Girl, Serpent, Thorn (11 page)

 

Soraya was barely aware of her surroundings as she followed Azad back through the empty city streets to the palace gates. Once again, both the guard at the city walls and the guards at the palace gates let them pass despite the late hour once they saw Azad's uniform, and even through the haze of her guilt, Soraya couldn't help thinking how easy it was for Azad to make his way through the world. With his new status and his air of confidence, he could go anywhere he wanted, while Soraya couldn't even leave the palace without ending up with blood on her hands.

The yatu's face still flashed through her mind, his eyes somehow both blank and accusing at the same time, the poison in his veins spreading up the strained muscles of his neck.

Something touched her shoulder, and she flinched before realizing it was only Azad, his hand dropping away at her reaction. He said something—asked her how she was, if she wanted him to stay
with her—and she shook her head, hardly able to understand him over the roar of guilt in her head.

She wanted to cry, to have a measure of release, at least, but she felt withered and empty. The smell of death and dirt from the dakhmeh still lingered on her clothes and in her hair. It was trapped inside her lungs, along with powdered bone remains that also stained her gloves and dress. But Soraya knew that even if she bathed and changed, even if she burned these clothes, she would carry the dakhmeh with her for the rest of her life. That was why the living should never enter the dakhmeh—there was no way to truly leave it behind.

They parted ways outside the golestan. Soraya entered alone, using the key that she had slipped in her sash when she had left earlier this evening, but she couldn't bring herself to continue on to her room. Her body didn't want to move, and she wondered if she would still be standing in the dakhmeh over the yatu's body if Azad hadn't been there to lead her away. She had always thought guilt was an emotion, but now she understood that guilt was a sickness, a fever. It made her feel like all her muscles were being stretched beyond their limits, her body twisting itself around this new and terrible truth.

She was a murderer. She was a monster.

Soraya looked around at her garden. It was the furthest place she could imagine from the dakhmeh—teeming with life, the air fresh and clean with the scent of dew and roses. It was all life that she had nurtured herself, with her own hands. It was life that she couldn't kill.

It was an elaborate and beautiful lie.

Without realizing what she was doing, Soraya shed her gloves, strode over to the nearest rose, and tore it from its stem, crumpling it in her hand. As long as she had this garden, she could convince herself that she was good, that she was not designed solely for wickedness, for killing. But tonight she had learned how easy it
was to become something cruel and murderous, how much effort it took to be good. To be small. They were the same thing for her, weren't they?

With a muffled cry, she lunged for the roses and began ripping them all from their stems, not even caring when the thorns pierced her skin. She moved through the entire garden in a frenzy of destruction, pulling the rosebushes apart and crumpling them underfoot until she had laid waste to it all. She knew she'd feel ashamed when she confronted the wreckage in the morning, but now—
now
—she felt nothing but the purest relief. She lost herself, and yet for the first time she
was
herself, more than she had ever been before.

She was breathless when it was done, her hands smeared with dirt and red streaks that were either blood or crushed petals, her dress ruined. The grass was littered with crumpled roses and broken stems. Anyone who saw the golestan now would think a storm had struck.

There was no sound but the rush of blood raging in her ears, but it all went silent as something gray and fluttering landed on a bare stem in front of her.
Parvaneh,
she thought, naming both the creature on the stem and the face that came instantly to her mind.

Even now, Parvaneh was waiting for her, still holding her stolen glove hostage.
Come back for it,
she had said, and Soraya felt the pull of those words as strongly as if there were a cord tied between her and Parvaneh, one monster linked to another. She was the only one here who could make Soraya still feel human. Not even Azad could offer her that. He was too innocent, his hands too clean.

Soraya reached out, one fingertip hovering over the moth's wing. Would it matter anymore if she killed it? What was a moth or butterfly compared to a human being? But before she could make that choice, the moth fluttered away to safety, leaving Soraya feeling strangely bereft.

Come back for it
.

Soraya slipped out the golestan door, heading toward the secret entrance in the stairway that she had shown Azad. She understood now that it wasn't the golestan she needed tonight—not the comfort of her roses or even the assuring words of Azad.

What she needed tonight was another monster.

The cavern was almost completely dark, the brazier emitting only a few sparks of light. Soraya was glad. The darkness was effacing; it hid the streaks of powdered bone on her dress, the bleeding scrapes on her hands, and the poison under her skin. Here, she was nothing but a voice.

Or so she believed until she heard Parvaneh say, “You've had an eventful night, I see.”

Soraya squinted through the bars until she saw the inhuman sheen of Parvaneh's eyes. “Of course you can see in the dark,” Soraya muttered.

Parvaneh walked up to the bars, more visible now that she was closer. “You came back. Does that mean you have the feather?”

A wave of anger burned through Soraya, warming her cold hands. “You knew from the beginning that the feather could lift my curse,” she said, her voice little more than a tired rasp.

Parvaneh's face fell, her shoulders slumping. “So you found out,” she said, her voice dull with disappointment.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Because you never would have brought me the feather if I had.”

“You were
using
me, then?”

“And what were you doing with me?” Parvaneh said sharply. “If I had told you from the start how to lift your curse, you never would have come back here or spared me another thought. We owe nothing to each other except for the deal that we made. You would bring me the feather, and I would tell you how to use it to lift your curse. I would have kept my promise.”

Soraya shook her head in disgust. “This was all a game to you.”

“
No,
” Parvaneh said, her voice ringing through the cavern. Her hands clutched the bars so tightly that her veins stood out. “This is no game to me, Soraya. I need that feather. I don't know why you bothered coming back without it—did you think you could trick me into revealing the divs' secret plans? I've kept far more precious secrets to myself while enduring worse than this dungeon. So if you didn't bring me the feather—”

“I can't bring it to you,” Soraya snapped. She gestured to her face, to the veins pulsing under her skin. “Don't you think I would have used it by now if I could?”

