Empire of Sand Read online

  “All left,” Usha said in a shaky voice. She was shivering. “Ran. Cowards.”

  Mehr nodded. She grabbed the hem of her robe and slipped it off, covering Usha’s body in its dark weight. Usha murmured a thank-you, but her shivering didn’t abate. She pressed her face against the long, fanned sweep of Mehr’s skirt. Mehr pressed a hand to her forehead and Usha gave a sigh. The feel of Mehr beside her seemed to comfort her.

  I’m sorry, thought Mehr. I’m so sorry, Usha. I don’t know how to help you.

  Mehr said none of it. It wasn’t Usha’s job to give her absolution.

  “Where is Lalita?” Mehr asked quietly.

  “They came,” Usha murmured. “Knew they would.”

  “Who came, Usha? Please.”

  “Salt,” she whispered, and closed her eyes. “Tired.”

  She didn’t pass away then. It would have been easier if she had. But she said nothing more over the hours that followed. Her breath rattled in and out of her lungs. Her lips foamed blood. Mehr watched as she gritted her teeth against the pain, her eyes glassy, all her attention focused inward. Mehr thought of her dagger, thought of ending Usha’s suffering. It would have been easy. It might even have been kind.

  As the dreamfire quieted beyond the haveli’s walls, as Mehr kept vigil, Usha’s breath finally faded into silence. Mehr stayed with her until the very end, her dagger a heavy presence at her side.

  It didn’t take long for her father’s men to find her. Ever since the storm had calmed and the sky had lightened with morning, Mehr had been walking listlessly through the streets of Jah Irinah. In her blood-spattered Amrithi clothes, her feet bare, she was a hard sight to miss.

  They surrounded her on their horses, their steel armor gleaming sharply in the light. Their commander dismounted. His gaze flickered over her, taking the sight of her in.

  “Lady Mehr,” he said. “Are you injured?”

  She shook her head.

  “The blood is not mine,” she said. Her voice sounded hoarse to her own ears. She swallowed. “I’m unhurt.”

  The commander nodded, mouth thin, and looked away from her. Around him, his men were wearing identical expressions of embarrassment. Noblewomen rarely showed their faces to men outside their own families. They wore hooded robes in public; they traveled in veiled palanquins when they left the safety of the home. For Mehr to be barefaced before them, before everyone, was a breach of her dignity. Worse still, without the protection of her veil, dressed in her Amrithi garb, she was painfully, undeniably foreign. Half Amrithi. Heathen. Outsider.

  The sight of her shamed them. It should have shamed her.

  She was too numb, and too tired, to care.

  The commander arranged for a palanquin to carry Mehr home. She was met at the women’s quarters by a group of grim-faced guardswomen, who ushered her inside without words.

  Mehr was allowed to bathe and redress in a clean tunic and pajami. She didn’t argue when one of the maids gathered up her Amrithi clothes and took them away. She had no energy to fight. It was hard enough to simply obey as she was poked and prodded, as her hair was combed roughly and bound back into a hasty braid, as she was ushered along the familiar halls of the women’s quarters toward a corridor that led to her father’s chambers.

  At the end of the corridor lay the room Mehr had most dreaded visiting in her childhood, the room where she’d been brought to be scolded and punished for misbehavior. The Governor’s Study. She could still remember the terror it had once inspired in her. An echo of that old dread rippled through her now, as a guardswoman opened the door and ushered Mehr inside.

  The difference between the women’s quarters and the Governor’s Study was impossible to ignore. The women’s quarters were Maryam’s domain, elegantly decorated with silks and jewels and cool marble, but the study belonged entirely to Mehr’s father. Every inch was stamped with his mark. The furnishings were dark, the walls unmarked and austere. There were great thick books and sheaves of paper piled on a table set at the center of the room. No fine gems and delicate touches here. This was a purely masculine space. Here, Maryam’s power ended and the Governor’s power—the power of swords and steel, currency and politics and men—began.

  Her father and Maryam were seated, waiting for her.

  “Sit,” her father said. His voice was rumbling, soft.

  Mehr kneeled down woodenly. When she met her father’s eyes she saw him flinch before recovering himself.

