Amun grinned. The flash of his teeth, the crinkling of his eyes, left Mehr startled. He guarded his expressions so vigilantly that the curve of his mouth struck her with the force of a physical blow.

“And you, Mehr. Did you ever demand to be painted?”

Mehr snorted. “Me? No. I wasn’t ready to wed, so I didn’t have anyone to impress. Besides, any painter given my description would still have insisted on making me moon pale with hair like a fall of silk.” She made a dismissive gesture. “I don’t need false flattery.”

“They paint what they think you want to see,” Amun noted, with insightfulness that—again—struck Mehr.

“They paint what they think I want the world to see,” Mehr said. A woman beautiful in the eyes of the Empire. A woman with purely Ambhan flesh. “But they would be wrong about me. I like myself perfectly well as I am.”

“You don’t want to look Ambhan?”

“Me? No.” If Mehr had looked Ambhan, perhaps her stepmother would have looked at her and seen a child she could mold to her own ends, instead of an Amrithi heathen and living reminder of Suren’s exiled mistress. If Mehr had looked Ambhan, perhaps she would have lost what remained of her heritage to Maryam’s manipulations. The thought viscerally sickened her. To be Ambhan in an Ambhan world, to have light brown skin and lighter eyes, and straight hair and fine bones, was to be beautiful and to belong. But Mehr had never wanted to belong to that world. She’d simply wanted a place to call her own. “I’m content with what I am, Ambhan and Amrithi and all. Would you want to look Ambhan?”

“You’re half Ambhan,” Amun said. “I am not.”

“Answer my question anyway,” Mehr said. “Humor me.”

“It would be nice to vanish in a crowd,” Amun said after a moment of thoughtful silence. “But no. I am what I am.”

I am what I am. He hadn’t said that he liked himself, and in a way Mehr was glad for that honesty. She remembered the fractured hatred she’d seen on his face that night in the desert. She knew like would have been a lie.

But she wanted to see his smile again. She wanted to see his face—that dark, serious face, inked in fluid blue lines—crack open with emotion that wasn’t bloodied and sad.

“Amrithi or not, you’d never vanish in a crowd,” Mehr said, absently. “You’re too …” She made a vague gesture with her hands, trying to encompass his broad strength, the way he towered over her even when hunched over and seated. “You take up a great deal of space.”

“Space,” Amun echoed.