  “Sit,” she said. “You can pour the tea.”

  There were herbs steeped in water, a small bowl of honey, and a shallow tray of attar-scented water. Next to the tea were vegetables fried golden in gram flour. Arwa poured the tea and heaped in honey for both her and Gulshera, then took a quick sip from her own cup that was burning sweet.

  “You didn’t sleep,” said Gulshera.

  It wasn’t a question. “I slept a little,” Arwa said anyway.

  “No food, and no sleep.” Gulshera sipped her own drink; steam rose up around her face in coils. “I see.”

  Arwa picked up a fritter and bit into it pointedly, resisting the urge to bristle. No doubt Gulshera thought she was a fragile creature, a young and witless thing fueled by love and religious fervor, shattered by what she had seen that day and night at the fort a mere handful of months ago.

  Let her think it. It was better than the truth.

  She waited for Gulshera to begin lecturing her. She stared down at her oil-stained fingers in silence, as Gulshera sipped her tea and took one of the fritters for herself.

  Instead, Gulshera said, “Eat. Drink your tea. Then go, when you like.”

  “Go?”

  “When you like,” Gulshera repeated. She soaked her fingers in the attar-water, then stood, leaving Arwa alone with her tea and the cooling fritters, under a pale slant of sunlight pouring in through the window. She heard Gulshera settle at the writing desk. The sound of rustling paper followed.

  Arwa hesitated.

  A memory came to her, unbidden, of the feral cat she’d found in the gardens of her first home in the province Hara, where she had lived as a girl of ten. She’d been determined to make a friend of that cat, with its one bad eye and fanged teeth, but it ran and hid in the foliage whenever Arwa approached it. She’d gained a number of scratches before she’d learned that if she left slivers of meat on the ground near her, it would come and eat by her warily, as long as she studiously ignored its presence. In the end, it had grown warm with her, following her around the gardens, sleeping on her lap if she sat in the right patch of sun. Indifference and food had won it better than any straightforward affection could ever have.

  Arwa had the discomforting sense that Gulshera was treating her with the same studied, indifferent regard Arwa had once shown that cat.

  She wants something from me, Arwa thought.

  She ate another fritter anyway, and drank her tea, before she murmured a suitably gracious thank-you and moved to leave.

  “Come back whenever you like,” Gulshera said, not raising her head as Arwa left the room. “I always have enough for two.”

  Arwa had liked the brusqueness of Gulshera’s care, somewhat despite herself. But as time went on—as she walked from Gulshera’s room across the hermitage, passing rooms and other widows—the memory of Gulshera’s words began to feed her disquiet.

  You didn’t sleep, Gulshera had said. It hadn’t sounded like a guess. Perhaps Arwa was simply that transparent, but she went to her room anyway, checking the undisturbed line of blood on her window ledge, hidden carefully beneath her own miniature effigy of the Emperor. No one had searched her room. And her dagger was in her sash, hidden where no one would find it, and recognize it for what it was.

  Arwa looked out of the lattice window. Without the press of night beyond it, she could see that the hermitage stood above a deep valley studded with rich swathes of flowers. The hermitage curved like a crescent moon, following the shape of the valley below it. Arwa’s window faced another, far at the other edge of the building.

  Gulshera’s room lay at the other end of the hermitage. She’d walked the journey between their bedrooms, and knew that now. No doubt she must have looked out of her own window in the night and seen Arwa’s oil lantern burning. Perhaps she’d looked for a moment only, then gone back to bed. Perhaps she’d watched for a long time, marking the constant flicker of light in Arwa’s window, wondering what dark thoughts kept Arwa far from rest.

  Either way, she knew the exact location of Arwa’s room. She’d stared through the press of the dark at Arwa’s lantern light, deliberately, thoughtfully. It disturbed Arwa to be so watched. She stepped back from the lattice and sat on her bed, hands clenched, searching for calm. She had told Nuri she would protect herse
lf. She’d been sure she would be able to keep her secrets hidden. And yet, Gulshera had watched her. Gulshera had marked her strangeness, even if she did not truly know its cause. Arwa thought of how she’d listened to Gulshera’s words without discerning their full import, and stared about the older woman’s room wide-eyed without using any of the thought and cunning a noblewoman should sensibly employ. Fool. She was a fool.