  Governor Suren ruled one of the most barbaric yet holy reaches of the Empire on the Emperor’s behalf. He had hundreds of men at his command. He was built broad and imposing, and his eyes were sharp as steel. In the rich jet and ivory of his clothing, his hair swept back in a turban, he looked every inch the statesman and soldier. He was not a man who showed weakness easily.

  But Mehr looked so very, very much like her mother.

  “You’ve disgraced yourself,” said her father. He said it without inflection, without feeling. It would have been better if he had shouted.

  “A woman is dead,” Mehr said quietly. “And my friend is missing. I left to try to help them.”

  And what a waste it had been. She’d failed. In her father’s face she saw that knowledge reflected back at her.

  “I know where you went. I know how my guards found you,” he said. “Your face bare, your skin—tainted.” A heavy breath. “I have given you so much freedom, Mehr. I have been generous. And you—you have used my kindness to ruin yourself.”

  “You’ve brought scandal on us,” Maryam added. Her voice trembled. “And you’ve disgraced yourself.” Mehr saw her father’s fingers touch Maryam’s tenderly. Mehr looked away from them both.

  “What does it matter, if I am disgraced?” Mehr asked numbly. Her father was silent. Maryam was silent. They left her room to dig her own grave. She wet her lips, which still tasted of sand and the rich iron of blood. “What will disgrace do to me, Father? Are you afraid I will stand in the way of Arwa’s marriage? That I will drag her down with me?”

  From the periphery of her vision, she saw Maryam’s eyes narrow.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mehr repeated. “Arwa and I were born ruined. You know it to be true. You know what people think of Amrithi.” You know what your own wife thinks, she did not say. She raised her arm up, holding it to the light. “My skin was tainted a long time ago. But ah, perhaps Arwa’s skin will spare her my fate.”

  “Don’t say such things,” her father murmured.

  “I was born ruined and without the legal protection of your name,” Mehr said. Bitterness bubbled in her blood. She lowered her arm. “My mother kept true to her people’s laws. She never wed you. She never wore your seal, and you never wore hers. And now she is gone.” Mehr’s voice cracked. “In the eyes of the Empire we are less than nothing, Arwa and I. You should never have raised us here. You should have known that no matter what we would do, we would be judged as tainted by our blood. In the eyes of the Empire, we are less than nothing, Father.”

  “I allowed your mother to keep her customs,” her father acknowledged. “But in raising you as I have, I have kept mine. Make no mistake, Mehr: You are my daughter. You have been raised in my household, fed with my food, clothed from my coffers. You are your mother’s daughter …” He faltered. “But you are also mine. And half your blood is Ambhan, noble and strong.”

  Mehr said nothing. When it was clear she couldn’t or wouldn’t respond, her father continued.

  “You try to stay true to your mother’s customs,” he said softly. “For that I don’t fault you. But when you left your quarters, you betrayed your duty as my child. And that betrayal, daughter, comes with a price.”

  He leaned forward and pressed an item into her hands. She looked down. Pressed against her palm was a circle of carved stone, marked in Ambhan script with the names of the men of the family who had come before her. She saw her own name, set at its heart. Her blood ran cold.

  Her seal. This was her marriage seal.

  “
You are not only Amrithi. You cannot eschew all vows and contracts as your mother’s people do,” he said, in that same terrible, soft voice. “I have raised and treasured you as an Ambhan noblewoman, and like all my countrywomen, you have the right to make one contract.” He closed her fingers around the seal. “The choice is wholly yours, Mehr. But it is a choice you must make.”

  Mehr’s throat closed.

  “Maryam has agreed to chaperone you,” her father went on. “She will accompany you to her family holdings in Hara. If no courtiers there suit you, she will take you to Numriha. Find a good man, Mehr. Give him your seal. Wear his proudly. I believe you will find a way to be happy.”

  He spoke of other provinces of the Empire: Numriha, with its mines and its artisans; Hara, lush and green, fed by rivers and ocean alike. Mehr had heard of them, and knew guards and servants within the women’s quarters who hailed from them, but she had never seen them in person. She had never left Irinah.

