At the thought of Azad, her head jerked up, and Soraya briefly thought she had been transported somewhere else. Azad was still there, backed into one corner of the roof, and he was looking at her in awe—and unmistakable jealousy. But all around him, climbing over the edge of the roof, were vines from the golestan. They were spreading out along the surface of the roof like a green web, moving closer and closer to Azad, surrounding him until he had nowhere to turn. Soraya could feel the golestan in her blood—in the div’s blood that joined them both. There was something alive about it, and it seemed to know what she would want, what she would do, like an extension of her thoughts.
After checking her mother’s pulse, Soraya rose, slowly approaching Azad. He looked nervously at the vines that kept inching closer to him, creating a cage of thorns around him.
“I wouldn’t touch them if I were you,” Soraya said.
He looked up at the sound of her voice and spoke her name under his breath. He tried to move toward her, but the thorns only grew closer around him.
“Don’t you like me this way?” she said. The vines parted for her, creating a path to him. “Beautiful yet deadly, remember?”
“I remember,” he said, his voice strained as he tried to keep the thorns from touching his skin.
She stood directly in front of him, close enough to touch. Here was the great Shahmar, that monster of her nightmares, the demon who had terrorized her mother and deceived her into betraying her family. He was nothing now but a defenseless young man, fragile and exposed, so easy to destroy. Soraya reached a hand out to him, the thorns on the back of her hand moving closer to his throat …
“Soraya.”
Parvaneh’s voice was clear and loud behind her, but Soraya couldn’t make herself turn away. “My mother?” she said.
“I found the feather. She’ll heal now.”
Soraya did feel relief, but it was buried under something else, something sharp and hungry. Her eyes never leaving Azad’s throat, she said, “Does that mean you think I should spare him?”
“No.”
Her voice was closer now, and Soraya felt Parvaneh’s hand rest on her shoulder, her fingers fitting around the thorns. If Parvaneh wondered at her changed appearance, she must have decided that now was not the time for explanations. “I won’t stop you,” Parvaneh said, “but I don’t want you to do it like this, in anger, so quickly that you barely realize what you’re doing. I struck at him like that once, without thinking of the consequences, and I regretted it long after. If you’re going to kill him, you should want to do it even with a clear mind. So I’m asking you—are you sure you want to do this?”
Of course I do, she wanted to say, but she forced herself to lower her hand. She pulled away some of the vines encaging Azad, letting them wind around her arm in a kind of caress, as she considered the question more carefully. “What do you think, then?” she said to him. “Should I kill you, or should I do to you what you did to me and Parvaneh? Should I keep you locked away with nothing but your guilt for company? It would be fitting, wouldn’t it?”
Azad kept his eyes on her, his fear hardening into defiance, like liquid metal becoming a blade. “Lock me away if you will, but don’t think that you’ll break me so easily. I waited for over two hundred years to take back my throne—what makes you think chains and thorns will stop me this time?” He shook his head. “I won’t stop, Soraya. I won’t surrender, and I won’t stop fighting you until I see every single member of your family dead and—”
It happened so quickly that Soraya didn’t understand at first. Parvaneh had pulled her aside by the sash around her waist, and something blurred past her, and Azad was gasping in pain, the handle of his dagger sticking out from just below his ribs.
“Enough,” came a voice from behind them, and Soraya turned to find Tahmineh staggering to her feet. The blood-soaked feather was on the ground beside her, and there was nothing left of her wound except for a silvery, feather-shaped scar across her throat. Parvaneh must have noticed her moving for the dagger and pulled Soraya away so that Tahmineh’s aim would land true.
Tahmineh came to them, her eyes never leaving Azad. He had slumped down to the ground, his back against the parapet. While Soraya had gaped at her mother, Parvaneh had already retrieved the dagger, and Azad’s bloodied hands tried to cover the expanding circle of red above his stomach.
“You were right about me,” he said, his words labored. “In the mountain, when you told me why I never lived as human—that it would have all been for nothing—”
Soraya knelt beside him and nodded in understanding. His words to her before Tahmineh’s blow had been true, but they had also been spoken with purpose. He had wanted to goad her into killing him, rather than leaving him to face all his failures in the dark. I forget him sometimes, the man I used to be, she remembered him telling her, and she wondered if he already considered himself dead, if he had died with the Shahmar, and no longer knew how to be just Azad.
She glanced at her mother, who had finally faced her own nightmare and won, and nodded again. “Enough,” she agreed. Perhaps he didn’t deserve the mercy of her thorns, a quick end to his pain, but she would grant it to him nevertheless. Soraya moved one of Azad’s hands away from the wound and pressed the back of her knuckle against his palm, piercing his skin with her thorns as she released the poison into him. He shuddered as the poison spread through his veins, his eyes remaining on Soraya until at last they went glassy and still.
Soraya let out a long breath and dropped Azad’s hand, peace settling over her like gentle snowfall. She heard the same soft exhalations from her mother and Parvaneh, as if they were free to breathe for the first time.
Soraya rose, and she tensed as she faced her mother directly, not knowing how Tahmineh would respond to her daughter’s new appearance. But when Tahmineh came toward her and saw this final manifestation of her gift, her eyes were wide not in fear or revulsion, but in amazement. She raised a hand to touch an unmarked space on her daughter’s cheek and said, “It suits you.”
“I agree,” Parvaneh said, and Soraya laughed.
But the battle wasn’t over yet. Soraya went to the edge of the roof and looked down at the fighting below. The divs were even more outnumbered than before now that so many of them had fallen, but Soraya knew their deaths were only a temporary relief. She took in every div corpse on the ground and saw a new div rising from Duzakh to fight and die, around and around without end. Until now.
“Come,” Soraya said. “We have to put an end to this.”
Soraya stepped up on the parapet, and the golestan wrapped itself around her arms and waist to carry her down to the platform below. Tahmineh came the same way, as well as Azad’s body, wrapped tightly in the vines, while Parvaneh used her wings.
Their descent was striking enough to pause the fighting, and Soraya took advantage of this attention to step forward and address the crowd.
“The Shahmar has fallen,” she announced loudly, gesturing to the prone figure of Azad on the steps. She thought of everything Nasu had told her, and chose her words carefully. “Your leader is gone, and can offer you nothing more.”