And there was nothing he could do about it besides train more warriors. “Keep at it,” he told Noshrad. “I shall see if I can’t rustle up more recruits.”
Dara took the main avenue back to the palace, steeling himself for the mixed reactions his presence provoked. When he’d first returned to Daevabad, he’d been treated like a hero by the Daevas, the legendary Darayavahoush e-Afshin brought back to life to escort the even more miraculous and mysterious Banu Nahri e-Nahid. It made for a fantastic story, truly—Dara had once seen it performed by some sort of street puppets while walking with Jamshid in more peaceful times. He was also not unaware of the other angle people brought into it: Nahri was a beautiful woman, Dara a handsome warrior, and the Qahtanis made for excellent villains. He’d heard the sighs as he bowed before Nahri in the Grand Temple, not missing the admiring whispers, longing looks, and overly excited children eager to show him the Afshin marks they’d drawn on their cheeks.
No one wore Afshin marks now.
Oh, there were plenty of Daevas who’d greeted their conquest with grateful tears and flocked to see Manizheh during her rare public appearances. But like Noshrad said, most of their people just seemed wary. Resigned, traumatized, and as intimidated by Manizheh and Dara as they had been by Ghassan. And Dara couldn’t blame them. They’d been stripped of their magic, and ifrit strolled the streets. Ghassan might have been a tyrant, but Dara suspected the brutal way the Geziris had been slaughtered—the Nahid magic his people revered as sacred twisted to deliver a gruesome death—was simply too much to accept. Dara kept his eyes down as he walked, aware of the conversations that abruptly ended when he drew near, and the whispers that picked up in his wake. There were almost no women and children out, and the markets and cafés were empty, litter and weeds beginning to overtake the cobbled streets.
It was no easier to enter the palace grounds, for Dara walked straight through the scoured dirt field where the doomed Geziri traveling camp had been. It stood out like a wound against the rest of the lush garden; no one had yet the stomach to do anything about it.
Nor did Dara. Because every time he looked at this field, it was impossible to deny that what was left of his soul screamed this was wrong.
It could have been worse, he tried to tell himself. The palace had been just as blood soaked the last time Daevabad was conquered—and that time it had been his people slaughtered. The Daevas cowering in their homes should count themselves lucky to still be cowering. His family never had that chance.
But the justifications were getting harder to swallow. Dara continued to the massive throne room. This place too still smelled like blood. They’d removed the bodies of the dozen Geziris they’d found here, and Dara had ordered the room cleaned, first by servants and then by his own magic, but the pungent aroma lingered.
Without it, the throne room would have dazzled. Knowing this would be the place where Manizheh greeted her subjects, Dara had not held back from returning it to its former glory. He’d stripped the age from the enormous columns with a snap of his fingers, restoring the lustrous shine of the sandstone walls and the bright paints of the original Daeva ornaments. A thick conjured carpet ran the entire length of the audience hall, the luminous threads depicting dancers and animals and feasts, the patterns he remembered from his youth. Two large fire altars had been brought in, filling the room with cedar incense. And yet beneath that holy fragrance … still blood.
The room has always demanded a cost. Dara could still remember the first time he’d set foot in here. Suleiman’s eye, he’d been young. Eighteen, nineteen? Still in training, since he’d been taken directly from the sparring yard by an impatient steward in royal colors who said Dara had been summoned by the Nahid Council.
Summoned by the Nahid Council.
The five words that changed the entire course of his life.
AT FIRST DARA THOUGHT IT WAS A MISTAKE. WHEN IT became clear it wasn’t, he was both thrilled and panicked. Afshin minors did not get summoned by the Nahid Council. Dara knew he was favored—though he came from a talented generation of Afshins, he was head and shoulders above his cousins when it came to military skills. Considered a prodigy with the bow, he’d been taken for specialized training two years earlier, a decision that had quietly irked his father. Zaydi al Qahtani takes votes with his generals and sends their sons to rebuild villages we have destroyed, he recalled his father complain to his mother in a whispered conversation, while we make assassins out of warriors we should be training to lead.
Indeed, his father, Artash, was there when Dara arrived, kneeling before the shedu throne, his helmet at his side. Yet everything about the set of his features was wrong. Everyone bowed before the Nahids, but there was a simmering despair under his father’s carefully neutral expression