  Her father hadn’t mentioned Ambha. That, she understood. Ambha was no simple province. It was the jewel of the Empire, its beating heart, where the Emperor ruled. The greatest of the nobility, the old Ambhan bloodlines, all hailed from Ambha itself. No province had ever been ruled by a Governor who was not of Ambhan blood, born from the great Ambhan families who served in the Emperor’s court to this day.

  It was certainly no place for a half-Amrithi daughter.

  Mehr raised her head.

  “I watched a woman die today,” Mehr said. Her voice sounded like a stranger’s. “A good woman. I held her in my arms as she passed. I watched her go. And now you’re exiling me? Sending me away from everything I know?”

  “What you did in the storm, Mehr, the way you behaved, the rite you performed …” He paused, and shook his head. “I do it out of love,” her father said gently. “Beyond Irinah, you can begin again.”

  “Begin again,” Mehr echoed. “I see.”

  Leaving Irinah would place her beyond her tangible heritage. There would be no daiva to seek her blood, and no dreamfire to answer her prayers. Beyond Irinah she could hide her Amrithi heritage. She could give up her rites, her dagger, her dreams. She could claim to have a Chand mother, perhaps, to explain her dark skin and the distinctly un-Ambhan cast to her features. There would certainly be men willing to believe the lie for the sake of allying with the daughter of the Governor of Irinah.

  She could begin again by erasing herself.

  “You’re not safe here anymore, Mehr,” said her father.

  Mehr looked hard into her father’s steel eyes, eyes that were nothing like her own.

  “You should never have kept me and Arwa,” Mehr said. “You should have sent us away with our mother. We don’t belong in the Empire.”

  Her father didn’t flinch. But it didn’t matter. Mehr knew she had struck him a blow.

  “You’re confined to your chambers indefinitely,” he said. He looked away from her. Mehr squeezed the seal tight between her fingers.

  Maryam looked at Mehr with a hard expression on her face and clasped her husband’s hand tight, in a gesture that was both protective and possessive.

  You’ll be gone soon, Maryam’s eyes said. I’ll make sure of that.

  “Go now, Mehr,” she said, in a voice far softer than the look in her eyes. “Your father and I have a great deal to discuss.”

  Mehr stood and left without another word.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Alone in her chambers, Mehr lay down on her divan and wept. She thought of Usha and of Lalita, of blood on her clothes and the sand beneath her feet; she thought of the dreamfire clutching her wrists and ankles, of awe and terror and the absolute helplessness of watching someone die. The tears poured out of her uncontrollably. She wept and wept and wept. Eventually exhaustion dragged her down into a restless sleep. When she woke, hours later, she felt as fragile as glass.

  Earlier she had flung her seal to the other end of the room, too heartsick and furious to look at it. She collected it now, threading it onto a length of silk and hanging it around her neck. She washed her face clean with a damp cloth, rubbing away the salt and sleep marking her cheeks. She looked into her mirror. A worn, tired face stared back at her.

  The seal was heavy. It had to be, to carry the weight of her family’s history. It was marked with dozens of names, minuscule carvings that traced Mehr’s lineage back over three hundred years, generation upon generation, to the first soldier who had followed the Maha from Ambha into the neighboring lands of Chand and Numriha and Hara, conquering them all in turn and forging the Empire. One of those ancestors had been at the Maha’s side when he had conquered Irinah and made it the seat of his everlasting temple.

  She touched the grooves on the stone with gentle fingers. She understood that in giving her a seal marked with his ancestors, her father had tried to show how much he loved her. Illegitimate daughters had no right to ancestral names. Yet here against Mehr’s skin was a heritage lovingly offered, the unspoken right to call herself a daughter of Suren, a granddaughter of Karan, a child of many men and as many nameless women.

  She knew her father loved her. But Mehr knew, too, that love would not be enough to sway him from his decision.

  Mehr would have to marry.

  A daughter belonged to her father’s household until the day she reached adulthood and her seal was placed in her hands. Ambhan noblewomen did not make contracts; they did not own property or offer their loyalty or their service. They were treasured and sheltered, protected by their men. But their right to choose their own husband was sacred, and the choice could not be taken from them.

