Girl, Serpent, Thorn - Melissa Bashardoust Page 0,107

never come, if she had never spoken to Parvaneh, would she still have reached the threshold of her patience one day and lashed out at her family? Yes, said a voice from deep within. She couldn’t have lived that way forever, not without understanding why or how. It was inevitable that she would have begun to rattle the bars of her cage, and that all her buried frustration would have found a way out. That girl on the roof was gone, and though Soraya wished over and over again that she had chosen differently, she knew that the girl she had been would never have been able to love her family or her people the way Soraya did now. She had been too full of poison, too afraid to let herself feel anything.

The gates of Golvahar opened for her, and she was relieved to find the gardens unchanged. Still, the sounds of screaming in her head grew louder here, and she could see invisible bodies on the lawn, where soldiers had fallen.

They’ll never forgive you, said a voice in her mind. But she hadn’t returned here for forgiveness. She had broken something, and now she had to fix it as best as she could.

The divs set the litter down at the palace steps where Azad stood tall, waiting for her. He came forward to help her up, and remembering what he had said to her last night, she tried not to let her contempt show on her face.

He asked about her journey, to which she replied politely in turn and told him she was tired and wanted to rest. He led her to her room—a path that felt unfamiliar to her, because she was so accustomed to using the passageways.

The room was as she’d last left it. She had told Azad she was tired so he wouldn’t expect her to make conversation, but at the sight of her bed, she realized how true it was, how inexpressibly tired she felt. She wanted to sink into this room like it was a bath and let it strip away all memories of the mountain.

She waited for Azad to leave, but he was staring at her expectantly, until finally he said, “Don’t you want to know when the execution will be?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’m just so exhausted, I can barely think.”

His gaze softened. “Yes, I understand. But everything will be easier from now on—you’ll see. Tomorrow, before sunset, we’ll take care of your brother, and this ordeal will be over.”

She managed a smile, which seemed to satisfy him, and then he left. She heard the click of a key in the lock after the door was shut.

When she was finally alone, she went first to the hidden door in the wall on the slightest chance that he had forgotten to seal it shut. But he hadn’t forgotten, of course, nor had he forgotten to bar the doors leading out to the golestan. A beam blocked the handles from the outside, so that she could only push the doors open a crack.

At first sight, she had thought nothing in the room had been changed since she was last here, but as soon as she began to scan the room for anything useful, she saw that wasn’t true. Her hand mirror was gone, as were her bottles and vials of fragrances and a crystal vase. Anything breakable—anything that could create shards or sharp edges—had been removed, so that she couldn’t use them as weapons.

My gardening tools. Soraya hurried to the bed and knelt down, reaching underneath to see if Azad had been thorough enough to find her shears and other tools wrapped in leather under the bed. The tools were gone—but Soraya’s hand met something else instead. Something soft and made of cloth, like a rag …

Or a blanket.

From beneath the bed, she pulled out the blanket of stars that had set her on her path of destruction. She laid it flat in front of her, remembering now that she had taken it with her from her mother’s room and buried it under the bed. Her fingers brushed over the stiffened patches of blood on the fabric. And then her hand froze as she realized that Azad had mistakenly left her the most powerful weapon of all.

Are you curious to know how it’s done? It’s the blood of a div that made you poisonous. If a human bathes in blood from a div’s heart, that human takes on the properties of that div. You