* * *
Infinite. That’s how it felt to stand there in a realm, a field … a marvel … of stars. Cold light spangled the space around us. Darkness so old that the shadows felt like relics twisted between the lights. The air was scentless, laced with frost. We stood on nothing but air and yet it was solid. In the half-light, Amar’s face glittered and starlight clung to his hair. I stared around me, my heart skidding. The things I had called bright and blind enemies shimmered all around me. How many times had I cursed them? And now I was in their world.
Amar reached for my hand and put something in my palm. I looked down: string.
“For conquering,” he said.
I stretched the string into a taut line.
“Conquering what? Insects?”
“No. Your enemies.”
The stars. Fate.
The string drooped in my fingers.
“Why do you hate them?” he asked.
“If Akaran has its eyes and ears in Bharata, then you already know,” I said darkly, thinking of the horoscope that had shadowed the past seventeen years.
“Do you believe the horoscope?”
“No.”
I meant it. There was no proof. Sometimes, I still thought it was a hateful rumor born of Mother Dhina’s jealousy.
“Then why hate the stars?”
“For what they did. Or, I guess, what they made other people do,” I said softly. “For making me hated without reason and without evidence. Wouldn’t you hate distant jailers?”
“I don’t believe they’re jailers. I believe the stars.”
“Then you’re a fool to marry me.”
He laughed. “I believe them, but I choose to read them differently.”
“I don’t see any happy way to explain death and destruction.”
“Doesn’t death make room for life? Autumn trees die to make room for new shoots. And destruction is part of that cycle. After all, a devastating forest fire lets the ground start anew.”
I stared at him. No one had ever said anything like that in Bharata. No one had ever challenged the stars. And yet, the light contoured him, clung to him, like the stars knew and believed everything he said. Maybe I believed him too. All I had done was curse the stars from a distance. I’d never thought to reinterpret what they meant. I turned around, as if seeing the night sky for the first time.
Gently, Amar placed the string back in my hand. He pointed at three stars: one on my right, one in front and one on my left.
“Bind them. Conquer them.”
The stars were on completely different sides of the room. One, with blue edges, dangled above me; the other had a core of fire and the last was nothing more than tendrils of bright smoke.
“They’re too far apart,” I said, holding up the small piece of string. “That’s impossible.”
“Then make it possible. Reinterpret them. The room will answer.”
“It’s not even a room—” I started, gesturing across the vast expanse of sky.
And then I stopped.
It wasn’t a room.
… yet.
As if answering my thoughts, the space around us shrank, dragging the stars together so that their celestial glimmer was lost and they looked like little more than shining cuts. Light still seeped out, but the room felt brighter. The three stars were closer, but still not close enough to tie with a foot of string.
I reached out, my thoughts whirring. Reinterpret them. I used to think of the stars as cruel and fixed ornaments, but what about the sky that held them aloft? Could I … touch it? Push past it?
My fingers grazed the night—cool and sweet-smelling, perfumed with the scent of vespertine flowers that only opened their blossoms to the moon. And then I stepped forward. I gasped. I could move in the night gaps, like they were hallways themselves. Quickly, I slid into the rifts between stars. I imagined the space as a sphere bedizened with little astral ornaments, and soon those heavy celestial bodies became small as candies held in one’s palms. The thread easily looped them together.
I grinned, turning to Amar. Between us was a sphere thick with stars and around us twined soft shadows like cats weaving between ankles.
“Magnificent,” he said.
His gaze was full of awe, but I saw something else in his eyes. Longing. Then, he reached into the sphere, drawing out the string with the three stars. He twisted them between his hands, fashioning a constellation no larger than a sparrow. Amar stepped forward, sliding the stars above my ear. It cast a glow that turned his face silvery and beautiful.
“There, my queen,” he said. “A constellation to wear in your hair.”
