Lalita left eventually, assuring Mehr she would return when she could, but as the days passed with no sign of her, Mehr soon found she was glad to be alone. She was grateful, so very grateful, that Lalita was alive and well. But she wasn’t the girl Lalita remembered any longer. That girl had believed in her own strength, but she had been soft, her resolve untested. Mehr had been tested, and she had shattered and remade herself. There was no going back for her.

Rest, Lalita had entreated. But Mehr couldn’t allow herself to rest. Not yet, not even for Lalita’s sake. She would need to regain her strength eventually, but for now the thought of being soft, even for a moment, pained her.

That night, after eating some of the food Lalita had left for her, Mehr lit a prayer flame. She told herself it was a much more economical use of fuel than the oil lantern, and also far less likely to draw attention from any Saltborn out searching for her. But really she simply liked the comfort of holding the small clay container in her palm and feeling the flickering heat of the candle flame. She sat on the floor and looked down at the marriage seal around her neck, the one Amun had carved for her long before he’d met her.

The light flickered on the seal, and on the whorls Amun had carved into it, the same whorls that decorated the walls of this Amrithi ruin around her.

Amun would have been so happy to be in this place, among these walls. Mehr imagined him by her side, kneeling on the cool ground, imagined him tracing the whorls of her seal, the only mark on it apart from his name, and speaking in that low voice of his. I gave you a symbol of our people—

She let the seal go.

Her heart ached for him, and for herself.

Amun had sacrificed so much to save her, and Mehr had found so much that she’d feared she had lost forever: her mother, Lalita, a surviving clan. She had no right to feel crushed by her own grief, and yet she was. Amun should have been here, not Mehr. This was where Amun belonged.

A noise from beyond the shelter made Mehr flinch, then tense abruptly. Straightening, curling her fists at her sides, she looked up—and saw her mother watching her from the doorway. In the light of the flame, her hooded face was largely shadowed, and Mehr was glad of that. She wanted no mirrors.

“I’ll be on watch, if you’d like to join me,” her mother said. She vanished back into the dark.