TWO HALVES OF A WHOLE
20th day of the Month of Sloughing 4 months into Queen Shayla’s reign
20
CAVAS
Cavas, are you there?
Gul’s voice floats in my brain, a talisman I struggle to hold onto, as my own answer dissipates with another shock from the shackles around my wrists.
In the kalkothri, I’ve kept track of time by the meals I’m provided—a portion of stale bajra roti, dates that are more seed than fruit, and a small jar of water once every day. The vaid arrives shortly after the ninth day’s meal, carrying a fanas to light the way into the dungeons, his white turban and angrakha glowing in the dark. As healers go, he looks fairly young, the brown skin of his forehead taut and unwrinkled, his sideburns and mustache holding the barest tinge of gray. Up close, I can also see the engraving on his silver turban pin—a pestle and mortar girded by a two-headed snake—a symbol I’ve seen painted only on hospital buildings and apothecaries in Ambarvadi.
“I’m Vaid Roshan. Easy now,” he says when I try to sit up. “Those shackles are meant to restrict movement. Sudden jerks will activate their magic and damage your nerves. Hold up your hands for me. Slowly, please.”
I do so and am surprised to find that the shock, though still there, is more tolerable: a faint buzzing against my skin instead of a hundred needle pricks.
The vaid stares blankly at my nails. “This is going to hurt,” he says.
A moment later, his entire body begins glowing nearly as brightly as the fanas light. Magi healers rarely came to the tenements, and this is the first time I’ve seen one perform magic. With warm hands, the vaid applies pressure right below the cuticle of my middle finger.
It hurts, as he said. Nearly as much as it did when General Alizeh extracted them. But my nails grow back, healthy and whole, sealing over the throbbing tips of my fingers.
“The general will be here soon,” the vaid says, carefully wiping the blood encrusting my hand with a clean cloth. I think I see a glint of sympathy in his dark-brown eyes before footsteps echo on the stone floor outside.
The healer makes a move to leave as General Alizeh steps into my cell with another Sky Warrior. She raises a hand. “Hold on, Vaid Roshan. We might be doing consecutives today.”
Vaid Roshan says nothing, but his jaw tightens ever so slightly.
“So, boy.” Alizeh kneels before me, her gray gaze level with mine. “Are you willing to speak?”
“About what?”
She smiles, almost as if she expected my rudeness. “About the girl, of course. About that army of hers. What are they planning to do next?”
When I say nothing in response, the general’s smile sharpens. “Do you know what a consecutive means, dirt licker?” She holds up the hand the vaid healed a moment earlier. “It means I break you over and over. And Vaid Roshan heals you every time that I do. Break and heal, break and heal. Our prisoners aren’t able to say what’s worse.”
“I can’t tell you anything that you already don’t know.” My pulse beats in my throat.
“Don’t be foolish, boy. Why live through this nightmare while she roams unrestricted? Tell me and I’ll set you free.”
From the living world, you mean, I think. Or mean to. The words spill from my mouth, making the general’s hard eyes grow harder.
“I see what Rani Shayla meant when she said you’d be difficult.” Alizeh rises to her feet and holds out a hand to the other Sky Warrior. “The pliers, Captain Shekhar.”
This time my screams come quicker, every nerve on edge—my body anticipating the pain, fearing it. But the trouble with pain is that your body gets used to it. I don’t pass out when the general pulls out my second fingernail and then my fifth, not even when she sinks two daggers into the flats of my palms, pinning me to the earth floor. She asks me a question, breaks a finger, makes the vaid heal it, then asks the same question again.
What’s the girl planning next?
* * *
In the space between the consecutives, I float, imagining that I’m on a bed of grass, green and lush like the gardens at Ambar Fort. And then the pain of breaking or fixing follows and everything around me burns.
I look forward to the in-between moments, when I feel nothing. Moments when I think I hear my name. At times like this, I pretend my father is still alive. I talk to him, asking him if he has taken his medicine. Sometimes I scream for him over and over even though I know he’s gone. I call out for my mother as well and, once, think I hear an answering sob. When the pain is at its worst, I find myself inside the familiar confines of a dark temple.
