“I don’t think I will ever be free, Raja Subodh,” Cavas says wearily. “Ambar is where I was born, the only home I’ve ever known. As terrible as things are right now, that’s what it will always be for me. My nightmares won’t leave me alone in some foreign land.”
“What are you trying to say?” the Pashu king asks.
“I’m saying that I don’t want to give up on Ambar yet.”
Guilt pools like tar in my belly. I can tell that Cavas means what he says. That, regardless of his own motives, he really doesn’t want to give up on our kingdom.
Unlike Cavas, though, I have never been selfless. I seriously consider the Pashu king’s offer, weighing its pros and cons. Pros: I can leave Ambar right away. I won’t have to deal with any of this. Shayla will forget about me eventually, absorbed by other problems in the kingdom. Cons: The Legion will likely fight a losing battle against the Sky Warriors. Juhi and Amira will be stuck in captivity. Worst of all, Cavas will still be here, and I’ll feel like a piece of mammoth turd.
Out loud I say: “I don’t think I could give up on Ambar, either.” I look into Subodh’s fiery yellow eyes. “I’m the one who made a mess of everything by infiltrating Ambar Fort. If I left, I … I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”
Someone coughs in the distance—Kali, alternating her gaze between me and Cavas, an all-too-understanding look on her face.
A hand rests on my shoulder, squeezes gently.
“Are you ready to train with the Legion with magic?” Esther asks.
I unclench my teeth. “I’ll try. But if someone gets hurt, then I won’t—”
“No one will get hurt,” Esther cuts in. “I promise. I’ve been talking to Kali. We’ll take precautions.”
“We absolutely will,” Kali asserts. “Like we did at the Sisterhood. That was more dangerous, with so many magi novices under one roof!”
“And you and Cavas will need to begin training with me as well to learn how to use your powers as complements,” Subodh says. “How about after breakfast tomorrow, at the temple? You both will have plenty of time for lathi practice or boundary patrol later.”
“I’m fine with that arrangement—if Gul is,” Cavas says.
I say nothing. My nerves, stretched thin by everything that has happened tonight, feel brittle, breakable. I do want to help the Legion. I know I will have to use death magic at some point if we are to have any hope at surviving the forthcoming war with Shayla.
So why does it feel like others are making my decision for me? Why do I feel trapped?
When I look up again, Cavas is watching me, a furrow between his brows.
“Gul?” he asks softly. “Are you all right?”
I want to say I’m not sure. That I need more time to think about this. But it’s been so long since Cavas has looked at me with anything other than anger. And everyone else, with the exception of a bored Roda, looks so hopeful.
“I’m fine with it,” I force out the words. “The arrangement, that is.”
It’s not like we have any more time to spare. The attack tonight made that obvious.
“Now, if you don’t mind,” I say, no longer able to ignore the bladelike feeling in my belly, “I really have to use the bathroom.”
4
CAVAS
The night does not end when the bounty hunters are evicted from Tavan.
My eyes have barely flickered shut when Gul starts screaming in the room at the end of the hall, caught once more in the sort of nightmares that leave me numb, unable to make a sound.
Not Gul, though. She yells out spells, as if casting them in the dark; she calls for people who live and die in her dreams—her parents, Juhi, Amira, me.
Always me, despite our frosty silences with each other over this past month.
Every night I’ve heard her scream and stayed put. I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek raw. I could pretend that I don’t know what Gul is seeing or reliving. But I do know. We were together, after all, in Raj Mahal the day Papa died.
Not died, but killed, I correct myself. My father was killed.
Murdered by Captain Alizeh, a Sky Warrior so devoted to the Scorpion that she did everything she could to help place the latter on Ambar’s throne. Based on the weekly reports we receive from Queen Sarayu’s birds, I know that Alizeh has been promoted to general. She continues doing the Scorpion’s dirty work: making threats, raiding villages, leaving behind piles of burned bodies and severed heads as reminders of the punishment meted out to anyone dissenting against the new land tithes—magi or non-magi.