  What else, she thought, did I miss?

  After the midday rest—which Arwa spent pacing her room back and forth, fear and fury building up within her like a steady poison—Roshana dragged her out to join a small group of widows on their daily walk. Roshana spoke to Arwa anxiously, asking how well she was settling in, and how she liked it here in Numriha, so far from her old home. Arwa clamped down on the instinct to snap at her, struggling to be gracious in response to Roshana’s steady stream of questions. She had already raised the suspicions of one widow with her night-long candle burning. She did not need to disturb another with her rage. Still, she was glad when Asima commandeered her, demanding that Arwa walk by her side instead. Asima demanded nothing of her but a steady arm and occasional murmur of understanding. That, Arwa could provide.

  She felt as if her insides were coiled tight.

  There was a gentle avenue that followed the edge of the hermitage, not quite dipping into the steeper territory of the valley. It was a smooth enough path for the widows of varying levels of health to walk it comfortably. From here, Arwa could see the valley, and also glimpse the guardswomen who walked the roof of the hermitage, on the lookout for bandits who’d normally consider a house of noblewomen a ripe target.

  “You should dress more warmly,” muttered Asima. “A thicker shawl at least, girl. There’s a bitter chill in the air this season. Even the Emperor caught a chill, I hear.”

  “Did he?”

  “Don’t listen to gossip, do you?” Arwa did not have the chance to interject that her recent bereavement had rather stood in the way of her gathering gossip, before Asima continued. “Good. You’re better than these other prattling owls, then. Pick some of that for me now.”

  Asima pointed to some gnarled vegetation.

  “Not the flowers?” Arwa asked, leaning down.

  “No, no. Not flowers. What do I need them for?”

  Arwa picked Asima green vegetation, and long grass.

  “Can you weave them together?” Asima asked.

  When Arwa shook her head, Asima clucked in response.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” she said, shaking her head. “A noble girl who can’t weave a simple basket! The Empire has truly fallen to shit, Gods save us.”

  Her words drew a startled laugh from Arwa, quickly quelled by Asima’s gimlet-eyed stare. “As you say, Aunt,” Arwa said quickly.

  “Can you embroider?” Asima demanded.

  “Yes, Aunt.”

  “But you can’t weave?”

  What followed was a demonstration of how to make a grave-token. It was a simple enough lesson, and one Arwa could follow without paying it all her attention. As she followed Asima’s directions, taking green roots into her hands and winding them into a miniature braid, she worried over the thought of Gulshera watching her lantern-bright window. She worried over the thought as one worries over a sore tooth, incessantly, unable to soothe the irritation away.

  She knows, a chill voice said in Arwa’s head. The widow knows what you are. She can see it. Your ill blood. The curse in your bones.

  She’ll have you thrown from the hermitage. She’ll set the guards on you, to hunt you like an animal.

  You know how they punish people like you.

  Gulshera couldn’t know. She couldn’t. But if she did—if she had even guessed…

  Arwa shuddered. The air suddenly felt very cold indeed.

  Gulshera was not in her room. The door was locked. Arwa waited outside it for the woman to return. Eventually, Gulshera appeared, striding along the corridor. She hadn’t been attending to prayer or to mourning, or ambling gently along a well-trodden path, as the other widows had. Her bow was at her back, her face flushed with the heat of the day.

  “Arwa,” Gulshera acknowledged, tipping her head.

  “You watched my room last night,” said Arwa, without preamble. “Why?”

  She saw Gulshera’s forehead furrow into a frown.

  “Did your mother not teach you subtlety?” Gulshera asked incredulously. “They would eat you alive in Jah Ambha, by the Emperor’s grace! Come inside.”

  Arwa followed Gulshera into her room, shutting the door behind her as the older woman swiftly divested herself of her boots and her bow, and the long jacket she wore over her tunic. Finally, when Gulshera was done, she sat by the window, and gestured for Arwa to join her.

  “I looked out of my window and saw the light in yours. For a moment,” Gulshera stressed. “No longer. I had no darker motive. I only cared about your welfare. Are you satisfied?”

  No, Arwa was not satisfied. Far from it.

