The Heartless Divine

by Varsha Ravi

  “Somebody’s trying to break into the house!” he shouted in the direction of the other bathroom, where Suri was currently attacking the issue of the stuck pipes.

  “Tell them to fuck off!” she screamed back.

  Kiran ran a hand through his wet hair, which was dripping all over the carpet—that would be yet another stern lecture to look forward to—and tied a towel around his waist, unlocking the splintering door in the midst of one of the knocks. Four teenagers froze, hands hanging in the air as they stared at him.

  He regarded them with cool amusement. “Are you Suri’s friends?”

  Deafening silence. One of them, a lanky dark-skinned boy in a band T-shirt, muttered, “Jesus.”

  “Not quite,” he said cheerfully. He couldn’t truthfully say he wasn’t enjoying the ego boost, but he figured Suri wouldn’t appreciate it if he left her guests out in the hallway. “Are you Suri’s friends?”

  “Yeah,” said a tall girl in blocky black heels and a floral print dress. Her dark eyes were wide, as if she was faintly shell-shocked. The other two, likely related, with the same dark, hooded eyes, messy, black hair, and lightly tanned skin, were completely silent. “We’re her, uh, friends.”

  “Suri,” he yelled, turning toward the bedroom. “Your friends are here!”

  “I’ll be right out,” she screamed back. Shortly after, there was a shrill noise and the sound of spraying water, quickly followed by a long stream of expletives.

  He turned back to them, gesturing toward the empty couch. “She might be gone for a bit. Would any of you like refreshments? I’m quite good at making tea.”

  By the time Suri finished, the sun had gone down completely, and her entire body felt like someone had run it over with a tractor.

  After taking a quick shower, she padded out toward the living room. Kiran’s voice rose up before she turned the corner. She lingered in the hallway for a moment. It wasn’t really eavesdropping if it was your own house, she reasoned.

  “So how do you know Suri?” Ellis asked. “This is really good tea.”

  “One of my only real talents.” The god sounded pleased by the praise. “Her mother and mine were close friends. I’m staying with her while I do a gap year.”

  “Her mother’s dead, though,” Aza cut in, faintly suspicious.

  “So’s mine,” he said easily, and Suri figured that, in a roundabout way, he was telling the truth. Except that his mother had died a long, long time ago, long before hers had even been born. “They were old college friends.”

  “What are you planning to study?” Dai asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he replied, and there was an odd, mischievous edge to his voice that was meant for her, only her. “A little bit of everything. Might do a focus on Enesmati history. Always fun to splash around in the past.”

  Thinking she’d probably heard enough, she ducked out into the living room, raising a weary hand in greeting to her friends. She froze, blood draining from her skin. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “What?” Kiran asked innocently, looking up from where he was leaned against the side of the coffee table, sitting cross-legged. His towel was slung low around his waist, slow rivulets of water dripping down his—Jesus. God. What the hell?

  “You,” she said, voice so strained she could barely recognize it as her own. “What is wrong with you? Couldn’t you have—” She made a complicated, hectic motion with her hands. “Changed?”

  “Into what?” he asked, arching an eyebrow imperiously. “According to you, my sense of style is atrocious. Plus, it’s not like I could’ve left your lovely guests to, what? Make tea for themselves?”

  “Out of my sight,” she managed, oddly shrill. She snapped her fingers at him. “Go! Go put actual clothes on! I don’t care what they are as long as they’re made of fabric!”

  He waved goodbye to her friends on the way out, who all watched him leave with the faintly shocked sense of disbelief that Suri felt in every single cell of her body.

  She woodenly walked around to the couch and took a seat on the edge of it, sagging back against the worn upholstery. After a few moments of silence, she lifted her head and said, “I don’t want to talk about that. Don’t make me talk about that.”

  Miya’s eyes were alive with light. “I can’t imagine why.”

  “Oh, stop bullying her,” Dai said mildly, blowing on his tea. “It’s probably weird, seeing a childhood friend after all this time. Speaking of, where is he from? That accent doesn’t sound Enesmati.”

