Mehr worshipped the Emperor and the Maha, the Great One who had founded his bloodline, when it was expected of her, of course: on the Emperor’s birthday, on the anniversary of the Empire’s founding, or whenever Maryam demanded it. But she had no altar in her chambers, and no particular love of the Emperor in her heart. Her mother had hated him, in her own quiet way. She had refused, when Mehr was small, to worship him at all. I will never pray for him, her mother had said, with a black look in her eyes that Mehr had never forgotten. He has no right to an Amrithi’s prayers.

As a child, Mehr had not understood the weight of blood and history that lay behind her mother’s hatred. It was Lalita who later taught Mehr how the Maha, the first Emperor, had conquered Irinah and raised his temple upon its back. She told Mehr that the Amrithi had rebelled with the help of the daiva. When the daiva had begun to weaken, fading, the Empire had crushed the Amrithi with terrible swiftness. The Amrithi had been reviled for their resistance ever since.

Every time Mehr thought of the Emperor, she remembered that history and felt an echo of the darkness she’d seen in her mother’s eyes inside her own heart. She thought, too, of the way noblewomen would look at her when they visited her father’s palace, and the things the servants would whisper when they thought Mehr could not hear them. That one stinks of her mother’s blood. She’s not really Ambhan. Look at her face. Look at how she behaves.

They believed, just as the Emperor did, that there was no place for heathens in the Empire. If Ambhans were the highest of the high, blessed by the Emperor’s grace, obedient to the laws of an orderly and civilized culture, then Amrithi were the lowest of the races: barbarians, faithless wanderers, who had no respect for contracts or Ambhan law. The people of the Empire’s other provinces—even the Irin, for all their superstitious respect for the daiva—belonged to the Empire in a way the Amrithi never could.

To be visibly Amrithi was to be outcast. Amrithi had no real place in the Empire. Mehr had no place. And if the Emperor’s hate for her mother’s kind had truly sharpened into a deeper and more active loathing, then Maryam was right to be afraid. Mehr had put them all at risk, simply by being who she was.