  When her fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth years had passed with no mention of marriage or her seal, Mehr had been grateful for her father’s kindness. Amrithi did not make contracts, but as a noblewoman, Mehr had always known she would eventually be required to wed, but she had hoped to find a husband in Irinah. She’d hoped to stay close to Arwa and to the desert she loved. At the very least, she’d hoped for time. Time to watch Arwa grow. Time to come to terms with the business of tying her soul to another man’s soul, and leaving the life she had so carefully carved for herself in her father’s household.

  All that had changed now.

  In finally giving Mehr her seal, her father had placed a bitter message squarely in her hands: Marry whom you choose. You’re not mine to keep any longer.

  It’s time for you to be gone. He had ensured that she would never have the husband and home in Irinah she’d hoped for.

  She knew what was coming: carefully chaperoned meetings with lowly courtiers and wealthy merchants, first in Hara and then Numriha. Mehr wouldn’t choose any of them. Not at first. And then, inevitably, Mehr would relent. Give in. No Ambhan woman could be forced to marry, but there were many ways in the world to make a person bend. Time would wear her down. She would choose one of the men and give him her seal. Once he placed his own seal around her neck, once their lineages and their bodies were joined, she would be bound for life to an alien land. Exiled for good.

  The thought of leaving Irinah left her hollow and full of unanswerable fears. She would not be able to keep her Amrithi traditions, she knew that now. She would be forced to discard her mother’s culture to keep herself—and her family—safe from the Emperor’s displeasure. But what kind of marriage would she have, built as it would be on deceits large and small? What kind of man would she find herself wedded to?

  What if she never returned to Irinah—never saw its desert and its storms? What if she never saw Arwa again?

  It was a painful thought, sharpened to a knife edge by the knowledge that she had been losing Arwa slowly for years. Maryam had made sure of that.

  Grief welled up hot in her blood again. She bit down on her lower lip, holding it in. Maryam had been right after all. Her father had finally stopped letting his guilt control him. Fear had taken its place. Mehr understood his fear. She had felt it in her own bones. The Amrithi were not safe in Irinah. Clans had vanished; Lalita was gone; Usha was dea
d. Mehr was simply not Ambhan enough to be safe in this household, this land, any longer.

  But she was Ambhan enough to be sent away. Ambhan enough to marry and leave Irinah, and pretend to be the good noblewoman she was not.

  When Mehr lay back down on the divan, when she curled up like a creature inside its own shell, the edges of the seal pressed into her skin. Mehr breathed against its weight, slow and steady, and tried not to feel like a chained animal, tried not to feel like she was drowning. She tried to feel nothing at all.

  A week passed before anyone disturbed her grieving, full of nothing but sleep and tears and the slow wait for her heart to knit back together. She had half expected Maryam to come and gloat, but it was Nahira who hobbled into her bedroom one dull evening without so much as a greeting.

  “Oh, no need to stop your wailing for my sake,” she said, when Mehr scrambled off the divan and onto her feet. “But now you’re up, you’d best make yourself presentable. I’ve brought you a visitor.”

  Mehr hastily wiped her face clean. She heard a sound from beyond the door, and then a delighted cry.

  “Mehr!”

  Arwa rushed toward her and leaped up into her arms. She knocked Mehr off balance instantly. They both fell back on the divan, but Arwa held on tight, muttering joyful nonsense against Mehr’s ear. She was warm and smelled of rosewater and her knees were sharp where they dug into Mehr’s sides. Mehr pressed a palm to the back of Arwa’s head, like she had when Arwa was a baby and needed the support of firm hands to hold her steady.

  “Hello, little sister,” she murmured. Her heart was light, so light. “What are you doing here?”

  “She insisted on coming to see you,” Nahira said. “Complain, complain, that’s all the girl does. Right now for a moment of peace I’d have taken her to the Emperor himself.”

  “Where have you been?” Arwa cried out, oblivious to her nurse’s grumbling. Her eyes shined. “It’s been ages and ages, and I kept waiting for you to come see me, and you didn’t.” Her grip tightened.