The Star-Touched Queen

by Roshani Chokshi

  “I’m protecting her now,” said Nritti.

  I turned around. Nritti was no longer in the portal. She had stepped out, and behind her, there was nothing but a broken mirror. Memories exploded around her, and each time they did, I winced. Whatever secrets they held extinguished on the marble.

  There was a knife in Nritti’s hand, a manic glint in her eyes. Gone was the soft honey color of her skin. Even her hair seemed to pale and dull, no longer the beautiful, glossy sheets of black that had once hung around her shoulders.

  Nritti looked at me, a smile of camaraderie lighting her face. She placed the knife on the floor and kicked it across the tile, where it clattered against my foot.

  “Take it, sister,” she crooned. Her voice sounded different. Still familiar, but there was no warmth to it, and I couldn’t remember why. “Plunge it into the tree. Reclaim yourself.”

  “Leave us, Nritti,” said Amar. His voice thundered through the room. “I will not let your chaos hurt her or come between us ever again.”

  “Or what?” taunted Nritti. She tilted her head to one side, like this was a game. “Will you chase me down like you’ve done my sister? Will you trap my memories in some dingy chamber and lord them over me?”

  “That is a lie, and you know it,” he growled.

  “You know I tell the truth, sister,” said Nritti, turning to me. “You cannot deny the memory of us in that tree. You cannot deny how familiar I am to you. Familiar as flesh. I would never hurt you. I only want to protect you. I’ve spent years searching for you—”

  “Don’t listen to her,” hissed Amar. “You have to trust me, my love. There has only been you. I know who you are. You are my queen. You always have been.”

  I couldn’t look at him, but I could feel his gaze on me. So pained and tender that I fought the need to run to him, to comfort him. But I couldn’t push out the image of the woman in the glass garden. I couldn’t forget Gauri’s necklace encrusted with blood. I couldn’t forget how he had hinted at some latent power within me, and yet I couldn’t move a single thread on the tapestry.

  I couldn’t forget his lies.

  “Go near that tree and I will lose you forever,” he said fiercely. “Your memories won’t keep. Your powers will be gone.” Amar staggered toward me, and this time, I couldn’t help but look at him. His eyes held mine in a firm, unyielding gaze. “Jaani, I put too much of myself and my own memories into the tree.”

  Around us, the candles sputtered, their mirror shards brightening like miniscule comets before extinguishing into smoke and ash. Each time a light went out, Amar clutched at his rib cage, as if something was tearing at his heart. By now the flames had reached the middle of the trunk, writhing golden and serpentine, spitting out ash and memory.

  “You must destroy the tree now!” roared Nritti. “He lied to you. I would never lie to you. Don’t let yourself be one of the many women who was fooled by him. Do not look at him, sister. Look at me. I am the one who came here to protect you.”

  Each memory roared. I could hear the fire warping the voice of my past life, turning it into shrills and bellows. Voices burst from the trunk, echoing in the room. It was fire and chaos and sound. I backed against the tree trunk, the knife gleaming with sweat in my hands.

  Amar’s eyes darted between me and the tree, but I refused to move. I tried to summon the tingling sensation of power, but it only buzzed weakly at my fingertips before abandoning me. The tree was beyond my control.

  Amar shut his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was haggard, sweat shining on his neck. “Destroy that tree and I will be stripped of my memories. No one will remember who you are or what you mean to me,” he said, his voice rasping.

  “He’s lying to you!” screeched Nritti. “You will not remember yourself if you do not destroy the tree while you have the chance. Whatever you do, do not look at him.”

  The tree’s shadow lengthened, its limbs stretched forward in glaring whorls of branches. Everything loosened. Whole branches the size of full-grown men spluttered to the floor, splintering like glass. The room was spinning. All the smoke from the extinguishing memories wreathed my hair and filled my lungs. I tried to fight the dizziness, to focus on Amar’s and Nritti’s faces, but they seemed far away.

  I couldn’t fade away. I couldn’t let myself be lulled to weakness out of false love. Tears streamed down my face, pooling on my neck. My lips were full of salt. No matter how I felt about Amar, one thing was true—

  I didn’t trust him.

  I plunged the knife into the tree, pushing all my force, my heartbreak, my broken dreams, into the tree’s thick bark. Shrieks tore through the room. I heard Nritti yelling, laughing, and it felt wrong. Her laugh … it was identical to that of the intruder in my room. Had it been her?

