Maram knew it was not the Kushaila way to leave offerings at shrines or images. Graves and tombs, perhaps, but her mother’s tomb was in M’Gaadir. She would not go there until the honeymoon and her life was irrevocably tied with Idris’s. But it was the Vathek way, and so she’d had a small room built, its ceiling strung with brass lanterns, with a single great stained-glass window within which her mother stood.

For half an instant she’d considered asking Amani how to make bakhoor. It seemed the sort of thing a villager, a farmer’s daughter, would have to know how to do. But wherever they were now—whatever they were now—she didn’t think she could reveal this to her. She couldn’t share this with her. And so she’d searched on her own, and soaked the wood chips and found the syrup. When the bakhoor burned it smelled like Najat—jasmine oil and a hint of rose.

Maram found she couldn’t move. Her eyes were fixed on the stained glass that made up the folds of her mother’s qaftan. She understood that she was a terrible daughter. That she had never made the effort to visit her mother’s grave. That she was a terrible successor to her mother’s legacy. And that worst of all she was too scared to fix it.

Her hands shook as she unscrewed the top of the jar and moved from brass incense bower to brass incense bower, filling them with wood chips. There were almost thirty altogether, and she’d come home early from a viewing of falcons to do this. The room slowly filled with hazy incense smoke and the fragrance she’d soaked into the chips. Her mother appeared as an apparition through it all, lit by the fading light of the setting sun and the lanterns high above.

The doors to the room creaked open, and still Maram didn’t look away from her mother’s image. She knew it was Aghraas from her gait and from her silence. Many people would be motivated to make their apologies, to scurry out of the room immediately. But Aghraas stood a few paces behind her and remained quiet as if she were waiting for Maram to choose when to speak.

“Shall I say a prayer?” Aghraas asked at last.

“She can’t hear you,” Maram scoffed.

“Not to her,” Aghraas replied. “For her.”

“Our prayers help the dead as much as their wishes for the living help us,” Maram said quietly, and turned away from the image of her mother. “Which is to say not at all.”