The Heartless Divine

by Varsha Ravi

  Viro shifted away from the throne, closer to those glossy windows, their shadows cast in firelight against them. The words were innocent enough, but bitterness seared through him in eulogies. “I make the time, Princess. The safety of this city is a priority of mine.”

  Unsaid words threatened to rip him cleanly in two, but he turned to meet the girl’s gaze. She was a few months older than him, and yet she felt so foreign. As if, beside her, he was both an old man and a wailing infant. He wondered if she was struck by it too; the seas that divided them, the wars that had set wastelands to ash.

  But her expression was marble smooth and inscrutable. He thought petulantly of how she and Kiran might enjoy one another’s company, fruitlessly trying to crack layers of stone and polish until one finally hit upon a core of candor. “How admirable. Will I be able to see you, then?”

  “I’m sure we’ll find time for each other,” he said warmly. His fingers were clenched in fists so tight he feared his nails might draw blood. “There’s no need to rush, regardless.”

  She dipped her head in acquiescence, but it was forced. “Are you free for dinner tomorrow?”

  He nodded. “I’ll see you then, Suri.” The name was bitter and unfamiliar on his lips. He had only known her last name, had only known it as a curse.

  The other two girls left the room. She raised a hand in farewell and gave a brief, knowing smile before following them out.

  The door shut with a faint thud. Tarak’s footsteps shadowed the sound, and his hand brushed Viro’s shoulder before he stopped to lean against the jeweled table in front of the throne. His eyes danced with amusement, but his mouth was set in a sharp line. “You won’t like what I have to say.”

  Viro raised his eyebrows. “What is it?”

  “She reminds me a lot of you,” he said, turning to survey the darkened city outside, milky with lamplight and the empty shine of the new moon.

  “How so?” Viro pushed off from the throne, turning toward the windows. It had been years since it had been cleaned, years since it had last bled, but his fingers still felt tacky. It was not his throne to touch, he knew.

  Tarak lifted his shoulders in a shrug, bringing his index finger and thumb together in a quick snap. “The same spark, like flint and moonstone. Who knows? Perhaps you’ll learn to get along, fall in love.” He rose from where he had knelt beside the table, ragged nails tracing lines of pearl and garnet, and offered him a small, weary smile. “I have night watch.”

  He let his hand fall from the carved windowsill, but it lingered, the pads of his fingers pressed to uneven stone like a handful of broken kisses. I do not want to fall in love. “So you do. Promise you will take care of yourself.”

  It was a well-worn routine of theirs, vows softened by age and sorrow, and so, when Tarak spoke, Viro could hear the faintest hint of a smile in his voice. “I always do.”

  5

  Enesmat

  Marai was pleasant enough, all things considered. Suri hadn’t expected a warm welcome, and the city had responded in kind, lukewarm enough to be tolerable but cool to the touch. And those brief, rare, moments when Athrians could not hide their bitterness, their disgust—she didn’t begrudge them for it. She was slowly distancing herself from the apprehension regarding the job, the dread of looking at places and people and wondering what they would look like once dead.

  It had been over a week since she had arrived, and she still had only stolen glimpses of the boy king. She had taken to calling him that in her head, reluctant to recognize his name. It would become harder that way, would draw her mental outline of him further from a target and closer to a human.

  “Are you awake, Princess?”

  Though it was already difficult enough to imagine him as something with blood, with a beating heart.

  Suri flicked her gaze up from where she had been studying the tablecloth. The boy king sat across from her at the other end of the long dining table. He raised his eyebrows, amused. “Have you not been getting enough sleep?”

  “No,” she said, dropping the cloth. “Simply lost in thought.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched, but he said nothing. They had dined together every night of the past week, a perfect opportunity to lower his defenses if there was one, and yet every single meal began and ended in silence. Suri hadn’t thought there was anyone in all the seas more paranoid than her father, and yet she had been so cleanly proven wrong.

  “Your Majesty—” she began.