Our regrets are scars we live with, day in and day out, Papa had told me. If you don’t go to help Gul today, you are going to be filled with the same sort of regret.
For weeks after my father was killed, my greatest regret was going back to Ambar Fort to save Gul. Though, deep down, I was relieved Gul didn’t die, initially it was easier to blame her and simply ignore the truth—that Alizeh had been aiming to kill me, not Papa.
It was my fault that Papa was killed. All mine.
In my nightmares, I am forced to accept this. In my nightmares, I remain trapped inside Ambar Fort, chasing the waxing yellow moon painted on the inside of the wall bordering the two palaces, searching for a way out. Instead of people, the fort is populated with living specters: servants who’d worked and died for previous monarchs, princes and princesses lurking behind the many windows of Rani Mahal, their skin gray, their embellished silver clothes marred with dark streaks of blood.
Don’t you want to find the man who died for you, boy? they ask me. Don’t you want to see your father?
The worst ones can change their appearances to look like Papa and immolate right before my eyes, painfully exacting in their mimicry of his voice. Some nights, I find it easier not to sleep whatsoever, anxiety a set of claws hooked under my skin.
I find respite only when I relive the incident at Raj Mahal in a different way. When, in the light of day, I imagine Alizeh’s death spell missing its target, sinking into the Sky Warrior holding me in place instead of Papa. Most times, though, I picture myself with a spear, impaling Alizeh with it before she raises her atashban.
“Cavas, no!” Gul screams from her room. “Run! Get away from here!”
A lone shvetpanchhi perches on my windowsill and begins whistling, the way it often does a couple of hours before dawn. I watch the moonlight reflect off the large, carnivorous bird’s white feathers, no longer intimidated by its presence or its bulbous red gaze. I may not be a whisperer like Gul and Subodh, but this particular bird has done nothing to harm me. Perhaps it prefers rats to scrawny human boys.
My left arm, burned to blisters by Gul’s spell, is pasted over with one of Esther’s herbal remedies and thickly bandaged. I can feel the diluted blood bat venom in the salve working; my arm no longer aches as much. By tomorrow, it will be a mess of scars but fully functional otherwise, Esther promised.
“Rest that arm as much as possible,” she advised me. “You’ll need to be alert when you begin training tomorrow.”
Great advice, of course. Yet, when it comes to Gul, I’ve often found myself ignoring any advice—good or bad. I wasn’t lying tonight when I told Subodh that I didn’t want to give up on Ambar. But I also have never been able to give up on one other person, despite everything we’ve put each other through.
And so, tonight, instead of lying still, or tossing and turning in a bed that has always felt too big and too soft, I find myself racing barefoot down the dusty hallway to Gul’s room and cracking open her door.
She’s thrashing, well into the throes of a new nightmare now, sweat matting long strands of her hair to her forehead.
“Amira!” she shouts. “Juhi! Don’t hurt them—no!”
“Shhhhh.” I catch hold of her wrists, feeling her too-hot skin, the rapid pulse of her blood against my thumbs. “It’s okay, Gul. It’s okay.”
Her head snaps back, a vein green and taut along the side of her smooth throat, bare save for the necklace she
never takes off—three silver beads on a worn black cord, now nestled in the sweaty hollow formed by her clavicles. Eventually, though, her limbs grow lax. Her cries soften. Though her pulse still races, her body has recognized my touch and readily—perhaps too readily—accepts its comfort.
“Amira and Juhi are strong,” I tell her, ignoring the flush creeping up my face. “They’ve been through worse than this.”
Juhi endured a brutal marriage to King Lohar and an escape from Ambar Fort. Amira survived the atrocities of a labor camp itself. Together, with Kali, they formed the Sisterhood of the Golden Lotus and banded with other lost girls and women, training in combat and death magic to defend themselves. Juhi’s ability to scry the future guided them through the years and brought them to Gul when her parents died.
Eventually, Juhi and Gul found me—Juhi having known my father during her time as Lohar’s queen—and did their best to coax me into helping Gul infiltrate the palace complex.