* * *
We spent the rest of the day lost in that room of old planets and forgotten meteors. I stepped across flattened comets and spilled haloes of things that may have burned for centuries or may have always been illusions. It didn’t matter. For the first time, I felt like I was seeing things differently. Amar kept testing my perspective. He clasped nebulas in my hands and told me to think of them as fate.
Being with him was like seeing for the first time. I even started to think differently about the horoscope. Could I see a glimmer of silver in all that darkness? I wanted to. And now, I almost did.
* * *
When we had closed the door to the star room, Amar reached up to brush his fingers against the constellation in my hair.
“It suits you,” he said.
Warmth crept to my cheeks. For a long moment, we stood in that alcove. The mirror portals faintly shimmered. In the distance, I could see the lines of cities and flush of daybreaks, but everything felt dim compared to the space between us. It felt so charged it could have been alive.
Amar moved closer to me, but a sudden howl across the palace sprang us apart. Amar’s eyes snapped to a distant hall and his mouth, just a moment ago curved in a smile, was now a tight cut.
“Come, Maya. It’s not safe for you to be out here.”
“Why?” I said, following his gaze.
Were my eyes fooling me or did the shadow of a beast just cross the vestibule? Something dank overwhelmed my senses. Wet fur. Salt-crusted claws. That sound of the howling slid under my skin, conjuring something horrifying and nameless in my mind: faceless bodies falling to the floor, the frantic spurt of blood leaving a vein.
Amar half pulled, half ran me to the dining room. Inside, the room was lit up and lanterns of cut topaz hung suspended from the ceiling. Gupta ran to meet me, his gaze shadowed as he and Amar exchanged some silent conversation.
“I am sorry,” Amar said quickly, before running out of the room.
I stood there, unable to shake off the sound of the hounds. Gupta flashed a mournful expression.
“What was that?”
“I—” Gupta started before shaking his head, his face pained. “I cannot say. I am sorry.”
My hands clenched into fists. “The moon?”
He nodded.
“Were those hunting hounds in the palace?”
Gupta paused and nodded.
My skin crawled. “What were they hunting?”
“You know I cannot answer that.”
I sat stiffly in my chair, sparing a single glance to the taunting half-moon outside. There was still time before Akaran would make itself fully known to me. Until then, I had to endure. I tried to pretend that the sound was a warning. That there was a reasonable explanation behind it. But I couldn’t forget the horrible, stomach-churning feeling it rent through me. And when I bent my head to eat, the constellation of stars fell onto my lap.
Dull and silver. But sharp as teeth.
14
THE LION IN THE PILLAR
For three days I did not see Amar. The only sign of him was the sleep-mussed side of the bed. Always, it was cold to the touch. I wandered the halls alone, exploring the doors of Akaran that would open to me. Many of them were bolted shut, but some were not. One door in particular kept flickering to my mind—the charred one, with chains wrapped around it. But I never saw
it, despite looking.
On the first day, I found a room where snowdrifts floated upside down in soft, swirling eddies. Once the snow had piled onto the ceiling, it fell in ribbons of translucent silk before sinking into the floor, for the snow-silk cycle to start anew. On the second day, I found a sweltering hot room behind a door that bore a shifting pattern of sand dunes. Inside, sinuous shadows danced across the floor. Curious, I reached down to touch the pattern and the dark puddled into my hands, wet as ink. On the third day, I found a door carved with feathers. Carven niches filled with eggs covered the walls. Behind the shelves of eggs, someone had painted beautiful renderings of rain quails and white-eared pheasants, jungle fowl and storm petrels, ibis and osprey. When I stepped inside, the painted birds cocked their heads, chirruping and crooning to themselves. The eggs became seamed with light and soft birdsong filled the air.
* * *
On the fourth day, I found a pale white courtyard with a single huge pillar in the middle. The ceiling above was a soft twilight, burnt copper edging a smoky blue. It was a strange place. The air smelled damp and furious.
