Something brushed her hair, and she let out a small yelp.
“It’s me,” Parvaneh said in a hushed voice. Parvaneh’s hand found Soraya’s, and Soraya gratefully latched on to it. “We’re in a part of Arzur that only pariks know about,” Parvaneh explained. “Keep your head down and don’t let go of my hand.”
They continued on, and when the ground beneath them started to incline upward, Soraya hoped they were near the end. The air here was thin and stale, and not being able to see made her feel untethered, with Parvaneh’s hand as her only anchor.
Finally, Parvaneh told her to wait as she took back her hand. Soraya heard the sound of rock scraping against rock, and shortly afterward, a stream of air and moonlight bathed her face, as pure and refreshing as any river.
Parvaneh emerged first, and Soraya followed. Outside the mountain at last, Soraya stood with her head back and filled her lungs with the night sky. And then she looked around her and was convinced she had stepped into a different world.
“Where are we?” Soraya asked with a mixture of alarm and awe.
“The forest, of course,” Parvaneh said flatly.
But Soraya had never seen forestland like this before. She had never been inside a forest at all. From the roof of Golvahar, she could see the sparse forestland at the south of the mountain—where her mother had first encountered a div. But the land there was dry, with clumps of trees scattered across the landscape, more brown than green. That was not the forest Soraya was standing in now.
The trees here were so tall, so densely packed, that Soraya could barely see more than a short distance in their direction. She didn’t even recognize these trees, with their long vines and leaves hanging down and their trunks twisted into different shapes. Even in the moonlight, she could tell how green it all was—it felt green. It smelled green. The air was thick with moisture, and everything around her felt vivid and alive, like she was standing on a pulse. It reminded her of being in the golestan, except the golestan was only a shadow of the lush forest around her.
“I didn’t know such a place existed in Atashar,” she said, walking toward the forest. She took slow, hesitant steps, like she was afraid of waking something up.
“This is the forest to the north of the mountains,” Parvaneh said behind her. “Few humans have walked here.” That explained why Soraya had never seen it from the roof. The mountains had always blocked her view of anything farther north.
A sound like fabric tearing made Soraya turn back to Parvaneh, and again, she was struck with awe. Parvaneh’s face was tilted up to the sky with a look of pained joy, like she thought she’d never see it again—and Soraya understood now why keeping her buried in a dungeon had been a terrible punishment for her. Parvaneh seemed to be made of the night. She wore it like a gown, draped over skin that shimmered in the moonlight. The sound Soraya had heard must have been Parvaneh making a tear down the back of her shift, because now her wings were free and unfurled. The moth patterns on her face were almost luminescent, not dull and faded as they appeared in the dungeon. Strands of moonlight caught in her black hair like ribbons of silver, and her eyes—those hawk’s eyes—burned like firelight. Soraya had never seen her look so inhuman—or so beautiful.
That could have been me, she thought. If she had stopped trying to hide the veins of poison under her skin, if she had pulled back her hair and shed her gloves and not been ashamed to look anyone in the eye, then would she have had this same aura of majesty? She felt a pang of resentment toward her mother, not for cursing her, but for hiding her away and not telling her the real reason why—for letting her think she was made of shame instead of beauty.
But resentment was a familiar path, one she had already taken further than she had ever thought she would, and it had brought her to this prison. If she kept taking it, where would it lead her next? As if answering her question, she heard Azad’s voice: Do you want to know why I brought you here? Because I know this is where you belong.
“Where should we go now?” she asked loudly, trying to drown out that insidious voice in her head.
“I’m not sure,” Parvaneh said with a note of worry. “I know he keeps the pariks here, but this is a large forest, and we don’t have much time.”
“We don’t have to find them tonight,” Soraya offered. “Az—the Shahmar won’t know I’m gone until he returns tomorrow night.”
Parvaneh shook her head. “You haven’t considered something. When the Shahmar returns to the palace, he’ll likely notice I’m missing. And once he does, he won’t leave the pariks unattended, or he might move them somewhere else entirely. This is our only chance.”
Parvaneh charged into the forest, and Soraya was glad to let her take the lead, because as soon as the trees enveloped her, she knew she could easily forget her purpose and wander deeper and deeper into this forest until it swallowed her whole. The beams of moonlight filtering through the canopy draped over the trees like pale silk or cobwebs, giving the forest the impression of being ancient and untouched. But I can touch it, Soraya thought. The leaves and roses of her golestan had cradled her since childhood, never refusing or shying away from her touch, and so when Soraya reached up a hand to pass through the leaves dangling above her head like diamonds, she felt like she was greeting a dear friend.
Ahead of her, Parvaneh seemed to feel the same. She had dived into the forest with purpose, but now her pace was slower, and she often reached out to lay her palm against the thick, knotted tree trunks that they passed. Her dark wings and hair blended into the forest, and she moved around trees and over roots without pause, already knowing where they would be.
Soraya didn’t have the same confident familiarity, and yet she didn’t mind when she stumbled over the uneven ground or when her hair became tangled in the slender branches of a birch tree. These brief stumbles only brought her into closer contact with the forest, allowing her to know the paper-like texture of the bark under the pads of her fingers, the rich, earthy smell of the soil, the brush of leaves against her cheek—the forest returning her caresses.
They started to pass through rows of trees with twisting trunks, their thick, ropy branches reaching across to each other, creating a kind of latticed arch overhead, when Soraya called for Parvaneh to stop.
Parvaneh turned to her. “What happened? Is something wrong?”
Soraya shook her head, but she couldn’t speak, the tears stinging her eyes threatening to overflow. She only gestured to the scenery around them—to the clumps of moss glowing in the moonlight against the dark wood of the trees, and the silhouettes of the branches tangled with one another. Somewhere in the distance, an owl was hooting, low and reverberant.
Parvaneh’s face softened, and she nodded. “I understand.”
A few stray leaves had wound themselves into Parvaneh’s hair, and her eyes glowed with bliss and moonlight. Her wings fluttered behind her, the sound as soft as the rustle of wind through the trees. If Parvaneh told her she was the forest made flesh, Soraya would have believed her.
Unable to look away from her, Soraya murmured, “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”
Parvaneh started to come toward her, the air around them heavy with dew and silence—but then she stopped and turned to her right, suddenly alert. “The wind just changed,” she said.