  There was no easy way for her to say that she had absolutely no idea. He was right, though—Suri had grown up around Enesmati immigrants, and she couldn’t place his accent among any of the old languages. Maybe gods have their own language, she thought. “A dialect, maybe? He’s never bothered to explain.”

  Her gaze drifted, then fell on the old poster board slotted between the armchair and the sofa. From here, she could see the glint of glitter glue, the yellowing edges of the newspaper clippings. Her heart was something strange and sunken in her chest.

  “Suri,” Kiran said, dropping a hand on her shoulder. The dry, searing heat drew her out of her reverie; she glanced up at him, vacant, and he stared back steadily.

  Finally, she said, “Did you cut that off with craft scissors?”

  The old camp T-shirt been cropped, a few loose threads and the ragged, scalloped edge betraying the hasty job. He tilted his head, offering a faint smile, which was answer enough. Nudging her slightly, he squeezed in between her and Miya, pulling his knees up. “So what did I miss?”

  “Nothing,” she exhaled, scrubbing at dry eyes. “Nothing.”

  Instead of trying to hold his gaze, intense and overwarm, she dug around for the television remote. And then the conversation shifted organically to a discussion on the week’s shows, and season finales and eliminations and events that had once seemed interesting and now seemed horribly, painfully mundane.

  Suri nudged Kiran, interrupting him in the middle of a long tirade he’d been delivering on the merits and pitfalls of the current elimination system in Heartbreak Hotel. He cut himself off, raising his eyebrows at her. She whispered, “Kitchen. Now.”

  He dipped his head in a satirical bow and followed her into the kitchenette. In the distance, Suri could hear Ellis playing with the remote control. The voices on the television fluctuated, swelling and falling in comical tempo.

  “What did you want to talk about?” Kiran asked, taking a seat on the edge of the countertop. The fluorescent light cast him in sickly shades of white, washing him out into a ghost of himself. He tapped his fingernails on the laminate. “It’s not like talking in here will provide much privacy, but to each their own, I suppose.”

  Suri rubbed at the back of her neck, hesitant. She wasn’t entirely sure how to broach this issue, how one even tried to segue into it. The only option was just to—wade into the dark, thick mess of it all. “You have to—you have to be understanding of them.”

  He cocked his head, an oddly feral movement. “What do you mean by that?”

  “It’s just—” She trailed off, making a noise of frustration at her own ineptitude, her own inability to articulate what she meant to say. “They’re human. They’re young, they’re stupid. I don’t know, if they ever screw up and say something stupid to you, or, I don’t know, disrespect you? You’ll have to be understanding. You can’t just—” She waved a hand. “Do something to them.”

  Kiran was silent for long enough that, finally, she forced herself to look up and hold his gaze. There was something unrecognizable about him just then, carved with the beauty of a blade balanced on thin skin. This was what a fire looked like right before it burned, before it seared.

  He slid off the countertop and crossed the distance between them, soundless. He reached out a hand and tilted her chin up to meet his gaze, his touch oddly gentle, fingertips rough and calloused. The planes of his face were fairytale-sweet and just as sharp. “Are you afraid of me, Suri?”

&nb
sp; Her breath caught—from fear. Even with her senses dulled and singed by flame, she understood she was supposed to fear him. Wonder was a low roar in her blood.

  “Do you fear me?” he continued, watching her with that same intensity. It was impossible to say he resembled a boy now—his divinity marked him in distinct ways. In the glow of his eyes, the warmth of his skin when he stood so close. “Are you afraid that I will punish them if they step out of line? For the sake of punishment, for pure, power-drunk sadism?”

  Step back, she thought vaguely. He was too much up close, too strange and alive with divinity. There was a reason stars existed too far away to touch.

  “You should be,” he said softly, but a little distantly. “I won’t harm any of you, regardless. Not only because you are doing me the prodigious favor of housing me, but because I tire of senseless violence. I have already drunk my fill of that, been satiated and saturated with it. But you should be afraid of me, Suri. Gods are not kind. They have never been kind, and they never will be. Humanity would do well to remember that.”

