But Parvaneh would sleep forever if Soraya didn’t do something to help her. As for her mother, Soraya already knew what choice she would make. And Tahmineh was the only person Soraya knew who had beaten the Shahmar at his own game.
Are you like your mother? Parisa had asked her.
Soraya clutched the blanket in her hands. Yes, she thought. Yes, I still am.
She shoved the blanket back under the bed, went to the door, and began pounding her fists on it as loudly as she could. Within seconds, the door opened, and a div with spotted fur like a leopard’s stood frowning at her. “Yes?” the div said.
“I’d like a bath,” Soraya told her.
The div nodded once and shut the door on Soraya.
She paced nervously as she waited, wondering if the div had simply nodded to appease her, when the door opened again, and the same div brought in a metal tub and two buckets of steaming water.
Cold water would have worked better for her purpose, but she didn’t know how to ask for it without warranting suspicion, so she thanked the div and waited for her to leave.
Once Soraya heard the click of the lock again, she dragged a chair to the door to block the handle as an additional precaution. If anyone tried to enter and Azad questioned her about it, she could say she wanted privacy for her bath.
After retrieving the blanket, she poured the steaming water into the tub. She focused on the task like it was something routine—like when she was working in her garden—concentrating on each action so that there was no room for thought. Otherwise she might forget that she had chosen this—that at one time she had even missed seeing those green veins under her skin and knowing she was untouchable.
She dipped the blanket into the water and watched the water slowly turn pink. When she thought the water was as pink as it would ever become, and the water cool enough to touch, she removed the blanket, undressed, and stepped into the bath.
The water came up to her knees, and she looked down at her feet, wondering if even now, they were becoming steeped in poison. It had only taken a few drops to curse her the first time, but she didn’t know if the blood would lose some potency when it was diluted with water. This was the best she could do with her limited time and resources: submerge herself entirely in the blood-tinged water, and hope that it would have some effect.
Soraya sat in the tub, letting the water cover her entirely except for her head. Her heart was beating wildly, urging her to flee, but she ignored it. She tried to ignore every thought and every impulse, every doubt and regret. This was the choice she had made, and even now, it was possibly too late to change her mind. She drew in a long breath, closed her eyes, and dunked her head under the water so that every bit of her skin was submerged.
She counted to ten, and when she surfaced again, the breath she’d been holding came out as a sob, loud and almost painful. She buried her face in her hands, tears spilling from her eyes, her body heaving, like something was trying to escape from inside her.
When the tears slowed, and her breath no longer felt like it was being torn from her body, she looked down at her wrists. The veins there were not dark green, or even particularly noticeable at all. Maybe it would take time before the curse took hold, she thought, and she stood and used the other bucket of water to rinse the blood off of her. She wrapped herself in one of her dressing gowns, her wardrobe still intact, and looked down at the pink water in the bath with a frown.
Would a div notice or care that the water was pink? Soraya could say she had cut herself by accident, but there was nothing in the room sharp enough to make the lie believable, and she was ill at ease not knowing what would happen to the rest of the bloody mixture, assuming it did still work. Perhaps that was why her mother had kept the blanket all these years instead of trying to burn or dispose of it.
In the end, she decided to drag the tub to the garden doors and pour the water out into the golestan. It streamed through the crack in the door, down the steps, and onto the grass below. If anyone asked her why the tub was empty, she would say she used it to water the golestan, unsure if anyone had done so since she’d been gone. It was true, in a way.
As she waited for her attending div to return, she kept sneaking glances down at the insides of her arms, but she still found no change.
At last the div came, without any comment on the missing water in the tub, and Soraya murmured something polite as she came forward to help. She handed the div one of the buckets, allowing their knuckles to brush against each other, sucking in a breath as she waited to see what would happen in this final and most definitive test.
The div took the buckets and the tub without a word and left the room very much alive.
Soraya’s last resort had failed.
27
A beam of sunlight woke her the next morning—which was strange, because her curtains had definitely been closed the night before.
Soraya blinked, shading her eyes from the sun streaming through her windows. It had been a restless night as she tried to decide what to do now that both of her plans—the simorgh and the blood—had failed. All night long, Azad’s words kept returning to her: I will slaughter your family as easily as I slaughtered mine. What was the right choice, then? To refuse him, knowing that her family might die for it, or to kill her brother in order to save everyone else? Was Nasu’s solution the only one left? She had drifted into sleep eventually, but still without an answer.
She sat up, looking toward the source of the light—and saw that the golestan had come to her rescue.
One of the double doors to the golestan had been forced open, allowing the light to spill in, along with a tangle of thorns and roses that wound around the door and stretched across the floor. Soraya climbed out of bed and went to look more closely.
The last time she had seen the golestan, it had still been a ruin from when she’d destroyed it. Now it was more than restored—it was overflowing. The rosebushes had spread out across the length of the garden and were climbing up, so thick that the walls were almost entirely covered. But it wasn’t the roses that caught Soraya’s attention—it was the thorns. Her rosebushes had always had thorns, but the thorns growing from them now were longer and sharper than they had been, more like needles than the stubby thorns she remembered. Soraya bent down to examine one of the roses that had spilled into the room, cupping it in her palms. She almost dropped it immediately, because she could have sworn the rose was pulsing against her skin, like a misshapen heart in her hands. And there was something else, something that made her know without question what had caused this sudden overgrowth. The veins on the underside of the rose’s petals, usually white, were now a dark, venomous green.
She had disposed of the bathwater by pouring it into the garden—and now the garden was imbued with the blood of a div.
Soraya opened the door and walked outside, careful not to touch any of the wicked-looking thorns. She knew with a certainty she couldn’t explain that those thorns would be poisonous to the touch. Like I should be, she thought. But then, was it possible that the blood had simply needed time to take effect? The golestan had grown overnight; perhaps she had been too hasty to call her plan a failure.
Her veins were still normal, but she immediately began to look for some stray insect to touch. Navigating the golestan was difficult—the thorns left little room for safe passage—but she was used to shrinking herself down and moving through narrow spaces. She found a patch of uncovered grass and knelt, digging until she found a wriggling pink worm. She brushed her finger against it, waiting several breaths to see if it would stop moving, but her touch had no effect at all.