“I am your elder,” he said, his voice trembling with barely leashed feeling. “It is not up to you to decide when I am being unwise.”

Mehr lowered her head. The rage she’d felt when Maryam had grabbed her was still there, simmering under her skin. It rose in her now, burning away her fear and leaving her mind sharp as a keen blade.

She couldn’t compel him to be wise. Her father had never made wise decisions out of love. If he had been wise, he would never have fallen in love with her mother. He would never have had Mehr or Arwa. He would never have kept them, raised them, or allowed Mehr to keep her mother’s rites. He knew the place the Amrithi occupied in the Empire. By loving an Amrithi woman and raising half-Amrithi daughters, he’d risked losing everything.

He knew that the mystics, as representatives of the Maha, keepers of the soul of the Empire, were dangerous. He knew the Emperor was even more dangerous still. But he would risk everything to fight them, because right now he could see nothing beyond the haze of love and hatred and guilt clouding his mind. Perhaps later he’d feel regret. But his guilt would do his family no good.

The mystics hadn’t dressed like powerful people. But she had seen the way the courtiers flinched away from them and the proud assurance in the female mystic’s voice and bearing. Mehr knew deep in her bones that no matter where he sent her, if they wanted her, they would find her.

Mehr understood, too, the great cost of defiance. Maryam had educated her in that. But the stakes in a rebellion against the Maha and Emperor were infinitely higher than the ones in Mehr’s small, bloody wars with her stepmother. If her father defied the Emperor—if even a fraction of the nobility joined him—the numbers of people who would suffer for his choice would be unimaginable. She thought of those veiled wives, those women who shared their husbands’ burdens, who had listened to the female mystic speak in terrified silence. She thought of their children, and their servants, and the people who relied on their patronage. She thought of the fabric of the Empire; the way it was woven of ever so fragile human lives.

Mehr couldn’t allow her father to try to save her. Not when the cost was so high. Not when there was nothing to be won.

She straightened up. Still dizzy, she pressed her feet hard against the floor, grounding herself. She had to think of this as a rite, and give it all the due reverence she would give her dances.