  A scream of laughter came from the living room, and the overhead lights flickered. He inclined his head toward them, all youth-borne joy. “Go join your friends, Suri.”

  She turned to leave, too quickly for it to go unnoticed. But even after she returned to the couch, pulled her knees up, and settled into watching episode after episode of a show she wouldn't be able to recall the next day, she couldn’t help but think of the god’s warning, of the unfamiliar sadness in his eyes.

  4

  Enesmat

  Suri watched the flat, cracked soil of the borderlands begin to fade into vetiver grass and shrubbery. Athri was a clever country, wrapped by the arid wastelands in the way it was. Her family had stolen land that was dry and salted—the heart of the kingdom’s crown still lay within the ring of mountains.

  The carriage followed a trade route—one of only a handful—that led between southern Naja and northwestern Athri. Their western border was arid; thin soil stained red as blood, dotted by grasses and neem trees. There were settlements, of course, a handful of villages and cities that spread across the expanse of the wastelands, some on occupied land and some not. But they were few and far between, and in this world of dusty heat and dead air, they cared little for the crown that marked itself upon the land. A native Najan wouldn’t last a day here and the Athrians knew it, glancing at the passing carriage with the faint, haughty disdain that came from pride and loss.

  Suri traced the line of the tattoo below her collarbone—a dark, sharp design of thorns and flowers that she had been given as a child—and tried to focus not on the scenery but on the component parts of the assignment in front of her. Yet her mind continued to wander. Anyu had bid her farewell at the capital; the king and queen hadn’t allowed him to accompany her to the border. She had wanted to hug him, but hadn’t wanted it to come off too stilted, and so she had just stood there for a while until he had stepped forward, a little wry, and hugged her.

  Never return, he’d repeated. It was the kind of order, the kind of promise, that made her think she was in a fairy tale of her own, that this was an inexplicable gift the fates had offered.

  Outside, the grasslands became flushed with blossoms until they dipped and rose into low foothills. From this vantage point, she couldn’t see where they cut off, but she knew it well enough—she’d studied Athri’s geography intensely in the days before their departure.

  It was humiliating that she hadn’t made note of it prior to this engagement—she knew the rest of the peninsula like the back of her hand, from mountain to mountain and sea to sea. But she had never spent as much time in the southern kingdom as she had in the others. Out of the remaining free lands, it held the least Najan influence, stony and aloof.

  The soft hills grew into dark stone, the Niravu Mountains clawing out of the ground. Suri remembered what Isa had murmured, watching her poring over the atlases of the mountain nation. It was beautiful, she had said wistfully. I had family in the capital when I was younger, before the war. I cannot say if it will be the same, but it was beautiful.

  The war. They called it the Athrian War, not because Athri had won, but because Naja had fought far too many wars for every one to hold their name. She remembered it vaguely; nine years ago, she had been busy with insurrection in the northeast. But the boy king had lost his family to that war she barely remembered. He would hate her, surely.

  The carriage rattled to a brief stop, a respite before the drop. Suri glanced out the window and stilled. It was beautiful, Isa had said, past tense hanging heavy in her voice, but war didn’t break places like this. Time didn’t touch them—it skirted around them, and left the edges worn and sepia-toned.

  On one side, the ragged rock of the mountains fell away into the hills they’d just passed. On the other, they curved inward, creating jagged spires like teeth that flattened out into shorter cliffs before giving way to a wide valley that reached across to the other side. In the morning sun, it was a black crown, shining against the light.

  Isa was silent beside her, but she could not be sure whether it was from awe or sadness.

  The capital, Marai, was barely visible from here, but Suri could make out the edges. A crowded, tangled city pressed up against the base of the mountains, and a palace curled into the stone of the lower hills. A thin line wrapped around the capital—a gate, perhaps. Other settlements dotted the rest of the land, connected by roads as wild and decayed as the one they’d just traveled.

