“I will observe your training directly from time to time, in the future,” said the Maha. “Clearly I was wrong to think Amun would be a reliable teacher.” He slid the tea across the table to Mehr. It was still warm, steam rising from its surface. “For now, wipe the blade clean,” he said. “Drink the tea and calm yourself.”

There was nothing for Mehr to clean the blade with. Under the weight of the Maha’s hooded eyes, she took the blade in her bloodied, shaking hand and wiped the knife clean on the sleeve of her new tunic. Her hands refused to stop trembling. She put the blade down, lifted the glass, and drank. The liquid was scalding, a shock of sweetness and heat.

“You will both perform for me now,” the Maha said, his voice silken. “Show me that you will be able to do what is required of you, and you aren’t as clumsy and foolish as I’ve been led to believe.”

Under his watchful gaze, Mehr and Amun stood. Unable to speak, the weight of the Maha’s command upon him, Amun guided her to look at him with a light touch of his fingertips to her arm.

Follow me, his eyes seemed to say. Trust me. We will get through this together.

Mehr took a deep breath and raised her hands to form the first sigil.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

You seem calm.” Amun watched her carefully as she sat down on the bed in their room, as she curled her hands in her lap.

“I’m not calm,” Mehr said. “I just can’t allow myself to feel. Not yet.”

She inspected her hand carefully. The cut was shallow. It had pained and bled far more than a cut of its size deserved to. Even now, every time she curled her fingers, sluggish blood oozed from the wound. She pressed her stained sleeve hard against the cut to stem the flow. Performing the rite, shaping its sigils, had opened the cut again and made it pain all the more.

Her poor sleeve. After all the effort Amun had gone to in order to make her tunic presentable, the fact that the cloth was irreparably ruined seemed somehow a greater injustice even than the wound the Maha had inflicted on her. Mehr ran a finger over the cloth. The stain had dried fast. Even if Mehr begged some boiled water from the kitchens and sacrificed some of her new soap to the task of getting it clean, something of the stain would be left behind—some faint hint of darkness, the smell of bitter iron.

“You’re doing well,” Amun said. “No matter what the Maha claims, you are.”

“Then why punish me?”