Soraya looked at her in surprise, forgetting Azad’s revelation and her feelings of betrayal. Parvaneh had risked returning to the place of her captivity, risked doing so when Azad was still there, even risked changing forms, to bring Soraya some peace of mind—and a reminder of home. She stared down at the hyacinth in her hands, unable to look at Parvaneh. “You endangered yourself, your freedom, for—” For me.
Parvaneh brushed some of Soraya’s hair away, her fingertips lingering on Soraya’s neck. “You have faith in me,” she said softly. “It’s been a long time since anyone has. I wish I could give you more.”
Soraya lifted her head and froze as she found Parvaneh closer to her than she had expected, their faces mere breaths apart. Parvaneh’s eyes were on Soraya’s lips, and Soraya couldn’t bring herself to move away as Parvaneh leaned closer—as their lips met.
Her kiss with Azad had been devouring, almost violent, but this was different, delicate—as delicate as a moth’s wing. Soraya felt like a cat stretched out in a patch of sunlight, luxuriating in the softness of Parvaneh’s mouth, in the slow drag of Parvaneh’s fingertips along the length of her neck. Parvaneh seemed to be trying to memorize the feel of Soraya’s skin, and Soraya, remembering the sight of her tattered wings, wondered when Parvaneh had last experienced any kind of touch that was not in violence.
But that thought only made her remember the violence that Parvaneh herself had done.
Soraya broke off abruptly, standing and practically bolting to the other side of the fire, away from Parvaneh.
“Is something wrong?” Parvaneh asked with a tilt of her head. Her voice went cold as she asked, “Do you wish I were him instead?”
Soraya shot her an incredulous glare. “Of course not,” she said. “I only wish you were who I thought you were.”
“And who is that?”
“Someone without blood on her hands.”
Parvaneh hesitated before replying, “What is this about?”
Soraya shook her head. “You’re only asking me that because you don’t want to give away your secret unless you have to. But maybe if you had told me, if you hadn’t let me hear it from him—”
“Hear what, Soraya? The Shahmar is a liar, in case you haven’t noticed. He might have told you any number of terrible things about me. He and I have known each other a long time, and we’ve seen the worst in each other. I didn’t know you expected me to give you a full account of so many years.”
“Not a full account,” Soraya said. “Only the beginning. You were the div who convinced him to murder his family. You were the div who turned him into a monster in every way. All of this is your fault!”
“I know it’s my fault!” Parvaneh snapped, rising to her feet. “Why do you think I’m trying so hard to fix my mistake? I’m the reason my sisters have had to go into hiding. They won’t even take me back until I’ve repaired the damage I’ve done. And this is the first time I’ve even come close to stopping him, because I’ve been his prisoner for over a century!” Her anger dissipated, her face contorting in pain as her wings drooped behind her. When she was composed again, she said, “At first, I didn’t tell you because you were my only chance at freedom, and at stopping the Shahmar. Then you defended me to Parisa and the others…” She looked away, avoiding Soraya’s gaze. “I didn’t want you to regret that decision, or to look at me the way they do. I wanted you to keep looking at me the way you did last night.”
Soraya wrapped her arms around her waist and looked down at the ground. She didn’t know what Parvaneh would see on her face right now, and so she didn’t want to look at her at all, not until she sorted through her feelings. “What made you do it?” she said to the ground, an echo of the question she had asked Azad. “Why did you tell him to kill his family?”
“I didn’t tell him to kill anyone, not directly. He had captured me, bound my wings so I couldn’t transform, and refused to release me until I told him something useful. So I did what any div would do—I tried to destroy him, however I could. I sought out his weaknesses, his insecurities, and I reminded him of them at every opportunity. I didn’t know what he would choose to do.”
Soraya lifted her head to ask, “But did it matter to you? Once you knew what he’d done, did you feel any regret for all that bloodshed?”
Parvaneh held her gaze. “Do you want me to lie to you?”
“Never.”
“No, it didn’t matter to me. And if you think it would, then you’re right—I’m not who you think I am.” She turned away, running her hands through her hair in frustration. Her shoulders softened and she stepped around the fire, coming to stand in front of Soraya. “I may not care about him or his family,” she said, “but I do have my loyalties, and I am true to them. I care deeply about my sisters … and I care about you. Why do you think I tried to stop you from taking the simorgh’s feather toward the end? It was because I couldn’t do the same thing to you that I did to him, even if it meant being his prisoner forever.”
A chilling thought occurred to Soraya then. “Were you the one who told him about me? About my curse?”
“No,” Parvaneh said at once. “I was still his prisoner when your mother took you to the pariks. But I was there when he interrogated the parik who told him. That was how I knew about you.”
Soraya’s arms tightened around her waist. “But you were the one who told him to use the div’s blood. You must have known what would happen to him.”
Parvaneh shook her head, mouth pursed in disgust. “I was angry. He had become shah and he still refused to let me go—and then had the gall to ask me for help. I knew about the properties of a div’s heart’s blood, but I had never seen a full transformation. I didn’t realize how complete it would be, or what kind of div he would hunt down.
“After he was deposed, I managed to escape and return to the pariks for a time. But when he grew in power and began to hunt us down, I had to tell them what I did. They exiled me, and told me I could only return to them when I had undone my mistake. The Shahmar caught me soon after that, and I thought that he would kill me, but instead he took his anger out on me in other, smaller ways.” Her wings twitched. “I told myself then that I would stop at nothing to defeat him and undo my foolish, reckless mistake.”
The words resonated more deeply than Soraya wanted to admit, and she stared down, hunching over into herself as she had always done before to find comfort when there was no one to give it. Parvaneh’s bare feet approached her, and then Parvaneh’s hands gently unwrapped Soraya’s arms from around her waist, and held Soraya’s hands in her own.
Soraya lifted her head to meet Parvaneh’s intense, amber stare. “Do I have your forgiveness?” Parvaneh said. “Are you still with me?”
It seemed a simple enough question, but Soraya found it to be as tangled and impenetrable as a thicket. She and Parvaneh and Azad—their choices, their mistakes, their ambitions—were all entwined, inseparable from each other. How could she forgive Parvaneh without forgiving Azad? But how could she forgive Azad without forgiving herself? Maybe they all deserved nothing but one another, a constant cycle of betrayals.