Soraya abruptly halted, forcing Azad to stop and look back at her. “Are you accusing me of something? Please let me know what it is you think I’ve been able to do while tucked away in the room you put me in, unable to leave without fear of losing my life.” The words came out harsher than she intended, but the only way she could think to avoid his suspicion was to face it directly.
He held her gaze, then shook his head and kept walking. When Soraya was at his side again, he said, “No, I suppose you couldn’t have done anything. But if you see her or if she comes to you, let me know at once.”
She didn’t respond, hoping he would take her silence as agreement.
“Turn left here,” he said after they had continued a little longer. They went down a different passage and stopped at a door in the wall. But unlike the door to her room, this one was pure metal, with no space between the edges of the door and the wall. The door also had a keyhole, which Azad used the tip of one claw to unlock.
The security of this room gave Soraya hope—perhaps he was going to take her to the feather now after all.
But when the two of them stepped inside, all thought of the feather briefly fled Soraya’s mind. Everywhere Soraya looked were relics of the past—vases and painted jars, goblets and gold-rimmed dishes, tapestries and piles of coins. And all of them bore the image of the same man—Azad, before his transformation.
She walked up to a tapestry hanging on the wall to study the image of a young man hunting. She recognized him from the profile that she had found so beautiful, her eyes tracing the curve of his neck up to his face. He was riding a horse, a bow pulled taut in his hands, with a fierce look in his eye—a hunter tracking his prey. She knew that look. She had seen it on that first day, when he had spotted her on the roof.
When she turned to face him again, he was watching her. And even though he was as monstrous as ever, he seemed pathetic to her then, standing in the middle of this shrine to his lost humanity.
“Look around you,” he said. “What do you see?”
“You.”
“What else?”
She walked around the cavern, eyes glancing over the hoard of useless treasure, at the image of Azad engraved and carved and painted on each relic. She found a plate on the ground, chipped around the edges, but with a clear image of Azad in the center, and she picked it up, frowning. It was a garden scene, etched in gold. Azad was seated on a rug, under the shade of the pavilion, and all around the pavilion were rosebushes. She brushed one of the roses with her thumb, and the indentations of the petals felt like a spiral.
What else?
I see a selfish child who betrayed his family.
I see a demon in the making.
Soraya’s hands clenched tighter over the plate. She had the urge to throw it to the ground or dash it against the wall. She wanted to destroy everything in this room, not stopping until the images were unrecognizable and there were no longer any surfaces in which to see her reflection.
She didn’t hear Azad coming nearer, but he was suddenly in front of her, prying the gold plate from her grip as if he sensed what she wanted to do to it. “You’d like to know more about who I am, who I used to be? You already know him. You are him.”
“Why did you do it?” she asked, looking up at him. It was one of the questions she had planned to ask to guide the conversation, but now she found that she truly, desperately wanted to know the answer. “What made you decide to destroy your family?”
He sighed and turned away from her, moving toward a pile of rolled-up rugs and tapestries. He knocked the pile down with one wave of his arm and picked up the tapestry at the very bottom. He gestured for Soraya to come see, and unrolled the tapestry along the ground.
Soraya came to his side and looked down at the woven image before her. A shah, middle-aged and full-bearded, sat in a throne at the center of the tapestry. Surrounding him were five younger men of different heights and ages. Soraya looked at each one in turn, but none of them resembled Azad. All along the edge of the tapestry were dark singe marks, as if someone had decided to burn it but then changed his mind, several times.
“Are … are those…？” Soraya couldn’t finish the question, unsure of what reaction it would draw from him.
“My father and brothers,” Azad said.
“Was this before you were born?”
He snorted. “No,” he said. “I was the youngest, still a child, but that’s not why I’m missing. All five of my brothers were destined to rule—the eldest as shah, the younger four as satraps of rich provinces. But I was born under bad stars. The astrologist told my father that if I ever ruled even the smallest province, dire consequences would follow. My father took this advice very seriously. While I watched my brothers become the princes they were meant to be, I was allowed no battle training, no education in affairs of state, no sense of my future at all.” He kicked the tapestry aside, letting the edges curl up over his dead brothers’ faces. “I wanted so much to prove the stars wrong. I used to stay up through the night and read in secret or practice on the training grounds on my own, desperate for any opportunity to impress my father. He was never cruel to me, but I knew how he must have seen me. I knew that I was…”
He trailed off, unable to find the words, and so Soraya provided them: “You were your family’s shame.” No wonder he had found her so easily at Golvahar. He knew where to look for someone who felt unwanted.
Something strange happened then. Perhaps Soraya only imagined it, but for a moment, Azad’s eyes changed—no longer cold and yellow, but the rich brown she remembered. And in that brief time, she saw in them the kind of self-loathing that seemed exclusively human. Once more, she became aware of the patches of skin showing through the scales, the pieces of Azad that refused to be swallowed up by the demon. She wondered if his transformation was even complete, or if he still woke sometimes to find another patch of skin covered in scales, another piece of himself gone.
“And then I met the div,” he continued, his voice hardening. “It’s much as you once told me—one night, when I went out riding in secret, I caught a div. But I didn’t want to take her to the palace with me yet. Instead, I kept the div trapped in a cave, and I returned every night to learn her secrets, hoping that I would discover something invaluable to present to my father. But you know as well as I do that when you learn a div’s secrets, the div learns your secrets, too. The div became my most constant companion, and so when she began to tell me that I would be a better ruler than my father or any of my brothers, I believed her. When she told me how furious I must be at my treatment, I became furious. She made me question whether the astrologist’s warning was even true, or if my father was lying to me for his own purposes.” He took a halting breath before continuing. “And so I approached a faction of powerful nobles and soldiers opposed to my father’s rule, and suggested they should help me replace him. I had decided that if I could not rule with the blessing of my father or the stars, I would defy them all, no matter whose blood I had to spill.”
Soraya didn’t know where to look—everywhere, she saw Azad, and so everywhere, she saw herself. She shut her eyes, but in the darkness behind her eyelids, she saw the young man she had known with blood on his hands, slaughtering everyone in his path to the throne. She tore her mind away from the image, reminding herself of her plan to find the feather.