“An Ambhan wife shares her husband’s burdens,” said Mehr. “She is bound to him, soul to soul. He defines her.”

“So he is her master.”

“He often is,” Mehr admitted. “But I don’t believe a man bound in marriage can remain unchanged. My father altered after his marriage. Before he wed my stepmother he was—more tender. Kinder. She changed him. She had that power.” After he married Maryam, his relationship with Mehr and Arwa had changed forever. A wall had grown between them, and it had never truly fallen since. “It’s not a fair bond, Amun. I would never call it fair. But it’s still a bond—a rope with two ends.”

Amun was silent for a moment. He had a way of always mulling over her words, considering them carefully before allowing himself to speak.

“Do you believe any bond, even one founded on great unfairness, can have power?” He spoke slowly, deliberately.

Mehr thought of all the bonds, unchosen and unequal, that had shaped her like clay. She thought of how losing her mother had scarred her, and Maryam had hardened her, and Lalita had given her the strength to be bright rather than brittle.

“The bonds that tie people together change who they are,” Mehr said. “They have to.”

They walked a little farther in silence, Mehr’s world heavy between them. Then Mehr touched her fingertips again to Amun’s sleeve.

“Don’t worry about taking the blame. If we get in trouble we’ll face the consequences together,” she told him. She gave an exaggerated shudder. “Frankly I’d rather walk out into the desert without water than return to that damnable rite again.”

Amun’s lips twitched into a smile. The sight of it made a kernel of warmth bloom in Mehr’s chest. She ducked her head, her cheeks hot.

The reprieve from the rite was not only necessary but revealing. Mehr did her best to memorize the layout of the temple. She still found its winding corridors dizzying, but walking slowly at Amun’s side in daylight allowed her to truly understand how the corridors interconnected, and the role that each part of the temple served. Over the course of the morning Mehr saw the communal bathing rooms, and halls of contemplation where more senior mystics sat in meditative silence, wreathed in incense and darkness, and the irrigated fields of crops that marked the shadier edges of the oasis. The mystics were young and old, all celibate and dedicated to their calling. And there were so very many of them.