Girl, Serpent, Thorn - Melissa Bashardoust Page 0,109

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