A girl with a mark, a boy with her soul. The new prophecy has always made me uneasy—and Subodh’s explanation tonight about complements did little to curb that feeling. The others may have chosen to ignore it, but I saw the indecision on Gul’s face. I feel it now in the tremors that rack her limbs, her lids flickering open, her pale-gold eyes slowly focusing on mine.
“Cavas?” she whispers, surprised.
My heart skips a beat, but I say nothing in response. I force my expression into one of nonchalance and examine the shadows darkening her eye sockets, the sweat coating her bronze skin. Under my gaze, her trembling limbs slowly grow still.
Reluctantly, I release her hands. Before I can move off the bed, though, Gul reaches out to grip my arm—so quick that for an instant I think she’s a meddling specter.
“Wait. Stay a bit,” she says.
I sit next to her on the bed, struggling to find a topic of conversation.
“Who was it today?” I ask finally, not seeing any point in diplomacy.
“Papa again. Then Ma. Amira, Juhi…” Her voice trails off. She doesn’t mention my name and I don’t acknowledge that I heard her call for me.
“You…” She hesitates, the tip of her tongue flicking out to moisten her chapped lips. “Are you all right, Cavas?”
I’m about to answer when I hear her voice in my head, clear and resonant: He blames you, Gul. He still holds you responsible for his father’s death.
“What did you say?” I blurt out.
She frowns. “I asked if you’re all right.”
“No, after that. You said something.” Without moving your mouth.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Must be one of the specters,” I murmur. Some, like Indu, are fond of playing pranks. But Indu is supposed to be on patrol duty now, having taken over the faded specter’s place at the southern boundary. She can’t possibly come here without putting everyone at risk again—and I know she wouldn’t do that.
“Cavas?” Gul says, sitting up. “Is something the matter?”
“Nothing.”
This close, I can see fine brown lines surrounding her pupils, the dark rims of her gold irises. Those pretty, far-too-perceptive eyes narrow at me and I know she isn’t going to let go of the matter easily.
To distract her, I say, “Hold on. There’s an eyelash on your face.”
I touch her cheekbone with a finger, brushing aside the errant hair.
Which lands on her jaw.
I curse, and her lips twitch with a suppressed smile. Yet, even after the eyelash is gone, I don’t move away. My thumb lingers, tracing the velvety curve of her lower lip. A jolt goes down my arm and I drop my hand, ignoring the slight hitch of her breath. When I set out to distract Gul, I hadn’t intended to distract myself, too.
“It smells nice in here,” I say, hoping to draw attention away from my burning face. “Like flowers.”
It’s true. Beneath the odors of dust and stale air, I can smell something light, familiar, and fragrant. Jasmine, maybe?
“Must be the h-ha—hair oil I use,” Gul says, a yawn breaking her reply. “It’s made of chameli flowers. One of Esther’s concoctions.”
So it is jasmine. The tension in Gul’s shoulders finally eases, and I suppress a sigh of relief.
I’m about to respond when a shadowy form catches my eye—the pale gray figure of a young female specter hovering over Gul, sniffing her hair.
Gul stiffens, sensing her presence. Living specters may be invisible to magi, but they can still touch them if they wish. They can make themselves heard the way this young girl does, a giggle bursting from her lips when Gul looks up at her without seeing her.
“Is … is that a living specter?” she asks.
“It is … was,” I reply as the specter whooshes out the open window, leaving a cool rush of air in her wake. “A younger one, I think. But she’s gone now.”
“I must have given her quite a show with all that screaming.”
“I doubt it. Most of them are only curious. You are the girl from the prophecy, you know,” I say, smiling.
Gul doesn’t smile back. Two furrows indent the space between her brows. I wonder what she’s thinking when I hear her voice in my head again: I should have died the day the Sky Warriors first came for me. The day Shayla murdered my father and mother.
I wrench my hand away from hers. The loss of contact leaves me bereft, reminds me of being singed by a stove. Perhaps Gul, too, must have sensed something similar, because the color has drained from her face, her skin turning ashen.