Sant Javer waits alone in the sanctum. Yet something else lingers in the air—the smells of sun and salt, of chameli on a cool, moonlit night.
“Gul was here, wasn’t she?” I ask, looking into the saint’s kindly eyes.
“Some time ago,” he replies. “She was looking for you.”
“Some time? How much time?!”
“Forgive me, child, but I don’t know. Here, in this space, time is impossible to keep track of.”
I spin around. “Gul! Gul!”
The darkness swallows my shouts, leaves me gasping for breath. There is no response.
“You would know if something happened to her,” Sant Javer says.
Sure, I think bitterly. If Gul were dead, the Scorpion would be celebrating by now.
“I don’t know how much longer I can hold on,” I say. I can feel the waves of pain from the consecutives pricking through, even in this state of sthirta. “If I can stay alive.”
“For your own sake, you must,” Sant Javer says grimly. “If you don’t, they will turn you into a living specter the way they did Latif, the way they did so many others, chained to this earth, unable to move on.”
“If I die, then Gul will not come.” I don’t want her here in this hell with me, sharing my nightmare.
“Do you really believe that, Cavas? Do you really believe that Gul is the type to abandon the people she loves?”
My heart skips a beat at the word loves. “They’re going to kill me.”
“They will not kill you as long as they believe you still have something to give them,” Sant Javer says. “Revenge has many forms, child, and not all of them involve killing people.”
I’m about to protest this—revenge was what got me here in the first place—when my eyes flicker open, blurry figures outlined in the harsh rays of a lightorb.
“He’s awake, General,” a weary voice says. Vaid Roshan. “But I fear the revival draft won’t last long. He needs to rest if he is to be questioned again.”
General Alizeh’s white uniform reflects the too-bright light, making my eyes water. I would close them again if I could—if I didn’t feel the vaid’s magic holding them open, clamping the lids in place.
“Is she here?” Alizeh asks someone standing to her left.
“She’s here,” the guard answers.
The she in question is a person I never expected to see this far below Rani Mahal, the two moons tattooed on her chin nearly obscured by the hoop of her elaborate, pearl-encrusted nose ring.
Mourners in Ambar wear gray during the first year of a family member’s passing. Lohar’s first queen, Amba, doesn’t. She is dressed, instead, in her usual finery—shadowlynxes and leaping deer embroidered in gold on a pale-green sari, her pallu neatly in place over her head. It’s only when the queen’s indifferent yellow gaze meets mine that I notice her swollen eyes, the weary lines around her perfectly painted red mouth. I also note the absence of the gold dust that once visibly marked her cheeks, indicating her royal status.
“I will not touch him,” she says coldly.
“Oh, you will, Rani ji.” Alizeh’s addition of the honorific is more mockery than respect. “Unless you wish to lose your last remaining child as well.”
Princess Malti. My stomach sinks. Are they holding her captive, too?
Queen Amba is well accustomed to hiding her feelings. It’s not until I feel the brush of her
fingers against my arm that I realize how much General Alizeh now controls her, how quickly the tables have turned on Ambar’s old royals.
“I was kind to you before, boy,” the general tells me. “I gave you many chances to tell the truth. Now I will drag the truth from you with the help of our friend Amba, here.”
The quiver from Queen Amba’s fingers is slight and would have been undetectable if my skin wasn’t overly sensitized from the consecutive rounds of torture.
“Where is the girl they call the Star Warrior?” Alizeh asks me. “Where do she and the old Pashu king plan to go next?”
I consider telling them the truth again: that I know nothing. Rani Amba can easily vouch for it. But, if they realize how useless I am, they will kill me, drawing Gul to the palace simply to avenge my murder.
They will not kill you as long as they believe you still have something to give them.
