The Heartless Divine

by Varsha Ravi

  “How does Galen put up with you?” he murmured under his breath.

  The other boy heard it, as he was supposed to, and his smile only widened. “He doesn’t, really. He just throws me out to become someone else’s problem after a while. It’s quite effective, I think.” He shook his head in a laugh and continued, “Don’t distract me! Anyway, come Avyakanth, you won’t be able to hide in here. The festival’s for you and your ilk, after all. And in two moons, the nakshi and his bride are set to bring—what was it that they called the match? A union of peace and prosperity? Or was it bountiful riches? At any rate, you won’t be allowed to rot away up here. Won’t you be expected to give a speech?”

  Kiran didn’t answer. Sometimes things like these slipped Lucius’s mind, little details that he didn’t hold onto. Whether it was out of true forgetfulness or out of some kind of denial of the fact itself, he wasn’t sure. There was no way to bring it up now without ruining the conversation, anyway.

  “Oh. I’m a fool,” Lucius said, gaze sober for a single second before transitioning into wry amusement. “It’s the bride, isn’t it? The Najan princess. Suri.”

  Kiran had not previously known her name, had not known anything but her face—which he had seen passing by the temple the day she arrived—and her title, which he had put together with convoluted inductive reasoning. And he knew the way her dead body looked, he supposed. Ash and death under a red sky, like the blood had become fire and then crimson-slick smoke and covered the sky in sheets so thick that the clouds faded away altogether. He knew that.

  He came back to himself—Lucius was knelt in front of him, a single hand raised above Kiran’s shoulder, as if he had almost shaken him out of his thoughts but thought better of it at the last moment. His eyes were narrowed with concern. “Was it—a vision?”

  “Not a new one,” he said truthfully. “It’s a memory of one, and I do not know if that makes it a vision at all. What about the princess?”

  Lucius relaxed, a subtle movement. “You’re avoiding her. That’s why you’ve been hiding.”

  He shook his head wryly, despite the fact that he still felt shaken. “Why would I be avoiding her?”

  Because she is dead, or will be dead, or has been dead, and you’re afraid of it—afraid of what seeing what death looks like on a person up close, even after you have seen it before so many times. Because you think if you stay away long enough, you might be able to save her.

  Kiran turned his head away so he could continue to scrub at the floor, heart pulsing with the remnants of fear from the vision, praying Lucius would not think to look too closely at him. He didn’t, instead leaning back against the stubby legs of the table and folding his own. “I do not know. You’ve never been one for prejudice. But it has to be her. I’m sure she wishes I had a reason to avoid her.”

  “You’re close friends, then?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Do I mean so little to you after all?”

  “Oh, hush,” he said crossly. “I have spoken to her, and she’s nice, if a little sharp around the edges. It’s in her blood, I’m sure, the call of war, and all that. Nakshi calls to nakshi—”

  “I told you not to call him that.”

  “You’re no fun, has anyone ever told you that? And anyway, I’m sure she hates me, I am clearly besotted with her maid, and it’s becoming a problem,” he finished, turning wide, puppy eyes on him.

  Kiran rolled his eyes and wrung out the rag before returning it to the bucket. “Kazha should have claimed me, considering how often you come to me with problems of your love life. What counsel may I provide this time?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said in agony, stretching out his arms above him. “She’s beautiful, and kind, and is better at mapmaking than I am—Galen keeps threatening to take her back to the capital in place of me—and I don’t know how to deal with it. And sometimes we take walks around the city while she’s supposed to be accompanying me on errands, and I know she’s pointing out landmarks—not that I need a tour of this damn city considering how many times you’ve dragged me into it—but all her words go in one ear and straight out the other. It’s like I’ve lost all sense of language and communication.”

  Kiran blinked at him. “So this isn’t the usual?”

  “What? Of course it’s not the usual. What do you even mean by that, ‘the usual’?”