  “As I said, you’re welcome to call me by name,” he said, cutting his curried chicken into small pieces and bringing one to his mouth. “As we are betrothed.”

  It took all Suri had not to flinch, but the king was watching her far too closely for her to make a misstep and have it not be fatal. She took a bite of rice, just enough to feign an appetite. “I never see you around the palace.”

  “A nation doesn’t run itself.”

  Even one as small and pitiful this one. The words sprung to her mind, casual and thoughtless and true. She hid a frown behind her hand as she reached for her glass of water.

  “I can ask Tarak to show you around, if you’re listless. He’s busy enough, but you’d be safe with him.”

  “Tarak?” she questioned before recognizing the name, muttered low under the king’s breath nearly every time they met. The captain of the guard was inseparable from the boy king, an appendage just as natural as a limb. “I couldn’t impose on him like that. My maids already accompany me. It is just that…”

  The king tilted his head in a question. It was a youthful gesture, and it looked odd on him somehow. “What?”

  “I barely ever see you. As you said, we betrothed,” she said, willing the words to come out as interested and genuine-sounding as she could. “I feel like we should know each other better.”

  He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “We have time for that, Princess. Not everything is like the stories, where heroes bewitch their lovers in seven days and slay the demons in eight.”

  His tone was faintly abrasive, as if it took effort to hold his scorn back. But she supposed she had walked into that, naive as she was meant to present herself.

  The captain of the guard, Tarak, had been a little less unpleasant in conversation, but he was nearly as busy. The one time they did cross paths, it was the other boy that found her.

  “Do you like flowers?” The question came so abruptly that Suri nearly slid a knife out of the makeshift pockets she’d cut into her skirts. She dropped it and wiped her sweaty hand on the fabric before bringing it up to tuck a piece of hair behind her ears. The captain held his hands up, a gesture of peace. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Your Highness. Apologies, I’m unused to honorifics.”

  Suri bit back a snort. “You’re very close with the king.”

  The captain beamed, warm brown eyes bright against his dark skin. “We’ve been friends since childhood, actually. All three of us. Though Viro can be a bit prickly at times, which I’m sure you’ve learned.”

  Prickly doesn’t come close to covering it, she thought. “How did you know I like flowers?”

  “You come here every day,” he said, nodding at the rosebush in front of her. The palace had four gardens—one in the east courtyard, a simple one adorning the main entrance, a terrace on the roof of the western spire, and the northern gardens. The northern gardens were the largest and most elaborate, and despite her best interests and Mohini’s warnings, Suri found herself drawn there day after day.

  Suri wasn’t precisely sure whether the recluse in the mountains could hurt her from this distance—sometimes she still doubted his existence—but she limited nighttime visits, for Isa’s peace of mind if nothing else.

  Tarak took a rose in his hands, rubbed a thumb over the unopened bud. “My mother was a gardener.”

  Suri blinked. “Pardon?”

  He dropped his hand from the bush. “My mother loved to garden. She taught us—or tried to. Viro didn’t have the patience—still doesn’t—and I, unfortunate
ly, don’t have the hand for it. Flowers wither in my hands. But they are beautiful.”

  “They are,” she said. A silence followed, thick enough to cut with a knife, even though the other boy hadn’t looked up from the rosebush. “What happened to your mother?”

  “She died. In the attacks on Marai, later in the war.” Tarak smiled and straightened up. “You’re wondering why I don’t hate you.”

  Suri had been wondering that, and on any other occasion she would’ve worried at being so easily read. But his expression was calm and surprisingly friendly, and so she forgot to be afraid.

  “War is war,” he said simply. “People aren’t nations, even though they may wish it. No matter what happens, war will continue, and people will die. But where I stand now, I can try to limit the latter as best I can.” Tarak turned his attention back to the rosebush and plucked a fully bloomed flower before handing it to Suri. “I can’t bring her back, and so I have no reason to resent you for what you haven’t done.”

  Suri played with the stem of the flower to avoid looking up. “That’s a very unique point of view, Captain.”