Sant Javer was right. If I want to protect Gul, dying isn’t an option. Also, his last comment about revenge awakens my curiosity: an old friend stirring after a drowse.
What if my best revenge now is to survive—no matter what they put me through?
“Amirgarh.” I name a town that lies in the western part of Ambar. A town that I’m certain has never come up in conversation with either Gul or Subodh.
“Lie,” Amba says flatly.
“Is that so?” General Alizeh’s eyes narrow. “Hold out your hands, dirt licker.”
The shackles around my wrists force them upward. Once again, pain washes over my body, my screams ringing in the silence. There’s a moment when I think I see a shadow rise overhead, the lightorb flickering in response. I’m bracing myself for more pain to follow when my body finally gives up and everything turns dark.
* * *
In my dream, I’m walking through Ambar Fort again, following Sunheri’s path around the perimeter of the wall with blood-encrusted fingers. Strangely, no specters are here today. None, except one, her touch as warm as it is cool in the real world.
“Are you trying to get killed?” Ma’s reprimand, clear and strong, is music to my ears. “Why did you lie with a truth seeker present?”
“I thought you were fading,” I say, still marveling at her presence. “But I can see you now.”
“I will never fade. Not until I’m certain you’re safe. And while you can see me now, you won’t be able to for long. Cavas, there’s something in that prison. A magic that prevents living specters from staying within the cells for more than a few moments at a time. I bet that you don’t have spectral dreams anymore.”
“I don’t.” I frown as the realization sinks in. “But how am I having one now?”
“I’m not sure. It might have to do with the fact that you’re teetering on death’s edge,” Ma says, her voice tightening with despair. “Listen carefully. Get out of that prison. Get on the kabzedar rani’s good side. Stall her until Gul gets here.”
“The Scorpion will never believe I changed allegiances!”
“A person will do anything when tortured badly enough,” Ma says sharply. “Pretend … must … my sake!”
Ma’s voice crackles, breaks off as my eyelids flicker open, preventing me from asking her any other questions.
“Ma?” I call out. “Ma!”
“She isn’t here, Cavas,” a quiet voice says from beyond the far corner of my cell. Juhi. “Thank the gods for Vaid Roshan. That man saved you from being finished off for good.”
I brush a hand over my aching ribs—whole, where I’m certain they were broken before.
“I had a dream,” I tell Juhi. “That’s how Ma and I talked. Apparently, there’s magic here that prevents living specters from staying for too long.”
“Not surprising. Magi from the Chand gharana were far more inventive than any of Rani Asha’s own bloodline,” Juhi comments. “What did your mother tell you that made you so angry, though?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were mumbling in your dream. I thought it was a simple nightmare, but then I heard you say something about changing allegiances.”
A long silence falls between us, interspersed only by my rattling breaths.
“My mother told me to get on the Scorpion’s good side. To get out of prison any way I can,” I say flatly. “I don’t see how, though, with a truth seeker monitoring my every move.”
“Well, what in Svapnalok possessed you to lie in Amba’s presence?”
“I wanted them to think I had something to hide,” I explain. “If I told them the truth—that I know nothing—they would have killed me and used that to lure Gul here.”
A lull follows after that comment, one that tells me that Juhi is thinking.
“Amba cannot refute the truth if you tell bits and pieces of it,” she says at last. “I have lived with a truth seeker long enough to know this. In fact, it might be better if you persuaded Amba to be your ally.”
“She reviles the thought of touching anyone with non-magus blood. Why would she be on my side?”
“You both are fighting the same enemy. Why wouldn’t she?”
My response gets drowned by a man’s bloodcurdling scream followed by the sound of a yowl.
The shadowlynx.
“They usually drug it with sleeprose. I suppose the guard on duty forgot to dose it today,” Juhi says dryly.
It must be the case, because amid the shadowlynx’s roars, a woman begins laughing out loud. Amira.
“What’s Amira—”
“Shhh!” Juhi says. “Someone’s coming!”
