When Mehr finally followed, she found her mother seated facing the horizon. Her hood was thrown back, her hands clasped in front of her. She had no lantern of her own to illuminate the night, but she didn’t truly need one. The stars were achingly bright above them.

Mehr looked up at those stars and shivered. They looked … wrong. They glittered like shattered glass, splinters of fury on the black surface of the night. They reminded her of the Maha’s nightmare-flecked eyes. Sickened, she forced her gaze down, only to find that the sand was reflecting the starlight, wavering and strange.

“Come sit by me,” her mother offered.

Mehr wrenched her gaze up.

“I don’t need to be guarded,” she said.

“It puts my mind at ease to do so,” her mother responded. “Come.”

Mehr sat down next to her. The air was painfully cold, but the breeze was blessedly faint. Her mother was silent beside her, eyes narrowed and watchful. At her left side lay her dagger. Unlike the one she’d given Mehr when she left Jah Irinah, this one was unornamented, with a bone handle worn smooth by countless hands. It seemed she really did intend to remain on watch.

Mehr followed her mother’s gaze and stared out at the desert. Under the shattered sky, the flowing lines of the desert—its peaks and valleys, its sparse vegetation—glowed with subtle, off-kilter light. Only the horizon remained dark, a deep and fathomless blackness.

Under Mehr’s gaze, the darkness shifted.

She flinched with surprise, then narrowed her own eyes and leaned forward, squinting through the darkness.

“The daiva are moving,” said Mehr after a moment, awed. Now that she was looking closely, she could see them roiling upon the horizon, wild and seething.

Her mother was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “Strong dreams give them life. Now that the Maha’s grip has weakened, they dance.” Ruhi leaned forward too; she laid one hand on her dagger hilt, the fingertips of her free hand pressed thoughtfully to her lower lip. “If not for the Maha, perhaps they’d still walk the earth like men.”

“When I was little you told me stories about the daiva,” Mehr said. “Do you remember?”

“Ah, Mehr,” her mother said. Her breath gusted out of her. “Of course I do.”

“I used to try to tell Arwa those stories. But I don’t remember them as well as I should,” Mehr admitted. “And I had little chance to tell her tales.”

“Why?” Ruhi asked. Her voice was cautious.

“Our father’s wife didn’t care for Amrithi tales.” Mehr kept her gaze fixed on the black horizon. Maryam seemed like such a distant memory, now. A creature from another time and another world. “She thought it would be best to raise Arwa as an Ambhan, ignorant of her heritage.”