"Some mistakes," her mother had once said, "are not forgiven by the gods."

But she was the chosen one, wasn't she? The gods had plans for her, hadn't they?

Djari had never voiced those thoughts, even though they had been the reasons behind her every disobedience, every mistake she'd made. But one could take privileges and blessings only so far before they run dry, and sometimes pride had its consequences. Pride, Djari knew, had been one of her sins among many, and she was about to pay for it tonight, here, in the isolated canyons of the Djamahari.

They're coming for her.

She bit down hard on that thought, swallowed it down before it reached her face. She had seen it coming for some time, and if her intuition hadn't been right, the tightness of Hasheem's jawline and the way he'd jumped every time someone made a noise near their wagon confirmed it. She knew, from that suffocating tension and the pungent sense of dread shown by both Hasheem and Khali, what exactly was about to become of her.

In a way, it shouldn't be any different. Eventually, she would have to share a bed with her husband, a man of her father's choice, a stranger if one were to look at it from that angle. For the past fifteen years she'd prepared herself to live with such an arrangement, had accepted it as her duty to the khagan. In that way, she should have been prepared.

She wasn't.

The nightmares of her mother being attacked had returned, repeatedly, for the past two nights. They felt more real now than when she'd had them back at camp, and the surroundings had changed in these new ones to resemble where she was, almost like a premonition. She wondered sometimes if Nazir's gift had also existed in some amounts within her. A disturbing thought, that, considering where she was.

And it was her mistake that had put her there. Sheer impulse was what had gotten her running to the stable as soon as word had come about Hasheem having attacked Nazir. Her lack of patience, carelessness, and pride were to blame for riding out of camp alone to gain time with him. What she'd wanted to accomplish with that time, she wasn't so sure. It had never occurred to her to wait—that had always been among her flaws—but the moment she'd seen the band of men surrounding him, she knew this mistake would not be forgiven by the gods.

The metal doors clanged opened, yanking her back to reality. Like instinct, Hasheem jumped back to shield her with his body, his knuckles bone-white and trembling as he rolled them into fists. He had been trying not to show it—the fear that had been eating him alive and terrorizing him for the past few days—and had made a point at hiding his face, turning his back to her as much as he could. It hadn't worked then. It definitely didn't work now.

"Stay behind me," Hasheem croaked, his voice broken from disuse, or from panic, she wasn't sure. Their gags had always been applied during the journey but had yet to be put back on since the last meal. She thought perhaps now they wouldn't need to do that anymore. At night, deep in the canyons of the Djamahari, nobody would hear them if they screamed.

Two men came in, unarmed as they'd been instructed. The leader had made it clear no weapon was to be taken anywhere near Hasheem, and contact was to be as brief and as far out of arm's reach as possible. The boy will kill you with a tied up hand if you're not careful. Give him a weapon, and he'd kill the whole fucking lot of us, still tied up.

Whatever Hasheem was before he'd become her swornsword had put them on extreme caution. They called him the Silver Sparrow, and whatever that meant, there was a reputation that preceded it, and they weren't taking chances.

The bigger one of the two grabbed the chain attached to his ankle, the other took the one to his wrists. She remembered how he'd almost strangled one of them to death with those chains two nights ago for coming too close to her. It had taken three men to save the man before beating Hasheem unconscious. They'd starved him on purpose to weaken him since then, and now, together with the damage they'd done, he didn't seem to have much of a fight left.

Still, he fought, growling and thrashing like a rabid animal as they yanked him out of the wagon by the chains. Two more men joined in to beat him until they were certain he could no longer attack them. The old leader with one eye was nowhere to be found, she noticed.

The biggest man, the one who seemed to be leading them now, crouched down over Hasheem and yanked his head up by the hair.

"So," he said, "how would you like this done, pretty boy? Would you like to die first or watch us fuck her before I take your head off?"

Hasheem turned in that grip, spat blood in the man's face, and snarled, "You touch her—"

A fist came down and slammed into his face before he could finish the sentence. "Well then," he straightened, shook his fist hand to clear the sting and smiled, "die later it is." He jerked his chin to the men in front of him. "Go. Get the girl and bring her here."

She didn't make a sound when two men climbed in. Couldn't, even if there had been someone to hear it. Her windpipe had collapsed, her voice crushed out of existence as she pressed herself up against the wall, heart pounding louder and louder at their closing steps. Khali whose face had been beaten up beyond recognition after the other night's escape attempt limped over to protect her, and was kicked, thrown like a rag doll against the opposite wall of the wagon.

And then, when the men came to stand above her, when impatient hands gripped tight on her arms, her voice came back in a whimper, in useless, broken, suffocating cries of pleading to the men, the beasts, the monsters who were dragging out into the alley. She prayed then, for her brother, her father, for anyone or anything to intervene.

But the gods don't always listen, and life would take what it wants from you, even if you plead and scream. There would be no one to help her, not here, not now, the same way there had been no one to help her mother then.

They threw her on the ground just ten steps away from Hasheem. One of them climbed on top of her, pinning her down with his weight. A hand closed around the back of her neck, pushing her face into the sand, filling her mouth with it, choking her as she tried to breathe.