  I need you to lead me …

  Instinctively, my eyes clasped on Amar’s. He was shocked, his face pale. He grabbed me; his hands entangled in my hair even as my fingers were wrapped around the hilt that destroyed him.

  “I love you, jaani. My soul could never forget you. It would retrace every step until it found you.” He looked at me, his dark eyes dulling, as if all the love that had once lit them to black mirrors was slowly disappearing. “Save me.”

  The glow of the candles cast pools of light onto the ground, illuminating his profile. I knew, now, why Nritti begged me not to look at him. His gaze unlocked something in me. It was both visceral and ephemeral, like heavy light. The eyes of death revealed every recess of the soul and every locked-away memory of my past and present life converged into one gaze …

  I was weightless, my vision unfocused and hazy until the memory of the woman in the glass garden engulfed me. Slowly, the woman turned and a wave of shock shot through me—I was staring at myself.

  I remembered another life …

  Once, my skin wasn’t covered in smooth snake scales like the naga women or striped in hide like the shape-shifting maidens. Once, my skin bled from one hue to the next, shifting to reflect the transition from evening to night. Before, I never left the riverbanks unless my skin was the cream and pink of a newborn sunset.

  But something had changed … I had met someone. Someone who had seen me the way I was and had not sneered. He had seen me, reached for me when my skin was velvet black and star-speckled. I could still feel his stare—lush as obsidian, star-bright and pouring into the crevices of my dreams.

  * * *

  I remembered meeting the Dharma Raja’s gaze and wreathing his neck with a wedding garland of sweet marigold and blood red roses. Death clung to him subtly, robbing the warmth of his eyes and silvering his beauty with a wintry touch. And yet, I saw how he was beautiful. It was his presence that conjured the brilliant peacock shades of the late-season monsoon sky. It was his aura that withered sun-ripe mangos and ushered in the lush winter fruits of custard apple and singhora chestnuts. And it was his stride that adorned the Kalidas Mountains with coronets of snow clouds.

  His hands moved to my shoulders, warm and solid, and his arms were a universe for me alone. He had enthralled me, unwound the seams of my being until I was filled with the sight of him and still ached with want.

  “I hoped you would choose me,” he said.

  I blushed, suddenly aware of my unbraceleted arms and simple sari. “I have no dowry.”

  He laughed, a hesitant, half-nervous sound that did not match his stern features. “I don’t care.”

  “Then what do you want from me?”

  “I want to lie beside you and know the weight of your dreams,” he said, brushing his lips against my knuckles. “I want to share whole worlds with you and write your name in the stars.” He moved closer and a chorus of songbirds twittered silver melodies. “I want to measure eternity with your laughter.” Now, he stood inches from me; his rough hands encircled my waist. “Be my queen and I promise you a life where you will never be bored. I promise you more power than a hundred kings. And I promise you that we will always be equals.”

  I grinned. “Not my
soul then, Dharma Raja?”

  “Would you entrust me with something so precious?”

  I was silent for a moment before reaching for my foot and slipping off the worn slipper. “Here, my love, the dowry of a sole.”

  I began to laugh, giddily, drunkenly, before he swallowed my laughter in a kiss. I melted against him, arcing into the enclosure of his arms, my breath catching as his fingers entwined in the down of my hair. The music of the songbirds could not compare to the euphony billowing inside me, pressing against my bones and manifesting in a language of gentle touch.

  In Naraka, he drew me into the small universe of his embrace, laying kisses at my neck, the inside of my wrists, the dip in my abdomen. Now, the hum had settled to a lustrous melody, ribboning us like silk. And when we clung together, we drank in the other’s gaze, reveling in the secret hope and happiness that blossomed in the space between our lips.

  * * *

  Amar wore many names. Samana, “the leveler”; Kala, “time”; Antaka, “he who puts an end to life.” But I had called him jaan, “my life,” and kissed the gloom from the tips of his fingers. Together we had sleeved souls in new bodies, slipped the soul’s crux into a golden-ruffed sunbear or a handsome prince or a troublesome gnat. Together, we danced a quiet happiness, fashioning a room for stars and skimming our palms across cities kept behind mirrors. We drank ambrosia from each other’s cupped palms and tended to our garden of glass. And on and on it went.