  As they descended back onto flat ground, the shining stone of the mountains gave way to endless paddy fields, villages built around palm trees that bunched and crooked upward. The causeway toward the city was beaten and worn, and she felt the hatred of every staring farmhand and every young child on the outskirts of the fields as they passed them all by.

  Before long, the spiderweb of villages gave way to the city gates. They were made of the same dark rock as the mountains, reinforced by iron and topped by towers and watchmen. It would’ve been daunting if the structures hadn’t been so obviously worn from age.

  They met the envoy on the other side, after the guards finished gruffly reviewing their papers. It was a strange duo—a pair of pale-skinned yavanas, one a little older than Suri and the other around her father’s age. They looked identical, but not in the way of a father and son—they had the same plain cloak, the same boots, the same brooch on their collar, and the same mannerisms. The boy narrowed his eyes at her in appraisal, crossing his arms. “You’re the bride?”

  Suri winced, and the older man set a heavy hand on the boy’s shoulders, glaring down at him. Then he offered them a warm smile, nodding toward their bags. “Hush, Lucius. We can take those, your Highness; the crown sent us to escort you to the palace. You can call me Galen.”

  She exchanged a glance with Isa, but handed over the trunks. She felt oddly jittery in this foreign world, cut so clearly from a different cloth than all the cities she’d known before.

  The tenements ran unevenly in a half circle against the base of the mountains, and the incline toward the palace held another set, glittering in the morning light. It was hard to understand the mechanics of the city from the very bottom; Suri could only discern details through the banners that crisscrossed the streets, the bright-eyed vendors, the pungent odor of spices in the air.

  The central market held an empty square at the center, the beat stone edges cluttered with the edges of stalls and baskets. Spice vendors, hands streaked with seeds of dried chilis, handed bundles of bound spices to servants wrapped in dyed cotton and dull metal bracelets. Sacks of millet and rice were heaped on the stalls on the edges of the markets, and stray grains scattered the ground like dust.

  Isa tightened her shawl around herself. They’d been steadily receiving curious looks—from small children and the parents that steered them away, from vendors and buyers and beggars alike. The looks had quickly turned probing—Suri was a few shades light for the southern tip, and Isa’s servant�
�s tattoo was visible through her shawl.

  “How long until we arrive?” Suri asked Lucius, and he looked at her askance, surprised.

  “A few minutes, perhaps,” he said. “There is a shortcut through the upper city that may spare you two the scrutiny of the citizens.”

  He gestured up a set of steps cut into the stone of the mountain before starting up them cheerfully. Galen followed, glancing down at them with concern, but Suri gestured for him to go on.

  “What did you expect?” Isa asked, so low that her voice was nearly inaudible in the din of the angadi.

  “I don’t know,” she said truthfully, glancing around. The air here was perfumed with flowers and spices, and she was reminded strangely of Sahet. “Perhaps I thought we might be granted a certain measure of anonymity. Though I suppose that isn’t the purpose of this assignment.”

  Isa regarded her with warmth, but it read somewhat like dry pity. “I’m sure you will learn to disappear into the city quickly enough.”

  Suri raised her eyebrows—it was the closest to a proper compliment the other girl had ever given her, but she was already climbing up the steps toward the upper city.

  After finding Lucius beside the gates, Suri introduced herself and Isa to a guard, explaining why they had arrived. The words sat strangely in her mouth—Suriyalekha Adityan, here to visit the king. She’d never referred to him that way before, and it weighed on her heavily. He was cut from a different cloth than every king she’d met and killed before, even her father. Especially her father. There was something sharp and youthful and feral about the boy king that did not usually live in crowns, no matter how dark or strong they happened to be.

  The guard watched for a moment, uneasy, before nodding to another, who peeled apart from the rest and left for the palace. The guard returned with a young woman dressed in servant’s clothes—a thin, muslin skirt and a dun-colored, cotton tunic layered on top. A pattern of flowers was embroidered along the edge of the tunic, done in uneven, painstaking patches. She was unadorned apart from the pin on her collar, made out of the same dark metal as the gate, and her black hair hung in a thick braid down her back.