Girl, Serpent, Thorn - Melissa Bashardoust Page 0,120

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.”

Soraya descended the platform and walked out into the garden, winding her way through the crowd without fear, as she had done the night of the banquet. The divs regarded her warily, but they knew better than to touch her now. “If you continue to fight,” she said, “you will lose again and again, because this land—these people—are now under my protection.” As she went from div to div, the vines from the golestan followed her, circling around each and every div’s feet in silent threat. “But if you lay down your weapons and surrender to me,” she continued, “I will let you return to Arzur without further harm.”

The vines continued to climb up to the divs’ ankles as she spoke, and now she began to reach out and lay a hand on each div she passed—a scrape of nails against an arm or cheek or shoulder, a gesture to remind them of the banquet night, when they had accepted her as one of their own. Accept me now, she wanted to say, and I will protect you, too.

And as she passed them one by one, laying a hand on each, the divs began to drop their weapons. They did not bow as they had done for the Shahmar, because Soraya would not ask that of them, but simply surrendered.

She circled her way back to the steps and ascended them again. “I ask you—I ask all of you, div and human