“You will not remain uneducated,” Papa told me firmly. “Not while I’m alive.” He spent his days working at the palace and his nights teaching me to read and write Vani. It has been, to date, his only act of rebellion against the kingdom.
Now I begin reading Juhi’s letter out loud, my frown deepening as I get further into the contents. I hope I see you tomorrow, old friend, Juhi says in the last line of the letter. I don’t trust anyone else.
Right, I think. Sure, you don’t.
“What is it?” Papa asks. “Why did you stop reading?”
“It’s impossible, what she has asked you for! How dare—”
“It’s not impossible.” My father’s calm reply cuts me off.
“You cannot even step out of the house without falling ill!”
“Which is why you must go in my stead.” There is a look in Papa’s eyes that reminds me of the time he told me about the importance of learning Vani. “You must do everything you can—everything that is asked for in this letter.”
I shake my head angrily. “Why should we care about this? Magi have never done us any favors.”
My father pauses before answering, almost as if weighing his words first. “There was a world once,” he says finally. “Before the tenements. Before the Great War divided the four kingdoms of Svapnalok and turned friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor. This might be our only hope of seeing something like that world again.”
I grow quiet for a long moment and think of the vile words Bahar’s father and others spewed about my mother. People Papa once considered his friends and neighbors.
“If there is a world like that”—I rise to my feet again and walk to the door—“it only exists in dreams and in stories for children. We are born into this life, remember? Isn’t that what you’ve told me all along?”
“Son, listen to me. I know I said—”
“General Tahmasp says the army needs new loadbearers,” I interrupt. “He asked me to enlist. And I think I might.”
The clay cup holding Papa’s medicine falls to the floor and shatters. “You cannot! People die thankless deaths in the army every day!”
“And they don’t die in other ways?” I hold up the scroll again. “Do you think I’d be any safer if I was discovered doing this? At least the government pays fifty swarnas to the families of each deceased soldier.”
“If you join the army, Cavas, you’ll see me dead.” Papa’s voice is quiet, his face paler than I’ve ever seen it before. “By all the gods and the saints, you will.”
“I’m going to clean this up,” I say, ignoring the empty threat and kneeling to pick up the broken cup’s pieces.
Papa doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the night. He refuses the boiled vegetables I’ve cooked for him—harkening back to a form of protest I used when I was a boy of six or seven.
“Fine!” I shout. “Starve, then!”
I storm out and throw myself on top of the battered old cot by the door—one I sometimes use when the weather is good. Stars have appeared next to a lonely yellow moon, and I slowly pick out the shape of the sky goddess constellation, characterized by the triad of stars forming the tips of her trident.
“You’re wrong, Papa,” I whisper. “There is no such thing as hope.”
13CAVAS
Even though I know I’ve made the right decision, I can’t sleep that night. Choices and hope are dangerous words. They draw you in like a moth to a torch; they burn you alive if you get too close.
Yet, long before dawn breaks, I find myself slipping into my shoes again. Instead of my usual orange turban, I tie a checkered scarf around my head the way firestone miners do, angling it so it covers my day-old stubble and fully grown mustache. As a final touch, I drape an old blanket over my shoulders. The fewer people who recognize me, the better, even though no one is awake at this time of the day, not even the city sweepers.
Dawn in Ambarvadi breaks slowly. When I leave the tenements, it’s still dark, pale-blue light barely edging the sky. Here, the weather isn’t as extreme as it is near the Desert of Dreams. But mornings are still cold, and by the time I reach the outskirts of the city, I’m chilled to the bone. The earth is wet with dew and sticks to the thin soles of my jootis as I make my way to the main square, past darkened havelis and boarded-up shops. I circle the perimeter of the enormous marble temple devoted to the sky goddess, offerings of fruit and flowers heaped outside its gilded gates.
Behind the sky goddess’s temple there are more havelis, though many have fallen into disrepair. Women hang clothes to dry on lines on balconies; monkeys perch quietly on the rooftops. If a wealthy magus stepped into this quarter at any time of the day, they’d find themselves looted—either by monkeys or by common thieves. But no one bothers me or even looks as I slip into the alley between a boarded-up apothecary and a bicycle shop. No one cares that I am a non-magus headed to the shrine that lies at the alley’s end, dedicated to Sant Javer—a man who spent most of his life healing people without asking for anything in return. Javer had followers among magi and non-magi alike. When Svapnalok was still united, Papa said, pilgrims came from the farthest reaches of the continent to offer Sant Javer their respects or to seek cures.
“Sant Javer never turned anyone away,” Papa told me. “Rich or poor. Magus or non-magus.”
It’s the only reason the offerings placed in front of the closed doors of the saint’s temple have