She’s right. Soon enough, my eyes pick out the faint glow of white light from the distant corridor. Moments later, a small lightorb hovers outside my cell. Underneath that stands—
“Rajkumari Malti?” Thankfully my shout gets drowned out by the commotion at the far end of the prison corridor. I crawl closer to the bars. “Is that you?” I ask, my voice much lower.
Apart from a slight pallor, Princess Malti looks well enough, her yellow ghagra and blouse glowing sun-bright in the darkness of the kalkothri.
“How did you get past the guard?” I whisper.
“He was distracted by the shadowlynx,” she says, her voice calm, matter-of-fact. “It bit off one of his legs when he went in to feed it.”
I think I hear a gasp from Juhi’s side of the wall. So that explains Amira’s laughter. Her spiteful laughter.
Malice glitters in Princess Malti’s dark-brown eyes as well, the shadow of her dead father momentarily reflected on her seven-year-old face. But Malti isn’t King Lohar—and that is evident from the question she asks me next.
“Are you hurt, Cavas?”
“Vaid Roshan healed me,” I reply, holding up my hand.
She frowns, as if she doesn’t believe me. I force a smile despite knowing how difficult it is to maintain a charade in front of a child as perceptive as Malti.
“Is Siya here?” she asks.
Siya, who? I almost ask before the memory returns. Siya was the false name Gul used while infiltrating the palace.
“She isn’t,” I tell Malti. After a pause: “Her real name is Gul.”
“Gul,” Malti repeats. “That’s the name General Alizeh uses when she asks me questions about her. She makes Rani Ma check and see if I’m telling the truth.”
Malti’s about to say more when a pair of hands curl around her shoulders, pulling her back. I stare at the long, slender fingers, the signet ring embellished with unpolished yellow and blue firestones.
“Rani Amba,” I say, raising my gaze to meet hers. “Anandpranam.”
Her cold yellow eyes stare at me from under the lightorb. “Malti,” she says calmly. “How many times have I told you to never leave my chambers without me?”
Malti bites her lower lip, saying nothing.
“Come,” Queen Amba tells Malti. “We must go now.”
“So you’re going to run away, then.” A month ago, I wouldn’t have dared to speak that way or to look Queen Amba in the eye. But now I’m thinking of m
y conversation with Ma and Juhi. As Juhi said, Amba would be a good ally to have, if I can persuade her to be one. But first I must pique her interest—or rouse her anger by challenging her pride.
“Watch your tongue, fool boy. Lest you lose it at my hand.” The tremble along Amba’s normally firm mouth tells me that the threat is as meaningless as her finery.
“I heard your ancestors were the ones who built Rani Mahal,” I say. “The Chand gharana, wasn’t it? A noble house named after the yellow moon itself. Bold, considering no one really knows if you can trace your bloodlines back to Sunheri.”
Malti makes a small sound of pain. The queen’s grip on her daughter is so hard that her knuckles have paled. Amba relaxes her hands. In the distance, I hear the shadowlynx’s roars echoing in its cell, but that doesn’t intimidate me as much as the woman now watching me.
“What else have you heard?” the former queen asks.
“I heard that your palace wasn’t called Rani Mahal,” I force myself to speak over the pain. “That your ancestors put up a fight when Asha, the first rani of Ambar, wanted to take it—and that they lost.”
“We did not lose.” Her voice is clipped. “We acquiesced to a peace treaty that agreed to Rani Asha’s binding with one of my ancestors. Since then, many royal bindings have involved a member from the Chand gharana.”
“And now you have—what’s that word you used—acquiesced again?” I allow contempt to fill my tone. “Your family handed over your ancestral lands to someone—and now you’re handing over a whole kingdom to someone else?”
“Mind your tongue!”
“I can and I will,” I say. “As long as you back me up during the next interrogation.”
“I am not going to lie to save your sorry behind, half magus. That’s not how truth seeking works.”
“I’m not asking you to lie. You’ll only need to accept my truth for what it is. Help persuade the Scorpion to get me out of this prison,” I urge.
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