hadn’t realized she’d been plucking at her gloves until Azad put his hand over hers, stilling her anxious movements. “Look at me, Soraya.”
Her eyes opened, and instead of the Shahmar’s triumphant face, she saw only Azad. His gaze was focused on her with an intensity that made her breath catch, the flame from the lantern flickering in his eyes in a way that reminded her of Parvaneh. The furrow in his brow made him seem almost angry, and she tried to look away, but his hand tightened over hers and she held still. “Stories lie,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “You’re not a monster.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know me,” she said, even though he knew her better than most by now. “I must seem so small to you, so insignificant, hiding behind walls and layers of fabric, more a story than a person. But there are parts of me you don’t know, parts you haven’t seen.”
“I don’t think you’re small or insignificant,” he said. His gaze softened, solemn rather than fierce. “I think you have so much power within you that it scares you, and that you make yourself small on purpose because you don’t know what you’ll become if you ever stop.”
He let go of her hands, and neither of them spoke as they continued on toward the dakhmeh. Their trek was almost over, and before long, Soraya saw the shadowy cylinder on a hill up ahead. The sight of it should have filled her with dread or disgust, but she barely paid it notice. She was repeating Azad’s words to herself over and over again until their cadence matched her heartbeat.
* * *
It was only when they had come to a stop at the foot of the hill that Azad’s words lost their enchantment. The dakhmeh loomed over them, and Soraya’s stomach lurched in revulsion. The wrongness of being here—of being here alive—settled over her, coating her skin like fine grains of sand. She was breathing shallowly, not wanting to inhale the contamination of death in the air.
As they neared the top of the hill, Soraya saw a pale orange light glowing from inside the dakhmeh. I was right, she thought. She supposed it could be a different yatu, someone other than the false priest, but she couldn’t help feeling that whoever was inside had been waiting for her all along.
She kept expecting Azad to tell her she could turn back, that she didn’t have to go through with this, but he didn’t, and she wasn’t sure she wanted him to. Instead, to her surprise, she was the one who offered a way out. “You should wait here.”
Azad shook his head. “I can’t do that. We both go in or we both go back.”
There was the excuse she’d been waiting for to turn back, but Soraya knew she couldn’t take it, not when they had come this far. “My curse will protect me,” she argued. “I want to go in alone.” As soon as she said it, she knew it was true. There was an intimacy to this unraveling of her life that she didn’t want to share with anyone else.
He frowned at her, but he must have believed the resolve in her voice, because eventually he nodded. “I’ll stay close. If you need me, call for me.”
Soraya agreed, and after taking one last breath of the cool night air, she continued onward. She had never seen the inside of a dakhmeh, of course—only the corpse-bearers came inside—and so she walked in expecting the worst. Would there be corpses laid out, decayed or half eaten by scavenger birds? Would a yatu be committing some unholy ritual with parts of the dead? Every story meant to scare children away from the dakhmeh swam through her mind. If you step into the dakhmeh, or if you linger too long around a dead body, then the corpse div Nasu will find you and make you fall ill.
But as soon as Soraya stepped inside the dakhmeh, she no longer felt any terror or disgust—the only sensation was one of overwhelming emptiness.
The dakhmeh had two layers, she discovered, and she was standing on the top one, a jutting platform that formed a ring around the dakhmeh’s perimeter. And all along the platform were rectangular indentations, the right size for a grave. To her intense relief, each of the shallow graves was empty. There was no roof, of course, in order to grant access to the birds, and so the