I ran my fingers across the pillar before snatching my hand back. A crack had split the pillar. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. A hideous roar growled from within the pillar and I jumped back.
“It’s only an illusion,” came a voice near the door.
I spun around to see Amar slouched against the doorway. He looked gaunt; shadows creased the skin under his eyes and his hair was mussed. Still, he smiled to see me and I couldn’t help but smile back. Until now, I didn’t realize that the listlessness I had felt was because of him. I had missed his presence, his speech. Next to him, I felt more alive.
“What is this?” I asked, gesturing to the growling pillar.
Amar sank into an onyx chair that he had conjured from thin air. He tilted his head back and took a deep breath.
“Are you well?”
“Soon enough.” His smile didn’t meet his eyes. “That,” he said, “is a reminder that none can escape death. I am fond of the legend.”
The moment he said that I knew exactly who was in the pillar, and with a strange ache I remembered the harem of Bharata.
“Narasimha,” I breathed. “I have always liked that tale.”
His eyes widened in surprise. “You are familiar with it?”
I nodded. It was the one tale I never told Gauri. Too gory. But for some reason, strangely comforting to me. The pillar quivered behind us, as if it was waiting for me to tell the tale myself. Amar leaned forward, his broad shoulders hunched around him like a predator in wait.
“Tell it to me.”
“Why? We both know the tale.”
“Even so. I want to hear it from your lips. Tell the tale. The room will keep rhythm.”
Tell the tale. My heart clenched. I miss you, Gauri. Sinking into my old habit was easy enough. I sat on the floor, crossing my legs in front of me, my gaze flickering between Amar and the pillar. Amar’s eyes were closed, his head tilted back to expose his bronzed throat. I spun my tale and the sky shimmered with images. I told Amar of the demon king who wished to escape death so he performed the most severe penances until he was granted a boon by the gods.
“He prayed that he would not die inside or outside his home. He prayed that he would die neither at night or day nor in the ground or in the sky. He prayed that neither man nor beast could kill him. He prayed no weapon could harm him.”
Amar’s head snapped up. He looked at the pillar with a wicked smile.
“And yet death found its way to him.”
I nodded. “One day, the god appeared as part-man, part-lion and burst forth from the pillar.”
A being of shadow tore through the pillar. A lion’s mane cast a torn shadow across the marble. Fangs lengthened in its mouth.
“He came upon the demon king at twilight—”
“—which is neither night nor day,” said Amar.
“And he appeared on the threshold of a courtyard—”
“Neither indoors nor out.”
“And he spread the king across his lap.”
“Neither above nor below ground.”
The shadow story played out in front of us, a tusked hulking man dragged to his knees and then lifted onto the thighs of the beast god.
“And he used his fingernails.”
“Not a true weapon.”
The shadow being lifted muscled arms above his head and claws erupted from his fingers. Amar grinned.
“And then death took him,” I said.
“Yes,” finished Amar. “He did.”
The shadow beast tore its claws into the demon king. Blood spattered across the walls. Within seconds, the images collapsed and the beast god slunk back into the pillar, one eye slit to the outside world before the marble folded up and swallowed him. I stood up, my hands shaking for no reason.
“Beautiful,” said Amar.
“I found it gruesome,” I said, shivering.
Amar rose and walked to where I stood.
“I was not talking about the story.”
“Oh.”
“Why do you like such a gruesome tale?”
In Bharata, we were taught that it was a tale of the god’s might. But I saw another story within it: the play of interpretation that turned something terrifying and iron-clad into something that could be conquered. I was reminded of the star room where Amar had taken me only days ago. The story was like a different way of seeing.
“It gave me hope … that maybe there was some way around the horoscope. It was a lesson in language too, almost like a riddle…”
Amar stared at me and then he laughed.
“Only my queen would find hope in horror.” He took my hand in his and his gaze was burning. “You are my hope and more.”
“What does that make you? My horror?”
