I wonder if Cavas’s mother is among them—if she, too, blames me for losing her son.
Have you lost him though, Gul?
While my heart skips a beat, my mind protests at the impossibility of communicating with Cavas from such a distance. A few feet is the farthest we have been apart while meditating. There is no way of knowing if our bond can navigate the miles that the Sky Warriors have already put between us.
Step back, little one. The voice in my head isn’t mine, but my father’s. Allow yourself to look at the bigger picture.
I close my eyes and breathe deep. The memory of Papa’s voice allows me to detach momentarily from my fears and reassess the situation. General Alizeh has captured Cavas alive. She and Shayla will likely keep him that way for now—if only to gain information about me and the rebellion.
Cavas is alive. I focus on the thought again, repeat it to myself the way I would a spell.
Without the strain of battle, it’s easier to breathe deep and find sthirta, to feel the magic humming in my body. I spot the sky goddess watching from a distance, her skin the color of a sky blurred with rising dust and blood, as I call out to Cavas: Cavas. Are you there?
Long moments pass by.
There is no answer.
14
GUL
Of the fifty Legion women who lived in Tavan when I first got here, only twenty remain after the breach. A pair of them now prepare the fallen for burial—Esther, Roda, Nav, and others—cleaning their faces as best as they can before wrapping them in shrouds. The rest of us dig burial pits in front of the temple, where we had practiced fighting with magic. After today’s battle, we know we will not remain in Tavan any longer.
“The city is not safe,” Subodh says. “We need to leave soon—tomorrow at the latest. Traveling at night will be our best option. There is no telling when the Sky Warriors will return.”
They won’t return now, I think wearily. They have Cavas. They know I will come to them.
Subodh glances sideways, and I wonder if he heard my thoughts through our bond, but his great yellow eyes are wet, and I realize he isn’t looking at me.
“Let me,” he tells Falak, rising to his hind legs and walking over to where Esther’s body lies. Subodh’s forehead gently brushes hers before he lifts her up in his arms. Esther is a tall woman, but in Subodh’s arms, she looks surprisingly small. A soft white glow surrounds them both.
“You were born to this earth and you died for it, Ghiyas-putri Esther.” Subodh’s deep voice intones a single line from the Holy Scroll: one used for fallen soldiers at funerals.
“You were born to this earth and you died for it,” voices around me echo.
“Sky goddess, accept your child and her immortal soul,” Subodh says.
The women repeat his words, tears pouring down their faces.
The back of my throat pricks. As Subodh lowers Esther into the ground, the other fallen women begin glowing with the same white light. For a brief, startling moment, each face looks completely at ease, as if they aren’t dead but merely asleep. As the prayers for the fallen continue, I allow my own tears to fall. Picking up shovels like the others, I help them pour sand over the bodies in the burial pits.
The Legion of the Dead.
I hear Roda’s voice—so clear in my memory—and I nearly drop my spade and spin around to see if she’s still here. But she isn’t, of course. Roda died trying to keep me safe. Something soft and wet nudges my shoulder—Agni, whose mane I bury my face into and sob, clinging to her the way I always have, whenever I couldn’t share my pain with anyone else.
Once the burials are over, Kali calls out to me.
“Gul,” she says. “Shouldn’t we bury them, too?”
Something within me seizes when she points out the fallen Ambari foot soldiers. It’s not sorrow. Not anger, either, exactly. It’s discomfort, I realize. A feeling that makes me cringe at the flies that have started buzzing over many of the corpses.
“It doesn’t seem right, leaving them like this,” Kali continues. “Some were only children. Some weren’t even magi.”
“I am not touching them,” Falak says. “Those children killed Esther. They killed Roda, Nav, Rohini, and so many others.”
The other surviving women have similar hard looks on their faces. They will not touch them.
“I’ll help you,” I tell Kali. I think about how Cavas might have been one of these soldiers. How he would have done anything—even join King Lohar’s army—to save his father’s life. Who am I to judge someone else’s desperation?