  “In my experience,” Arwa said steadily, “people don’t just simply care about one another’s welfare. All actions have a purpose. I may be a child to you, Aunt, but I’ve lived long enough to know what people are.”

  “Then you’ve lived a terribly sad life,” Gulshera said, not mincing her words. “You’ll learn that we have to look after one another here. We’re not like the noblewomen you left behind, we have no need to play political games and tread on one another for the sake of our husbands or children or even ourselves. Our time of power and glory is finished.

  “Perhaps you don’t understand yet,” she continued, “that when your husband died, the part of you that shared in his world died with him. We all came here, by choice or by necessity, because we Ambhans hold our marriages more sacred than the lesser peoples of the world, and we respect our vows beyond death. We are the ghosts of who we once were, and accordingly we must take care of one another. No one else will.” Gulshera’s gaze was fixed on Arwa’s, her voice unrelenting. “You’ll think me dramatic, Arwa, but I assure you I am a realist. You must be one too. For your own sake.”

  Fine words. Strong words. But Arwa could not let the bare-fisted blow of them mislead her.

  “I know what I know,” she said. She raised her head higher, jaw firm.

  Her mother had tried to teach her subtlety. But the art of folding secrets inside words and smiles, and hiding the knife of her anger until it was already in someone’s gut, too late to be escaped—those things had never been Arwa’s strength. Flighty, she’d been called as a child, and mercurial. She wore her heart, fierce and changeable as it was, right on her skin.

  Sometimes, her mother had called her worse things. Out of love, and out of fear. Tainted. Cursed.

  You must be better than your blood, Arwa. For all our sakes.

  Her parents had needed her to make a good marriage, to wed a nobleman of immaculate reputation and stable wealth. They’d needed her to save them. Not from poverty. Not from death. But from the insidious, destructive suffering that disgrace had brought upon their family.

  They’d had no son. A man could strive to save his family, could serve valiantly in the military or ascend through the rungs of governmental service. A daughter could only hope to wed well enough to raise her position in society, and raise her family up with her.

  So Arwa had done what was necessary. For a handful of liminal years, she had learned to weave a veneer of placidity, for the sake of making herself an attractive prospect as a bride, a worthy noblewoman, better than what lay in her blood. She’d learned to smile and to be soft, to say gentle words when sharp ones came far more easily to her tongue, and in the end her hard-won calm—and her youth—had granted her the older, powerful husband her mother had hoped for her. For a time, she had been better than her true, barbed self. She’d been a commander’s wife. She’d been a noblewoman worthy of respect. Her parents had been able to hold their heads high.

  But that was before the circle of blood, and eyes like gold. Before Kamran�
�s death. Before she realized there was no running from the curse that lived in her own body: that no matter what she did, no matter how she had tried to obey her stepmother’s entreaty, she could not rise beyond what she was.

  “I know,” Arwa said, “that you have scrolls that were sent to you by an Ambhan noble family. I was a commander’s wife, Aunt. I know the seals of the great families. But I didn’t recognize the seal upon them, which suggests to me that the seal is not real. Someone of noble blood communicates with you but seeks to hide their true identity. I know you own a man’s bow more expensive than anything I have possessed in my lifetime, embellished in a manner intended to please the eyes at court. Your husband, then, was a politician and a courtier. You wear no jewels but I suspect it is not Roshana who is truly of highest standing in this hermitage. You are.”

  Arwa leaned forward, not allowing her gaze to falter.

  “You’re not a ghost of a woman, cut off from the world,” said Arwa. “You serve someone. You answer to someone powerful. And you seek to take care of me, of all people. Forgive me, if I do not think your motives are entirely benevolent.”

  “Well,” Gulshera said finally. “If we’re talking bluntly…” She leaned forward, intent, mirroring Arwa. “I am under no obligation to tell you anything. You have no power here. No standing. I know a little of you, Lady Arwa. You may have been a great commander’s wife once, but your father was disgraced—”

  “Don’t speak of my father,” Arwa said abruptly. She curled her fingers in her lap. She saw Gulshera’s gaze flicker to her fists, then up again. Reading her.

  “You are no woman of a great noble house,” Gulshera continued calmly. “Only a woman lucky to wed well. And if you truly believe I am of such high stature and influence, then you shouldn’t have spoken to me like that.”

  “I meant no disrespect.”