“Cavas, what happened?”
“Shubhraat, Gul.”
I don’t wait for her to wish me a good night in return.
5
CAVAS
The first thing I do after leaving Gul’s room is head to the western part of Tavan, toward the big city temple. I normally spend my mornings patrolling the city’s boundary with Esther to look for any faded specters. After our patrols, I slip into the temple to talk to my mother. The place is always devoid of worshippers and I don’t know if anyone prays here anymore. As suspected, it is empty at this early hour as well. I pull out an old green swarna from my pocket and rub it between my thumb and forefinger, watching the coin glow.
“Ma?” I whisper. “Are you there? I … I need to talk.”
Unlike Latif and Indu, specters who like to show off their invisibility by appearing one body part at a time, my mother materializes without dramatics, her long gray hair flowing as she steps out from behind one of the temple’s thick, engraved pillars. To my surprise, she holds up a sprig of delicate purple flowers—the sort that begin budding on tulsi bushes during the Month of Flowers and bloom only during the Month of Song.
“What’s this for?” I ask.
“Does a mother need an excuse to give her son a present?” she asks lightly, though her gray eyes are full of concern.
I marvel at the tiny flowers, taking in their strong, clove-like fragrance, before tucking the sprig into my pocket. “Thank you, Ma.”
“It was my pleasure.” She pauses. “But you didn’t call me here for chitchat, did you, son? Not with the way you ran out of Gul’s room.”
I’ve had three months to accustom myself to it, but some days, it’s still strange to hear Ma call me her son, to see bits and pieces of me reflected in her: in the slight tilt of her head as she watches me, the cut of her jaw, the bump tipping her nose, which is smaller than mine.
“You saw what happened?” I ask.
“I saw you go there and comfort her. But then something else happened, didn’t it?”
I take a deep breath. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Cavas…” Her voice inflects: a warning to not evade the question. “What is it? Was it another specter?”
“It wasn’t,” I say truthfully.
Moonlight pours in through the temple from all sides, outlining her spectral form, turning her gray face silver. Right now, I can almost pretend that she’s still alive, her expression more forbidding than the ones
carved onto the stone figures of the gods in the temple’s sanctum.
Ma continues to frown. “I know you won’t let me see you then, but if it was someone from your spectral dreams, you need to tell me, son.”
“No, Ma, it wasn’t.” I emphatically shake my head. “Besides, I don’t need you in my spectral dreams.” It’s bad enough that I see specters turning into Papa; the least I can do is spare Ma the pain of seeing him die.
“I wasn’t able to protect you when you were young.” Ma’s voice is low, bitter. “It seems fitting that you’d keep me away now, too, doesn’t it?”
“That wasn’t your fault. You and Papa did your best to keep me safe.”
By now I’ve understood and accepted Ma’s reasons for wanting to remain a secret when I was a boy. If I’d seen Ma back then, I would have asked Papa a hundred questions. I would have eventually figured out that I wasn’t Papa’s son and that the man who sired me was a magus who lived in the Sky Warrior barracks.
“You are so much like your Papa,” Ma says sadly. “He would also pretend things were perfectly fine when they weren’t.”
A flush rises up my neck. I wonder if this is true. If I’m really like Papa or the man whose blood I share—though I don’t know who he was. I have my suspicions, of course. General Tahmasp, the former commander of the Sky Warriors, appears in my mind again the way he has several times in the past.
“So why did you call me, then?” Ma asks, distracting me from my thoughts. “Is it Gul?”
“Yes. She … she keeps having nightmares,” I say. “It sounds awful, but we’ve been fighting for so long that I spent a lot of time pretending I didn’t know about them. Tonight I couldn’t help myself. I had to go see if she was all right. I was sitting next to her, holding her hand when … I … I thought I heard her voice in my head. She was blaming herself for Papa’s death.”
There’s a long silence.
“I know it’s crazy—being able to hear voices like that,” I say.
Rising Like a Storm Page 3