“I’ll help, too.” Sami steps forth with a shovel, ignoring Falak’s glare.
Subodh works with us as well, using magic to burn holes in the ground for the Ambari soldiers, while Kali, Sami, and I heft each body in and shovel sand over them. There is no time to clean the bodies the right way or to cover them with shrouds, but we do our best.
Forgive us, sky goddess, I think. Accept their souls.
As he moves from body to body, Subodh also murmurs quietly, as if talking to someone.
“I’m checking to see if there are any living specters among them,” he says when he catches me staring.
“Are there any?” I ask.
“A few,” he admits. “I tried to recruit them to our cause, but I think I frightened many of them off. I don’t have Esther’s touch.”
“Were there…” I lick my lips. “Were there any among the Legion?”
“Only one.” Subodh pauses. “Most of the Legion died doing what they had always dreamed of—fighting for the Star Warrior.”
My stomach churns. I can’t bear to ask Subodh who the latest living specter is. I say nothing throughout the rest of the burials, pouring myself into shoveling sand over the bodies. Exhaustion creeps up my bones, but my insides remain as tightly wound as thread over a loom.
“Guilty, are you?” The voice that whispers into my ear belongs to a man. Only, no man—no living human—is next to me.
“Latif?” I ask hesitantly. “Is that you?”
“Pleased to finally make your acquaintance,” the living specter replies. Grass sprouts from the ground—a trail that I follow away from the funeral proceedings.
“You haven’t faded,” I say. I don’t know why, but somehow, I feel relieved about this.
“I haven’t.”
I blink back tears. “Esther’s gone,” I say. “So Indu has … has she…?”
“She has faded, yes.” Latif’s disembodied voice is filled with sorrow. “Indu’s greatest wish was to protect her sister. With Esther gone, Indu simply … broke apart.”
I’m startled by the added grief I feel over not being able to hear Indu’s strange singing or see her thick white fog again.
“What about Cavas’s mother?” I ask, bracing myself for the worst. “Is she still here?”
“Yes, Harkha is still in specter form. The last I saw, she was chasing after her son as the city fell.”
“But if she fades…” I can’t say the rest of the words.
“She hasn’t, as I said before,” Latif says, his tone matter-of-fact. “We specters have our own ways of communicating with one another. I would know if Harkha was gone.”
Breath rushes from my lungs. The grass forms a circle around me, sprouting around my sandaled feet. “That’s remarkable. Your magic,” I say, pointing to the patch of green in the dry earth.
“A fading remnant of an old life,” he replies, and I recall that Latif was once head gardener at Ambar Fort.
“It’s remarkable how you’re still here, though,” I reiterate. “You haven’t faded while the other specters have.”
“Their ties to the world weren’t as painful as mine are—and therefore not as strong. Some would argue that this makes me weaker than they are, of course.”
“What keeps you tied to the living world?”
“Ambar,” he says simply. “Or Ambar under a good king. Sant Javer once said that his version of paradise was a garden and that, when he died, he wa
nted to enter it. When I was alive, I used my earth magic to emulate Javer’s vision and tried to create the most beautiful garden I could think of. My playground was Ambar Fort, and so I had the tools I needed, every plant and flower at my disposal. But my little paradise was a sham, of course, built on the broken backs of non-magi and nurtured with the blood of enslaved Pashu. My heart remained uneasy as a young man, grew bitter and angry as an older one. So, in some ways, it doesn’t surprise me that I’m still here. Waiting.”
“Subodh says that I’m Ambar’s only hope,” I say. “Yet I can’t promise a victory. I can’t promise that I’ll stay alive—or that my death will have any meaning.”
“Your death could have some meaning to the rest of Ambar. You could be the martyr they could rally behind. But this kingdom has remained far too long without a living hero. People need to see you fight and live and thrive—even if Cavas doesn’t.”
Brutal as his words are, at least he isn’t hiding the truth from me.
“It won’t ever come to that,” I promise. If I have to die to save Cavas, I will.