  He pulled himself up, shaking out the stiffness in his legs before going to wash his hands with the remainders of a bar of rosemary soap Lucius had brought him the last time he’d passed through. He counted off his points on his fingers as he spoke. “She’s pretty, you’re bored, you think love is beautiful and poetic so you decide to give it a try, both of you give up on it after a week, and you move onto the next one.”

  Lucius glared at him. “That is not—I don’t do that. And even if I did do that, that isn’t what is happening here.”

  “Really?” he asked, rinsing his hands. “Have you told her about me?” At the responding silence, he tilted his head with amusement, drying his hands with the washcloth. “That should be your real marker of what to do when you feel oh-so-strongly about someone, instead of coming to me with your woes.”

  He was quiet for a moment more before he said quietly, “I don’t think she likes you very much.”

  “That’s not an uncommon response,” Kiran said, raising his eyebrows. “And you know that. Do you truly plan to interact with us separately for the rest of my gods-given life? I would not call it a bad plan, it has merit—”

  “You always talk like that,” Lucius said, a familiar, weary anger in his voice. “Are you so resigned to the thought of it?”

  Kita had often asked him the same thing, with less anger and more familial sternness, and he had never answered it, not seriously. He uncrossed his arms and came to sit on the edge of the settee, close enough to Lucius that he could see the boy’s hands shaking. “If I wasn’t, I would’ve gone mad by now.”

  His mouth flattened out into a grimace. Finally, he said, “Sometimes… sometimes I wish we had met under different circumstances.”

  His mouth quirked to the side. “It’s unlikely we would’ve met at all if I had not grown up like this.”

  “I know,” Lucius said, a glimmer of sad humor lifting his expression. “I know, but it would’ve been nice. Do you ever wonder what your life would’ve been like, if it hadn’t been this way?”

  “This is the only life I’ve ever lived,” Kiran said, and though it was true, a traitorous whisper thrummed under the words, a voice he had never allowed to speak. All the time.

  Suri had never worked with a kagha before. She had seen one once, as a young girl, reached out a soft, small hand to touch the black bird—it had been fully grown, scaling the length of her torso in height—and pulled back when it had snapped its beak. They were volatile, coarse animals, but beautiful all the same. And nearly impossible to tame by anyone without Athrian blood.

  Anyu had informed her that they had already trained one for her and left it in the aviary months ago, assuring her in his pleasant way that it was perfectly safe to interact with as long as she didn’t put her fingers near its mouth.

  She wasn’t planning to, but the entire operation of communication was rendered useless by the simple fact that she could not find the aviary.

  Her maids were unsure; Tarak would know, she knew, and so would the boy king, but she could never find the former, and knew the latter would be too suspicious of her motives to give her a straight answer. After a week and a half of fruitless searching, and the first report date already past, it was apparent that if she didn’t shake the answer from the palace itself, she wouldn’t find it handed to her.

  After leaving Isa in her rooms— Mohini had been gone the entire evening, presumably to moon over Lucius while he made idle conversation and pretended he wasn’t mooning back—Suri went to find the two of them, inseparable as they always were.

  Suri leaned back against the chilled stone walls of the colonnade and looked out on
the west courtyard, pillars of stone cutting her view into chunks. The fountain gurgled in the center, the water colored silver-white by the rising moon, but apart from that it was silent.

  What had Lucius called him? Nakshi. War dog; Suri couldn’t judge him for it when her own nickname still ghosted over her shoulders. Hehyava, an antiquated word for assassins. Hehya, from the sacred wellspring of blood, and ava, for girl. They were cut from the same cloth, from scar tissue and iron. And where would a war dog feel most comfortable?

  She caught the door to the war room as it swung open, ducking out of the way of someone already leaving. She turned to look behind her and see who it was, but Tarak was leaning forward, tapping her on the shoulder, and she pulled her attention away. There was something faintly apologetic in his gaze, a kind of weary irritation, as if he meant to say, Sorry for all this, but it is to be expected. She raised her eyebrows, but followed him into the room.