Parvaneh held Soraya's gaze, the eerie glow of her eyes becoming stronger as she said, “But you know where it is, don't you?”

Soraya let her silence answer for her.

“It's not that you can't find it, but that you can't take it. Why?”

“If I took it,” Soraya said, “I would have to betray my family and everything I've ever known.”

“Why should you care about them?” Parvaneh nearly shouted. “Are they truly your family if they've failed to accept you as their own? If they cast you out and treat you with disdain? Why do they still matter to you?” Her face was contorted, her voice frantic, and if Soraya didn't know better, she would think Parvaneh was on the verge of tears. She wondered what was fueling this sudden burst of emotion, but whatever sympathy she felt shriveled up when Parvaneh said, “You'll never lift your curse if you're unwilling to face any hardship.”

“Unwilling?” Soraya spat back. “How do you think I found out where the feather is? I stepped inside a dakhmeh tonight. I spoke to a yatu, and he tried to attack me. I had to—”

Her voice broke before the words left her throat, and then, finally, the tears came, pouring out of her with such violent force that she sank to the ground, her forehead resting on the dirt and stone as if she were prostrating herself before some divine authority.

She let the tears come—she felt like she was expelling the dakhmeh from her lungs. And when she was finished, wrung dry at last, she was no longer tense or angry. She was almost drowsy, and she thought she could probably curl up there on the dungeon floor and fall asleep.

She looked up to find Parvaneh now sitting on the floor across from her, watching her intensely. “What happened at the dakhmeh, Soraya?”

She heard Azad saying,
Let's leave this place and put it out of our minds
. But why else had Soraya come here, if not to bury her confession in this dungeon? And who better than a demon to hear that confession and not judge her?

“I went there for answers,” Soraya said, the words spilling out as easily as the tears had. “I asked the yatu where to find the feather, but the answer he gave me was … impossible.” Soraya closed her eyes, not even the darkness of the cavern enough to protect her from the truth of herself. “What I did find out tonight was what happens when I touch a living human being. I found out that I'm capable of killing—not as a mistake, but with purpose, with intent.” She swallowed. “With rage.”

She opened her eyes then, because she knew she would find no judgment on Parvaneh's face. But what she didn't expect was for Parvaneh to drop her gaze when Soraya looked at her. She seemed distracted, staring at a spot on the ground, her forehead creased in thought, lost in some private conversation that Soraya couldn't hear. Finally, she looked up at Soraya and said, “So you've made your choice?”

Soraya shook her head. “There is no choice. I've always wondered who I would have been without my curse, what kind of person I would be if I hadn't grown up hidden and ashamed. But after tonight, I wonder what kind of person I'm becoming, what this path is doing to me. I was always afraid the poison would make me a monster, but what if trying to get rid of it makes me more of a monster than I was before?”

Parvaneh didn't respond. She was staring at Soraya with something heavy and unreadable in her eyes. And again, Soraya found herself wondering what kind of life Parvaneh had lived before now—what was the “far worse” she had endured? Why did Soraya think she could read her own remorse written in the lines and patterns on Parvaneh's face? A delicate sympathy floated in the silence between them, like ashes falling after a fire had burned itself out.

“Then don't do it,” Parvaneh said at last. Her voice rang out in the cavern with the clarity of conviction, and she shifted closer to the bars. “You were wrong when you said there is no choice. You
made
a choice. Now embrace it. You are the most powerful and protected being in Atashar. Why would you want to give that up? Why make yourself vulnerable? This is a dangerous world.”

Soraya thought again of the yatu—but this time she saw him not dead but alive, bending over her, tying her wrists together while her eye throbbed. Hadn't she thrilled with the power of her curse when she had grabbed his wrist? Hadn't she marveled at how easy it was to bring her attacker to his knees? Without her curse, he would have killed Azad and held her for ransom—but without her curse, she wouldn't have been there in the first place.

“It's because of you and all your talk of power that I killed the yatu,” Soraya snapped. It was an unfair accusation, but it comforted her a little. “That was what ran through my head tonight. I thought I was being powerful when I killed him, but all I've done is lose a piece of myself. It's not power to be
dangerous,
to have to hide away behind walls so you don't shame your family while everyone you've ever known leaves you behind. I want my family. I want companionship. I want—” But the word
love
refused to move beyond her lips, too new and precious to lay itself bare for mockery.

Parvaneh thought a moment, and then said, “Perhaps you're simply keeping the wrong company. You would be welcome among my sisters. If you freed me now, I could take you to them. You could have a new family.”

Soraya let out a disbelieving laugh. She thought at first that Parvaneh was toying with her, but her tone had been solemn, her words sincere. “You want me to forsake my family and join the divs?”

“Not the divs—the pariks.”

“I still don't understand the difference,” Soraya muttered as she pushed herself up from the ground.

“You should ask your mother. She knows.”

Those words made Soraya freeze. “What do you mean by that?”

Parvaneh rose from the ground, her movements more labored than Soraya would have expected. What happened to a div who was exposed to esfand for this long?

“Haven't you wondered why your mother lied to you about your curse? It's because she's the one who did this to you.”

“You're lying,” Soraya said. “You said the pariks did this to me.”

“At your mother's request. She brought you to the pariks wrapped in a blanket of stars and asked for this curse. Are you curious to know how it's done? It's the blood of a div that made you poisonous. If a human bathes in blood from a div's heart, that human takes on properties of that div. You must have had only a few drops.”

Soraya tried to soak in the words like they were rain and she was parched earth, so little did she know about her own history. And yet, each word was a tiny stab, further confirmation that she shared a link to demons. “My mother would have no reason to want such a thing.”