  “Unfortunately,” he agreed. He opened his mouth to say something else, but a shout arose from far away, mildly resembling his name. He shook his head and offered another small smile before raising his hand in farewell. “I’ll see you around, Your Highness.”

  Wandering around the palace alone was still too suspicious to be safe, and so Suri made it a point to take Isa or Mohini with her whenever she made to “explore.” But even that was an unexpectedly difficult task, considering how infrequently she found them where they were meant to be.

  Isa, at least, tried to be clandestine about it, stealing away from her room adjacent to Suri’s early in the morning and late at night. Suri applauded the effort—if not for the fact that stealth was her profession, she might not have noticed her on some occasions.

  It wasn’t as if Suri didn’t have her suspicions. She was often awake far before Isa returned, and the girl often returned through the northern gardens, and occasionally the eastern gate. On walks around the city, she would subconsciously take a more circuitous path, passing by the entrance to the temple instead of cutting through the heart of the markets like Suri was wont to do. Any attempts at subtlety on Isa’s part had gone horribly and undeniably wrong, though Suri was willing to wait until the other girl wanted to talk about it.

  Mohini made no attempts to hide her distraction. Many mornings would pass with her completely absent from the entire west wing of the palace, only to return long after the sun had risen, dressed in her clothes from the previous night. Oftentimes Mohini would go missing, eventually tracked down in some dusty alcove of the library sorting through correspondence for Galen and his apprentice. But there were just as many times when Suri would open her door in the early morning to find Lucius on the other side, a strangely strained expression on his face.

  “Is there anything I can get for you?” she asked dryly. “Laxative herbs?”

  He gave her a dirty look before pulling a sheaf of bound parchment slips out of the leather bag by his side. “These are… Well, when I was going through maps with Gal and Mohini yesterday, she seemed interested in western history… And I just thought she would appreciate them more than dusty old cataloguers… I was planning to give them to her myself, but I can’t find her—”

  “She’s washing up.”

  “Ah,” Lucius said, face blotchy. “That explains it. Give them to her, will you, Princess?”

  And then he had shut the door in her face and run loudly down the corridor.

  A sheaf of letters was just as often a pastry from the bakery down the street, or a flower that had fallen from a bush, or a note written in truly unintelligible handwriting and folded until it became little more than a ball.

  Despite it all, Suri found that, surprisingly, it took little time to learn the city, and even more surprisingly that she actually enjoyed Mohini’s company, her wide smile and mischievous take on the littlest of things. The palace still eluded her, though, full of locked doors and dusty, unlit hallways that always ended in dead ends.

  And, no matter how hard she looked or how long she waited, she never saw the boy from the hill.

  It was not a loss in the strictest sense of the word. Suri liked the upper city well enough, but it wasn’t alive in the same way as the angadi and the buildings borne from it. To walk a few meters in the lower city was to hear five people’s life stories and a hundred vendors calling out into the humid midday air. To walk an entire street’s length was to hear more than a few whispered rumors, heavy with wild fear.

  If the boy king was the kingdom’s smile, harsh and cutting, the boy from the hill was its blood, everywhere and nowhere at all, slick with smoke and secrets.

  No one could seem to agree on who he was, what he was. Mohini had made it clear that first day that she disapproved of either his actions or his existence—she had never deigned to clarify which one—and that they were all better off without him. The boy king never spoke of him, but sometimes, Suri could feel him in the air—a dangling pronoun in a conversation that she wasn’t supposed to hear, silver ash streaked against the inside of his wrist.

  The people of the lower city spoke of him without really daring to, a dance from one thought to another, suspicions grown into something new and frightening. A handful of matronly women hanging out their laundry on a terrace far above the packed dirt street—I heard he can touch fire, that he can drink it, that he was borne of it, pulled straight from the hearth in the middle of the storm. Children clad in colorful rags darting out from one alley into another, dipped and danced around Suri, fingers interlocked and mouths stretched open in rictal smiles as they sang a song that must’ve been new but sounded old as bones—The orphan of the earth and the ashes, the only hope of the night-struck land, the messiah. A few older kids, perched on the edge of an arching, elegant fountain on the outskirts of the markets, worn down by decades of use and whitened by the sun—Which of them? The thyvaayan? The gods whisper in his ears so often, my atha told me he has to go to the apothecary for herbs to stem the bleeding.