I ignore the prickle of warning in my chest, one that suggests I may not be able to live up to my vow.
THE THRONE OR THE GRAVE
12th day of the Month of Sloughing 4 months into Queen Shayla’s reign
15
SHAYLA
The nightmare is still brimming in my vision.
It comes to me from time to time, clouding my dreams ever since I made my first kill. An island in the middle of an ocean, black waves wild in a red sky. My arms sluice the water, strong and fast, the way they did when I swam through muddy Ambari ponds as a girl. On the island, there’s a tree, skeletal branches extending like a hand uncurled in an offering. Hanging from the branches, clustered like jackfruit, are human heads with closed eyes and gaping mouths, in some cases, hollows where the noses are supposed to be—noses that I’d cut off while executing royal orders. Until last night, though, I never had the courage to speak up.
“What is this?” I asked in the dream. “Who are you?”
A small boy’s eyes opened, two hollows bleeding red over his cheeks. I blinded this one before killing him—a nosy servant who saw me slipping a drop of poisonberry extract into King Lohar’s morning milk.
“I am part of the tree of your sins, Megha-putri Shayla—and I am not even your first kill,” the boy said. “Its roots run deep, more and more heads having appeared over the years. But the time has finally come. The tree can bear you fruit no longer.”
If the boy were not already dead, I would have killed him then, all over again.
“Greater sinners than I continue to live. To thrive, despite everything they’ve done!” I told him.
“Their time will come,” the boy said. “As will yours.”
As he spoke, the Tree of Sins parted its branches, revealing a hollow within, shaped perfectly to fit a human head. Mine.
I woke with a start, my scream held back only by long hours of training and a sheer determination to never show any kind of weakness. Not to the cadets at the Sky Warrior academy. Certainly, not to the guard who now stands outside my door, day and night. The rising sun gleams red in the glass panes that make up Lohar’s old bedroom. Dark clouds shroud the sky, cresting like the waves from my dream.
“The throne or the grave,” I whisper, suppressing a shudder. “The throne or the grave.”
Years ago, while training at the academy, fourteen would-be Sky Warriors were asked a single question: “What wakes you up in the morning?”
The other cadets spoke of their parents, their mates, the dream of a good home. When my turn came, I said, “The throne.”
Two words, no explanation.
My fool instructor thought I was pledging my loyalty to King Lohar. Some of the other cadets laughed, saying that the only way I could get close to the king was by being his whore. Only Alizeh looked at me and saw what lurked under the mask I wore.
The truth. My ambition.
Now, over three decades later, the men who called me a whore are dead—perishing in the early elimination tests, their severed feet stuffed into their mouths.
My instructor had disparaged me for my conduct. “Killing your opponents does not mean you should desecrate a body.”
“I only do to them what they did to me when I was alive,” I said.
When they rendered me immobile with magic and crushed my teeth with their boots. When they stripped the clothes, and then the skin, off my back, leaving other scars that no amount of magic can undo.
The instructor fell silent. He said nothing about the deaths that happened afterward, not even when he found the last body scattered in pieces across the compound: ears, nose, fingers, limbs.
A knock on my door interrupts my reverie. “Ambar Sikandar! I have news!”
I sit up on my bed. “Enter, Captain.”
A tall figure steps in; newly promoted, the Sky Warrior is bright-eyed and brimming with excitement. She gives me a deep bow.
“General Alizeh and Major Emil have returned, Ambar Sikandar,” she says. “I apologize for disturbing you, but you asked me to come to you with the news right away.”
“It’s quite all right, Captain.” I make my voice pleasant, which isn’t entirely difficult when called by my new title. Ambar’s Victor. “Ask the general to report to me as soon as possible.”
The captain bows again. “My rani.”
The sun begins pouring into the room, slowly leeching away the shadows of my nightmare. Of the past.
I toss aside the blanket and bedclothes, slipping out of the simple white tunic I always wear to bed. I pad barefoot across the thick paisley carpet to the giant almari in the corner that holds the royal wardrobe, opening the doors with a snap of my fingers. I don’t rush to cover myself out of modesty upon hearing Alizeh’s familiar tread. Alizeh has seen me at my best and at my worst. I have no secrets from her.
