But Soraya wasn’t capable of fear right now. She had been afraid to come into the city at all, but this outing had quickened her blood and quieted her fears. She was here, outside the palace, in the world, and she had harmed no one. She could live without someone or something dying for it.
“You’re not tired, are you?” Azad asked her, his pace slowing slightly.
“No,” she said. “I’ve never felt less tired in my life.”
She thought she saw a flash of a smile, and they continued on.
They moved toward the setting sun, and by the time they reached the large wooden door set into the eastern wall of the city, that sun had nearly dipped below the horizon. The night guard took a glance at Azad’s red tunic and let them pass without question.
It would be another hour’s walk to reach the dakhmeh, which stood alone on a low hill, a safe distance from the living. Azad had brought a lantern with them, and as the sun disappeared, he lit and raised it to light their way. The light didn’t extend to the dakhmeh, however, and so all it did was illuminate the dry, cracked ground around them.
Soraya had thought moving through the city would be the hardest part of this journey, but with each step that took her farther away from the city walls, her breathing became more and more labored, as if a weight were pressing down on her chest. She tried to look back to see how far they had come, but the city was lost to the night now. Outside the lantern’s wavering ring of light, there was only darkness all around them, stretching on without end.
On the roof, the whole world had been laid out in front of her, and she had been able to map the distance from the city to the dakhmeh easily. But now that she was no longer watching from above, she felt like she had shrunk down to the size of one of the insects in her garden, walking an impossibly long trail in a world that was too big for her. Had she found the boundaries of her room and her garden suffocating before? Had she felt she couldn’t breathe in the passages behind her walls? She could have laughed at herself—first it was not enough, and now it was too much.
Azad must have heard her increasingly ragged breathing, because his voice broke through the silence and the darkness, saying only, “Tell me a story.”
His words brought her out of her head, and she looked at his profile, lit softly by the lantern light. He was trying to distract her, to make the journey shorter, and she was grateful to him for it.
And so she told him the story of the princess who let down her hair for her lover to climb, and when it was over, Azad asked for another. This time she told the story of a brave hero stronger than ten men who bested dragons and rescued a foolish shah from the hands of divs.
She waited to hear him ask for yet another story, but this time he said, “Tell me your favorite story. The one you’ve read over and over again.”
Soraya wanted to protest that the first story she’d told had been her favorite—but it wasn’t the one she’d revisited the most over the years. It wasn’t the one that haunted her dreams night after night. It wasn’t the one that she felt was a part of her, so much so that she hesitated now, in case it would reveal too much of herself.
But as always, once the Shahmar entered her mind, she couldn’t think of anything else.
“There was and there was not,” she began, in a voice that seemed both hers and not hers, “a prince who was what every young man should be. He was handsome and courteous and brave, but he was also proud and curious. One day, the prince captured a div, but he didn’t vanquish it. Instead, he kept it locked up in a cave, and visited it every day, demanding the secrets of its knowledge.”
She paused, knowing both of them must be thinking of Soraya’s visit to the div locked away in the dungeon.
“Before long, the div convinced the prince that he would make a better ruler than his father or his elder brothers. And the young man agreed—after all, didn’t he know even the secrets of the divs? And so the prince slew his father and brothers, and took the crown for himself.
“The prince—now the shah—ruled for a time in peace, despite his bloody coronation. But he still visited the div, and over time, the prince noticed that he was changing. His bones shifted, his skin grew scaly and rough, and his heart grew violent. He hungered for war, for destruction, and he began to rule by terror and force, demanding the senseless sacrifice of two men every month to quench his desire for bloodshed. The act of murder that had made him king had now also twisted him into a div himself—”
Her voice broke, and she froze where she was, trying to collect herself, her throat burning as she tried to hold back angry tears. From beside her, she heard Azad say, “I’ve heard the rest. You don’t have to go on.”
The rest of the story was about her ancestor, the adopted son of the simorgh, who had led a rebellion against the Shahmar and chased him off into exile, where he was either killed by other divs or lived long enough to take his revenge against the simorgh, depending on which version you believed. And yet, even though that was her family’s origin, that wasn’t the part of the story Soraya felt most connected to.
“Why does that story affect you so?” Azad asked her, his voice gentle.
She didn’t want to answer, but she wouldn’t have begun the story at all if she hadn’t been prepared to face this question.
She held her arms out to him, pulling back her sleeves so they both could see the dark green veins running down her wrists. “Do you have to ask?” she whispered. “Doesn’t it sound familiar to you?” She pulled her sleeves back down. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve wondered if the same thing would happen to me—if the poison was only the beginning, if I was going to grow more and more dangerous until I wasn’t human anymore.” She had thought she would have to fight to get the words out, but she found now that it was easy to say them. They were less frightening aloud than they were in her mind.
“And so I told myself,” she continued, “that as long as I was good, never angry or envious, I wouldn’t become a monster like the Shahmar.”
Azad swallowed, his eyes moving over the veins on her face and neck. “And have you been successful?”
She lowered her head, looking for reassurance from the cracks in the earth. But the way they branched out reminded her too much of her veins and the poison inside them. “I don’t know,” she said. She thought of all the dead insects in her garden, of the night she had been tempted to hurt Ramin, of amber eyes staring in the dark. “I try to hold myself back from doing any real harm, but sometimes I feel like my thoughts are steeped in poison, and that it’s only a matter of time before I lose control over them … or over myself. I dream about it sometimes—I see myself transforming into something else, and the Shahmar stands over me, laughing—” She shut her eyes, but in doing so, she only conjured up the image of the Shahmar.
She hadn’t realized she’d been plucking at her gloves until Azad put his hand over hers, stilling her anxious movements. “Look at me, Soraya.”
Her eyes opened, and instead of the Shahmar’s triumphant face, she saw only Azad. His gaze was focused on her with an intensity that made her breath catch, the flame from the lantern flickering in his eyes in a way that reminded her of Parvaneh. The furrow in his brow made him seem almost angry, and she tried to look away, but his hand tightened over hers and she held still. “Stories lie,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “You’re not a monster.”