  It was empty, save for him and the boy king, who was pacing across its length. With every stride, he seemed to get even angrier, a strange, jagged energy animating his movements. There was a desk in the back, flanked by rows and rows of cluttered bookcases. A grand, needlessly intricate painting of Athrian fields framed the single, high-backed seat, studded with gold.

  There was also a table in the center, nearly two-thirds the size of the long dining table Suri had familiarized herself with. There were maps strewn across it, and small metal figurines holding down the edges, paperweights carved into life. The pawns were worn down, glistening with overuse.

  The boy king swore, and it was almost surprising—not because it sounded uncharacteristic, but because it had felt like, up until this moment, he had taken pains to not swear in front of her, to construct some kind of barely civil façade that wavered on a shaky foundation. And now, it seemed, the foundation was cracking.

  He swore again, and Tarak dropped his hand from Suri’s shoulder, shot her another apologetic smile, and went to calm him. The boy king lifted his gaze, glanced once at Suri before turning to the captain, and said, “I hate him.”

  “No, you don’t,” the other boy returned calmly, the words practiced and smooth on his tongue as if this was a daily occurrence. “You’re angry that he’s right.”

  He laughed, unamused. It was a jagged, unpleasant sound, pottery shattering on stone. “Perhaps. Perhaps I am angry that he is incapable of being wrong. I suppose that human error seems like a faraway concept to him. Like most human things do.” Tarak’s mouth tightened, but the king didn’t notice, lowering his gaze to the mess of a table. “This is going to be a bitch to move around in time, if he’s right. And to get rations to the northern border in less than three days—does he think we can just fly them there, on wings?”

  “If he’s right, then they will starve without them, and you know that,” the captain said, reaching out a hand and resting it on his shoulder. Some of the tension dissipated away at the touch, but Suri could still feel his anger from where she leaned against the door.

  “I know that,” he said petulantly, lips faintly parted as if to add something else before he pressed them together and looked away. He glanced over at Suri, that incendiary anger flattening out to something thin and brittle. “Princess. I thought tonight's dinner was canceled. Something about already eating in the upper city?”

  “Yes,” she said, the word sharp and unfamiliar on her mouth—her presence in itself felt like an intrusion of sorts, and it had unsettled her greatly. Even though her job, in crude terms, was to intrude upon every single part of the king’s life until he no longer had one. “Yes, I was just wondering if—if I could speak with the captain for a moment.”

  “With Tarak?” he asked, surprise softening the planes of his face. He looked strangely youthful for a moment, like a seventeen-year-old boy who had come by a crown by some trick of fate and was playing dress-up. “Why?”

  “A civet ruined my room while I was out,” she said smoothly. The king’s expression had already begun to harden, but disinterest substituted his usual suspicion, and he waved his hand in dismissal.

  Tarak offered her a small smile and followed her out into the corridor. The moon had fully risen, and it shone into the shadowed stone between the pillars, casting them both in milky off-white light. “I’m assuming your room is fine, and that was an elaborate lie meant to draw me away from Viro.”

  She exhaled a small, sharp laugh. “How observant you are.”

  “He might have noticed,” the captain said, nodding toward the door, “If he had not been so distracted. A friend of ours came by, gave us some bad news. The timing could have been better.”

  “A friend?” The words came out a little strangled, but Tarak didn’t notice. You have more important things to worry about, she reprimanded herself crossly, but still, she waited with bated breath for the other boy to explain. It was the curiosity of stories and fairy tales, the desire to blow away dust and find something glittering and night-black and magical.

  He nodded and pointed at the hills. This late, the contours of the dark stone and tangled shrubbery had faded into an eerie splash of black below the night sky, the jagged peaks reaching up to touch the stars and then dipping back down to the earth. From here, Suri could just barely make out the outline of the temple, four pillars of charcoal-gray stone and no roof above it all. “He lives up there, so you might not have seen him. Though usually he’s around the palace quite a lot.”

