Girl, Serpent, Thorn - Melissa Bashardoust Page 0,33
wanted to protest that the first story she’d told had been her favorite—but it wasn’t the one she’d revisited the most over the years. It wasn’t the one that haunted her dreams night after night. It wasn’t the one that she felt was a part of her, so much so that she hesitated now, in case it would reveal too much of herself.
But as always, once the Shahmar entered her mind, she couldn’t think of anything else.
“There was and there was not,” she began, in a voice that seemed both hers and not hers, “a prince who was what every young man should be. He was handsome and courteous and brave, but he was also proud and curious. One day, the prince captured a div, but he didn’t vanquish it. Instead, he kept it locked up in a cave, and visited it every day, demanding the secrets of its knowledge.”
She paused, knowing both of them must be thinking of Soraya’s visit to the div locked away in the dungeon.
“Before long, the div convinced the prince that he would make a better ruler than his father or his elder brothers. And the young man agreed—after all, didn’t he know even the secrets of the divs? And so the prince slew his father and brothers, and took the crown for himself.
“The prince—now the shah—ruled for a time in peace, despite his bloody coronation. But he still visited the div, and over time, the prince noticed that he was changing. His bones shifted, his skin grew scaly and rough, and his heart grew violent. He hungered for war, for destruction, and he began to rule by terror and force, demanding the senseless sacrifice of two men every month to quench his desire for bloodshed. The act of murder that had made him king had now also twisted him into a div himself—”
Her voice broke, and she froze where she was, trying to collect herself, her throat burning as she tried to hold back angry tears. From beside her, she heard Azad say, “I’ve heard the rest. You don’t have to go on.”
The rest of the story was about her ancestor, the adopted son of the simorgh, who had led a rebellion against the Shahmar and chased him off into exile, where he was either killed by other divs or lived long enough to take his revenge against the simorgh, depending on which version you believed. And yet, even though that was her family’s origin, that wasn’t the part of the story Soraya felt most connected to.
“Why does that story affect you so?” Azad asked her, his voice gentle.
She didn’t want to answer, but she wouldn’t have begun the story at all if she hadn’t been prepared to face this question.
She held her arms out to him, pulling back her sleeves so they both could see the dark green veins running down her wrists. “Do you have to ask?” she whispered. “Doesn’t it sound familiar to you?” She pulled her sleeves back down. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve wondered if the same thing would happen to me—if the poison was only the beginning, if I was going to grow more and more dangerous until I wasn’t human anymore.” She had thought she would have to fight to get the words out, but she found now that it was easy to say them. They were less frightening aloud than they were in her mind.
“And so I told myself,” she continued, “that as long as I was good, never angry or envious, I wouldn’t become a monster like the Shahmar.”
Azad swallowed, his eyes moving over the veins on her face and neck. “And have you been successful?”
She lowered her head, looking for reassurance from the cracks in the earth. But the way they branched out reminded her too much of her veins and the poison inside them. “I don’t know,” she said. She thought of all the dead insects in her garden, of the night she had been tempted to hurt Ramin, of amber eyes staring in the dark. “I try to hold myself back from doing any real harm, but sometimes I feel like my thoughts are steeped in poison, and that it’s only a matter of time before I lose control over them … or over myself. I dream about it sometimes—I see myself transforming into something else, and the Shahmar stands over me, laughing—” She shut her eyes, but in doing so, she only conjured up the image of the Shahmar.
She