She looked away from him, forcing herself not to stare at his lowered face or the blue whorls that swept from the nape of his neck down under the cover of his tunic. Instead she looked at the bare room around them. Red-gold light filtered in beneath the cracks in the shutters.

When had Amun’s bedroom begun to feel like home? She didn’t know. Here was the only place she felt like the Maha’s eyes were not on her. She still had uneasy dreams, still woke reaching for the blade that was no longer under her pillow. But within these bare walls, these shuttered windows, she felt safe.

“The Amrithi he spoke of,” Mehr said slowly. The cogs of her brain were still turning, sifting through the Maha’s words for a pattern, an answer. Knowledge. She had to seek knowledge. “The man. Gaur. He wasn’t the one who trained you, was he? You told me you were trained by a woman.”

“There’s only been one Amrithi pair in the temple, in my time here,” said Amun, his attention still focused on her cut. “The woman who trained me, and myself. Then you and me. No more than that.”

Mehr thought of the Amrithi pairs who had come before them. She thought of the great effort the Maha had gone to, in order to acquire Mehr—the way he had twisted the sacred institution of marriage, sacred to his Empire and to his people, in order to control one single half-Amrithi woman with the amata gift.

“The Amrithi, our gifts, our people,” Mehr said softly. “We’re fading, aren’t we?”

Amun let out a deep breath. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps. I try not to think of it.”

Mehr closed her eyes and let out a breath. She thought of the Empire. She thought of the Maha. She thought of all those dreams that had never touched either of them. She thought of dreams of aging and death.

Death and decay followed humans with every breath, every heartbeat. Skin could be cut, and skin could heal. Bodies could hunger and be fed. But the Maha no longer hungered as humans hungered. She’d seen the light under his skin, the strangeness of it. She wondered if he could even bleed any longer.

He’d used the rite to make himself something not quite human.

Somewhere, immortal dreams of his death lay, crushed beneath the weight of the mystics’ prayers and the rite. If he had managed to twist himself into something so utterly inhuman through the power of the rite, what had he done to the Empire? What had he done to the world?