  Not recently, she thought sourly. It was a bitter pill to swallow, the knowledge that she had just barely missed him. Even now, she couldn’t remember anything about the figure she had sidestepped—the memory slipped away from her, mutable. She shook her head to clear it of the puerile frustration and forced a smile. “Actually, I was wondering whether you knew where the aviary was.”

  “The aviary?” he asked, cocking his head to the side. “It should be at the top of the northern tower. Why?”

  She shrugged, letting her mouth quirk to the side in a melancholy-tinged smile. This came easily, the deception and the pretenses. “I’m feeling rather homesick, so I wish to send a letter home to my brothers.”

  The ghost of suspicion on his face softened, and for a moment, she regretted exploiting him like this. “It is always open to you, then. Though I think the trainer has retired for the night. If you want, I’ll send someone to accompany you tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” she said, forcing another smile and inclining her head in acknowledgement. Tarak returned it before waving and slipping back into the war room. Suri waited until she could once again hear soft voices from within, and then continued down the colonnade.

  The north tower was closest to the mountains, and as far as Suri knew, the most secluded of the three spires. A spiral staircase led up to the second floor and above to what she now knew was the aviary, silver metal shining darkly in the shadows. Moonlight streamed in through windows cut into the stone of the outer tower, rendering the entire edifice in shades of ash. Past the second landing—splitting into stoas exposing the east and west wing—the staircase led upward to a comparatively small wooden door. Though it was already locked, a quick search revealed that the key ring was hidden in the shadows of the doorway, under a loose brick.

  The door ached as she pushed it open gently, and she shut it with care. It was stuffier in here, the air thick with secrets and silage. At her entrance, a resounding shriek filled the air, the sound of hundreds of kaghas screeching one after another, a harsh, dissonant symphony. Suri braced herself, pressing one ear to the door, but could hear no footsteps. She supposed it was common enough for the birds to rile themselves up over nothing.

  Anyu had given detailed instructions with regards to locating the kagha—seventh row, fifth from the right, scar two inches above the third talon of its left foot—and it didn’t take long for her to find it. She slipped the letter out of her skirts where she’d hidden it between layers; Athrian finery made it difficult to conceal things, with its tight swathes of fabric and intricately engrave
d accessories. The heavy embroidery and layers of Najan dresses—though they often cost her respect in the city—were made for simple deception.

  Suri examined the letter. It looked innocuous; the contents revealed little, if one did not know how to decipher them. She glanced up again and saw the kagha—it caught her eyes, perched strangely still, as if waiting for her to call it down.

  She raised her hand, clicked her tongue, and it swooped down and landed on her wrist. Its talons dug into her skin, drawing blood without any sort of malicious intent, simply out of a sense of instinct and natural brutality. It stared at her, black eyes shining with a preternatural intelligence.

  Suri pulled the thread loose from where it lay coiled around the kagha’s left foot, then folded the cloth carefully so it was the size of her thumb before wrapping the twine around it and tying it back onto the kagha. She held it at arm’s length, scrutinizing it for a moment. Aloud, she said, “You know where you are meant to fly to?”

  The kagha simply stared back at her, gaze faintly disdainful. Scorning her doubt. She shook her head and climbed the steps up to the aviary window. They led out onto a thick but small platform a few feet in width, surrounded by wrought-iron bars. From here, the top of the tallest tower, Suri could see the entirety of Marai—this late, the lights glittered and danced, the city a night-dark jewel. It was beautiful, and it was to die.

  By your hands, a voice in her head whispered, but she dismissed it. She held the kagha up, turning it to the northwest, and let go. It disappeared almost instantly, a smudgy blot dissolving in the oily blackness of the night.

  Her gaze dropped from it, wandering across to where the hills sloped into the mountains. The temple was only visible from the other side of the north tower, but the black stone and faint smell of smoke drew her back to the memory. What she felt—she didn’t know what she felt. It was some strange amalgam of childlike offense and curiosity and righteousness, and despite it all, an unfamiliar kind of resonance.