“And more,” he said.
All I saw were his eyes. Velvet dark. The kind of umbra that shadows envy. Amar stared at me and his gaze was desperate with hope. Reckless. I should’ve stopped. I should’ve stepped away. But I didn’t. I leaned forward, and a soft growl—like surrender—escaped his throat. He dug his fingers into my back and pulled me into a kiss.
Amar’s kiss was furious. No heat. Just lightning. Or maybe that was what his touch teased out of me—vivid streaks of light, dusk and all her violent glory. I was lost. I leaned into his kiss and the world around us peeled into nothing. I felt like I could stand over chasms empty of time, and this moment, like a chain of soft-blooming stars, would still be ours.
We kissed until we couldn’t breathe. And then we kissed until we needed the touch of one another like breath itself.
* * *
I never glanced at the moon for the next week. I knew, buried beneath my happiness, that it was temporary and that sooner or later I would have to pull Vikram’s thread, but I ignored it. I was too lost in the magic of Akaran and Amar.
Akaran had no seasons, so we spent our days trying to find them. Amar led me to a summer hall, where the sky was dim and lovely, bleached of its blue by the heat. Squalls gusted in the corners and above us hung lush glass vines where crystal mangoes swayed. In the monsoon room, we fashioned small enamel elephants and sent them trumpeting across the liquid, stormy floors. Amar blew on them and small coronets of clouds hovered above their heads. In the summer hall’s heat I told him stories and in the ruthless rainstorms of the monsoon room, he kissed me. Beside him, the world was a soft, pulsing and bright thing, alive with hidden angles that we could uncover one by one. It was more than magic. It was life turned relentless and astral. And I reveled in it.
But even in this happiness, my bed was always cold. He would leave before dinner and return while I slept. Sometimes his face was more gaunt than lovely, but he smiled anyway each time that he saw me. Sometimes, at night, I heard the echo of hounds baying and my skin would crawl, but I would forget it, choosing bliss over burden. Sometimes, I looked behind me, certain I had seen a glimpse of that charred d
oor wrapped in chains. But it always danced out of sight.
And then one night, Amar appeared for dinner. He sat across from Gupta, not meeting my gaze. Outside, the moon waned to a paring. Just two more days.
“Tomorrow, you must make your decision,” said Amar quietly.
He left abruptly after that, hardly touching his food, hardly saying a word. Worry bit at me. What if I made the wrong choice?
When I walked back to the room, I heard a soft song calling out to me for the first time in days.
You are running out of moon time
Listen to my warning rhyme
I know you hear me in your head
I know the monster in your bed
I shook off the voice and shut the bedroom door behind me. I felt like insects made of ice had crawled under my skin. The palace was filled with riddling voices. It was nothing. It meant nothing. Maybe tomorrow I would find a room playing out a skit where one character said those words to another. My heart calmed, but my mind wasn’t convinced.
That night, I dreamed of locked doors and baying hounds, rooms that were night-dark and a beast-king that smiled and laughed around a mouthful of broken stars to sing one phrase over and over: I know the monster in your bed.
15
VEINS OF MAGIC
I stood before the tapestry. Sweat stamped my palms. Even now, the threads dazzled—shifting, coiling, breathing, pulsing. Impossible to tame, like the sea in a storm. Amar faced me. He looked haunted. His hair was mussed and when he finally turned to look at me, it was with a mix of hope and fear.
“What have you decided?”
I tried to think about a decision, but each time, I was struck by the memory of the helmets piling up in my father’s inner sanctum. I forced myself to look at the tapestry. I already knew what it would show me. The bodies of my father’s people being dragged through a foreign empire that would herald peace but at a deadly cost. A future of fragile peace won more quickly, with less bloodshed, but with no memory of Bharata’s great legacy. Worse, its people would lose all their sovereignty and identity. Some might even be forced into slavery, but all would be forced to obey a new ruler.
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