  The rumors were so elaborate it was impossible for them to be true, and so specific it was impossible for them to be made up. He was a criminal, a peasant too dangerous to live near others; he was a long-lost prince from Erya that the king’s late parents—gods bless them—had taken in out of the goodness of their hearts; he was a god himself, a fallen sort of god that was being disciplined and had been forced to live with humans, and yet he hated their faces so much he couldn’t stand to live in the city proper.

  An old woman, hemming a dress on the stoop of a low, crumbling tenement building as a thin summer breeze blew through, even suggested, in a thoughtful conversation with the dragonflies beside her, that he was not real at all, just a figment of smoke—an illusion breathed into something near alive that they had all believed because it was simply too difficult to attempt the alternative.

  Suri was not entirely sure what to think of him, apart from a bone-deep wariness she had acquired from years of experience, a knowledge that people only left whispers of themselves behind in the minds of so many people if they were foolish or dangerous. And she did not think he was foolish, not yet.

  She did not want to visit him, not really. He was not her target, and he was not her ally—it was likely he’d impede her path before he aided her—but it was impossible to let it go. If only because she wanted to knock his teeth out for scaring Mohini so badly.

  But he was a ghost and a shadow and more the scent of smoke than the dark, ashy thread of it, and she never saw him, not once.

  “Now,” Lucius said, tossing an apple core from one hand to another, “Will you finally tell me where you have been?”

  Kiran held out his hand, and the other boy dutifully placed the core in it. He placed it in the waste bin and wiped his hands with a washcloth hung on a low ring, speaking without looking back at his friend. “I don’t know what you’re t
alking about. I’ve been here all week.”

  “Yes,” Lucius said, spreading his hands emphatically as he was wont to do when he was feeling particularly melodramatic. “Precisely. You have been here all week. You schedule all your meetings with the nakshi in the early morning and pop around the city to say hello, and then do a single circuit of the temple before cloistering yourself in here for the rest of the day. This is not typical Kiran behavior.”

  “You’ve been gone for over a year,” he said, gathering a stack of treatises he was looking over for Viro into a stack and placing them in the corner of the stout wooden table they’d all made together, when they’d been considerably smaller and had much less hand-eye coordination. Scrolls were swept across the rest of the table, and lay covering the floor in precarious stacks. Stories, ledgers, tales of distant lands—Lucius had brought them with him when he’d first visited after a year and a half of being pen pals, and had never stopped since. The gifts were the closest thing Kiran had to a taste of the outside world, apart from brief diplomatic envoys. “For all you know, I may have changed. And don’t call him that.”

  “Call him what? Nakshi? He is what he is,” Lucius said, shifting to lie down on the uneven, overused settee. “And, at the very least, allow me this—I know you, and I don’t need to see you to know you, never have. So why are you hiding? Or rather, who are you hiding from?”

  “I’m not going to play along with this, Lucius.”

  “You don’t have to say anything,” he said, holding up his hands. There was an irritating, familiar gleam in his eyes. Kiran wondered if Tarak would be terribly upset if he dumped the mess of dealing with him on the royal guard for the day. “All your answers will be in your expressions. Your left eyelid twitches when you’re upset, you know.”

  He looked up from where he was scrubbing the tiled floor and jerked his head at the bucket of water beside him. “I will pour this all over you.”

  Lucius grinned. “You’d have to catch me first. Is it… that baker who thinks you’re a revenant from Dhaasthur?” Kiran kept scrubbing. “Or is it the chief from Maíneli, the one who thinks you asked the gods to ruin their crops?”