“Ambar Sikandar,” she says, her soft voice neutral, the warning there undetectable to anyone who does not know her well. “You honor us with your presence.”
Ah. So we are not alone.
Calmly, I continue to dress, slipping into the sleeves of my angrakha. This one has my new emblem embroidered over the collar and the hem: my mother’s trident merged with a Sky Warrior’s atashban. Leaving the ties open, I turn to find my most loyal adjutant and behind her the obsequious form of Ambar Fort’s high priest—Lohar’s most trusted advisor, Acharya Damak.
As always, the acharya is dressed in cream-colored robes of the finest silk. Jade beads garland his neck and wrists and swing delicately from his lobes. The acharya isn’t as well dressed as he is well preserved. Under a head full of silver hair, his skin remains as taut and unscarred as the day I first saw him at court twenty years ago. Now his pale-green eyes rove over my bare legs, scan the scar over my torso, and linger on my naked breasts.
“Rani Shayla,” he says. “My apologies. I will come at another time.”
“Don’t pretend to be squeamish, Acharya. I’ve seen you salivate over me in the past.” I tie the strings of the angrakha over my left shoulder—the way Ambari royals do. “There was a reason you barged into my chambers with the commander of the armies. Get to the point.”
“Ambar Sikandar,” Damak says delicately, as polished as always, his eyes narrowing ever so slightly. “The zamindars are getting obstreperous again.”
“Obstre-what?” Alizeh asks, frowning.
“Noisy,” I translate. Difficult to control. “I’ll have it taken care of, Acharya Damak.”
The acharya coughs. “That’s what I wanted to talk about. Perhaps it isn’t wise to send out soldiers to, uh, persuade the landlords. My rani, might it not be wiser to meet with some of them? See them face-to-face, perhaps give them some gifts?”
“Gifts?” Ice stems from my voice, making the acharya wince. “The punishment for sedition is death, Acharya. Our treasury isn’t meant to appease wealthy old farts with gold lining their tunics. Funds are low as is,
thanks to the past raja’s misappropriation of Ambar’s assets.”
“Not every zamindar is wealthy, Rani Shayla,” the high priest says, frowning. “In the city, more and more people talk about how you increased the pay for the Sky Warriors and gave them new homes in the Walled City, mere days after taking the throne. There have been whispers of discontent among the army—from as far away as Amirgarh. Soldiers have been demanding a pay raise. Many of them are related to the taxed farmers and landowners, you know.”
“And how am I expected to gift these people?” I ask. “Surely you don’t expect me to empty my own pockets.”
“You could use the weapons in the royal armory,” the acharya suggests. “The maha-atashbans can be melted down, the gold and firestones embedded in them extracted and sold for a profit. I know of buyers in lands across the Yellow Sea, in the Brimlands, too. That’s what Ra—er—the conjurer Amar was initially planning to do.”
“The conjurer was also planning to dismantle the flesh market and free every single human and Pashu still under indenture in Ambar,” I say, acid seeping into my voice. “Did you know this, Acharya? Your servants, those pretty girls you bed, gone—like this.”
I snap my fingers for emphasis, making the high priest wince. “Those giant atashbans that you so cavalierly suggest melting away—and my Sky Warriors—are the only reason Ambar still remains free from external attack. I am not going to dissolve both because a few zamindars and their progeny think of the state’s land—my land—as their own.”
Clearly, killing the zamindar in Dukal had not been enough to silence people about the new land tithes. The Sky Warriors have brought me rumors of secret meetings to discuss the new prophecy, of magi gathering in pockets in different parts of the kingdom, some even conspiring with non-magi in plotting to overthrow me.
“But the land does belong to the zamindars, Ambar Sikandar!” Sweat beads Damak’s unnaturally smooth forehead. “The laws were laid out by Rani Asha herself during the formation of Svapnalok.”
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