It shot up out of her, those short, uncontrollable bursts of scream that had been building up in her stomach. The images from those nightmares of her mother replaced her vision, took over her senses, overlapped themselves with her surroundings. It was her body being trapped under a man's weight now, her skin he was touching, and her screams that were scraping the lining of her throat as they came pouring out of her.

And amid all those sounds she heard herself whimper the words. Please, she pleaded. Don't do this, she cried, in panic, in helplessness, in prayers she knew wouldn't be answered.

The sound of a belt being unbuckled came, followed by the loud shuffle of fabric, and out there, ten unattainable steps in front of her, lying on the ground surrounded by three men, Hasheem cried out the sound of a man being tortured, of someone going through his worst nightmare, watching them.

He crawled over on the sand, made it a few feet before they kicked him in the ribs and dragged him back by the ankle. A booted foot pinned him to the ground, pressed tight in the middle of his back to keep him from moving. The new leader yanked him up by the hair to face her, bent over to whisper something in his ear, and Hasheem, with all the strength that was left in him, thrashed under that foot, screamed a sound so animal-like, so terrifying as though something had been ripped out from his throat. It went on, escalated into a wail one might expect from tortured beast as the man above her took a fistful of her clothes and ripped them apart, piece by piece.

We are bharavis...

A distant memory drifted into her mind. A voice so gentle, so strong from which limitless, immeasurable strength had been derived, time and time again.

"We are bharavis," her mother had said, gripping her hand so tight it had left a mark, "born to carry the legacy of our race, to ensure the continuity of our blood. Whatever happens to us, no matter how hard, how vile, we must survive and endure."

And at that moment, when the night suddenly turned silent in her head, when all lives seemed to have stopped breathing, she felt him enter her.

We are bharavis...

A burning, searing pain shot through her core, took away her vision. She bit down on her lip, gripped the sand underneath her trembling fingers to stay silent, and repeated those words in her mind, drilling them into her existence.

No matter how hard, how vile...

He drove into her again, and again, and again, without pause, without hesitation, without mercy. This time tearing her further, deeper, taking more and more until she would have nothing left to take.

We are bharavis...

But there was, oh there was, something he could not take from her, something so permanent, so deeply ingrained no man nor beast could ever make her surrender.

We do not break or bend in the face of danger. We will thrive, in hunger, in thirst, in every torture the gods throw at us. And when the oases run dry, when all other lives have perished in the sun, we, as people of the desert, will live and survive drinking our own blood.

It was the first thing they learned the moment they knew how to speak, the writing on every wall, in every heart of whoever sought to call themselves a Shakshi. And she was a bharavi, her mother's daughter, a child of Za'in izr Husari, a Shakshi to the last drop of her blood.

Djari swore then, by all the gods that had ignored her pleas, and all the beasts that gathered there that night, that she would find a way to survive this, just as every bharavi before her had survived, just as every Shakshi before her had done for thousands of years. And if there had ever been a doubt in what her destiny would be or what role she would take in this war, there was none of it now, not after this. That day she'd paid for it, sealed it with her blood, and the blood of her swornsword.

And there Hasheem was, bruised and bloodied from the beatings, dying little by little as he watched the man slam into her, as careless fingers searched for her hair, gripping it tight while he took pleasure after merciless pleasure, just ten steps too far.

But he was watching, every moment of it. He watched, as if turning away was a crime he would never commit, as if doing so was to hold her hand through it, to remind her what he was, what he'd promised to be, the night she'd killed her horse.

You are an extension of me, she'd said, without thinking, or having considered the consequences.

And he'd reached out his hand then. A hand so large, so steady, closing around hers so tight. A promise under a starry night sky, unshakable even by the gods.

We do this together, you and I.

Don't do this alone.

In the span of those ten impossible steps between them, under the weight of the crushing sky and the men that held them down, their eyes met, locked together in an unspoken understanding. And she knew, she knew then, that this was no longer her pain to hold, but also his, and unmistakably theirs.

Don't do this alone.

She could see it so clearly then, could feel the certainty of it like the beating of her heart, like sunrise in the desert, like breathing, that she would never have to go through life, through marriage, through any promise of death, of pain and sufferings to come, alone, for as long as they lived. He would be here, by her side, even if their paths would forever run parallel to each other and never meet. He would be here, even if it tears him apart.

The man above her came to a pause, and for a moment Djari thought he was done with her.  But there was a strange, strangled sound that came from him, like the gurgling of someone drowning or choking on water. She turned to look and saw him swaying a little to the side, eyes wide and bleeding from his mouth.

And then he fell on top of her.

There was a war hammer buried deep in his back, massive, pitch-black and covered in blood. Djari traced her eyes on the crow figure carved into the hammer head, up the length of the long handle to the dark hand that held it, and then to the man to whom it belonged.

Above her, a tall, large figure in a black, fur-trimmed robe stood, towering over her and the corpse he'd just made, blocking out the moon, the stars and the mountain behind him. He took a step forward, grimaced as he yanked the war hammer out of the dead man's back, made another face of disdain that rendered the number 57 tattooed on his right cheek unreadable and let out a deep, growling sound of displeasure when he caught the attention of the man above Hasheem.

"You pathetic, good for nothing swine," he swore, pointing the war hammer at the man, "take your dirty foot off my Sparrow before I smash that useless brain out of your skull."

***