the question she had asked Azad. “Why did you tell him to kill his family?”
“I didn’t tell him to kill anyone, not directly. He had captured me, bound my wings so I couldn’t transform, and refused to release me until I told him something useful. So I did what any div would do—I tried to destroy him, however I could. I sought out his weaknesses, his insecurities, and I reminded him of them at every opportunity. I didn’t know what he would choose to do.”
Soraya lifted her head to ask, “But did it matter to you? Once you knew what he’d done, did you feel any regret for all that bloodshed?”
Parvaneh held her gaze. “Do you want me to lie to you?”
“Never.”
“No, it didn’t matter to me. And if you think it would, then you’re right—I’m not who you think I am.” She turned away, running her hands through her hair in frustration. Her shoulders softened and she stepped around the fire, coming to stand in front of Soraya. “I may not care about him or his family,” she said, “but I do have my loyalties, and I am true to them. I care deeply about my sisters … and I care about you. Why do you think I tried to stop you from taking the simorgh’s feather toward the end? It was because I couldn’t do the same thing to you that I did to him, even if it meant being his prisoner forever.”
A chilling thought occurred to Soraya then. “Were you the one who told him about me? About my curse?”
“No,” Parvaneh said at once. “I was still his prisoner when your mother took you to the pariks. But I was there when he interrogated the parik who told him. That was how I knew about you.”
Soraya’s arms tightened around her waist. “But you were the one who told him to use the div’s blood. You must have known what would happen to him.”
Parvaneh shook her head, mouth pursed in disgust. “I was angry. He had become shah and he still refused to let me go—and then had the gall to ask me for help. I knew about the properties of a div’s heart’s blood, but I had never seen a full transformation. I didn’t realize how complete it would be, or what kind of div he would hunt down.
“After he was deposed, I managed to escape and return to the pariks for a time. But when he grew in power and began to hunt us down, I had to tell them what I did. They exiled me, and told me I could only return to them when I had undone my mistake. The Shahmar caught me soon after that, and I thought that he would kill me, but instead he took his anger out on me in other, smaller ways.” Her wings twitched. “I told myself then that I would stop at nothing to defeat him and undo my foolish, reckless mistake.”
The words resonated more deeply than Soraya wanted to admit, and she stared down, hunching over into herself as she had always done before to find comfort when there was no one to give it. Parvaneh’s bare feet approached her, and then Parvaneh’s hands gently unwrapped Soraya’s arms from around her waist, and held Soraya’s hands in her own.
Soraya lifted her head to meet Parvaneh’s intense, amber stare. “Do I have your forgiveness?” Parvaneh said. “Are you still with me?”
It seemed a simple enough question, but Soraya found it to be as tangled and impenetrable as a thicket. She and Parvaneh and Azad—their choices, their mistakes, their ambitions—were all entwined, inseparable from each other. How could she forgive Parvaneh without forgiving Azad? But how could she forgive Azad without forgiving herself? Maybe they all deserved nothing but one another, a constant cycle of betrayals.
“I don’t know,” Soraya said hoarsely. It was the truest answer she could manage.
Parvaneh waited for her to continue, and when Soraya didn’t, she nodded and looked away, letting Soraya’s hands slip out of hers.
22
Soraya was beginning to become as nocturnal as the divs, sleeping through the day to make the time pass faster. She woke groggy and irritable after having another one of her usual nightmares. But this time, Soraya was the Shahmar, scales spreading down her arms instead of veins, and when she looked up, it was Parvaneh who was watching her transformation with a satisfied gleam in her eye. Parvaneh opened her mouth, and Soraya thought she would laugh, but