  I remembered …

  … how acrid heartbreak tastes. I remembered the walk to the edge of the reincarnation cycle—the chill of marble, my plumed breath, betrayal prizing apart my heart.

  I remembered fury enthralling me body and bone. I remembered light lapping over my eyes and my soul unraveling, fracturing into prisms of amethyst, lapis, topaz. I remembered a needling twinge of regret and the secret, terrible knowledge that somewhere in Naraka my abandonment would leave behind a chasm of obsidian threads—a chronic rift.

  I saw …

  … Amar slumped onto his throne, refusing to look at the empty seat on his left. Gupta was at his side, his face pinched, skin sallow.

  “Go over every birth record, every horoscope until we find her again. I want—” He stopped, jaw tightening. “I need her back. I made a mistake.”

  “How will I know it’s her?”

  “The stars will not lie,” said Amar. “A girl partnered with Death, a marriage that puts her on the brink of destruction and peace, horror and happiness, dark and light. Find her.”

  “But even if you bring her back, how will she know—”

  “I have taken care of that,” he said sharply.

  In his hand was a small branch and a fledgling candle. “I have preserved every memory in the heart of Naraka.”

  “A fitting place,” said Gupta in a small voice, but he frowned. “But then what? Mortals cannot receive such divine information. It destroys them. Not even you can break those sacred boundaries.”

  “There is a way,” said Amar, breathing deeply. “I cannot tell them to a mortal. But if she becomes immortal…”

  “Ah … clever,” said Gupta. “The Otherworld may stop you from divulging those secrets, but a mortal that does not pass through the halls of the dead would eventually be deathless.”

  Amar nodded. “Sixty turns of the moon. A handful of weeks in our halls. And then I can reveal the memories of her past life. Her powers will be restored. She will be a queen once more. But until then, she needs protection. Nritti will no doubt try to find her. She knows she has gone missing. She can feel it, and it fuels her destructiveness. Nritti can never know where she is. Or who she was.”

  * * *

  I jolted backward, my breath knocked out in a rush. Spots of light appeared each time I blinked. I shut my eyes tightly, but the images wouldn’t relent. All the love and resignation of my former self, each memory of my past life drifted through me, fitting into my mind like lost pieces of a grand puzzle.

  But it was short-lived.

  The memories fled as quickly as they came, leaving only ghostly imprints. Like plunging into a vat of warmth before being thrown back into the cold. I shivered. My soul was nothing more than a patchwork of half-memory dipped in rime. Incomplete. And made worse by the knowledge of its own fragments.

  Around me, there was nothing but the expanse of evening sky. Stars were beginning to shoulder their way for a place in the tapestry of night. Cold that had nothing to do with myself seeped around me. It was frigid. And yet, the air was full of smoke.

  Naraka was gone. No marble met my feet, no splintered branches filled with burning memories fell across my ankles. There was no Amar, pulling my face to his—one last kiss before I damned him. There was no Nritti. My hands curled into fists. Now here I was. Exiled. I had no idea what Nritti had planned, but Amar’s words—save me—clung to me. My head was spinning with questions … why had I left Naraka? What happened?

  A thousand questions gripped me, but no question cut me deeper than one:

  What had I done?

  PART TWO

  THE FORGOTTEN QUEEN

  19

  THE SADHVI

  At first, I didn’t know where I was. But then the landscape became familiar. I had seen this place, once, from the turrets of Bharata. The stench of smoke and charring bodies filled my lungs. All along the horizon stretched nothing but gray piles of ash, studded with bone. They unrolled toward the horizon, thick as sand dunes. No light penetrated those hillocks of the dead. Small fires wrapped around them, feasting on burning logs and pine. The over-sweet scent of flaming marigolds, tulsi and mint stamped the air.

  Cremation grounds.

  Why was I here?

  I choked back my nausea until I saw that I was standing in my own grave. Around me, like the mementoes of the dead, were small objects covered in a fine sieve of dust. I knelt down, my fingers closing around the broken bracelet of my hair that had been around Amar’s wrist. Tears burned behind my eyes.

  My hand closed around other things too. An onyx stone that was no bigger than my thumb. Its edges had been sawed off into slick rock. The color was the same velvet black of Amar’s eyes. I turned it over. Two glittering pinpricks of light shimmered beneath the surface of the onyx. I traced the light, something sharp burgeoning within me. They were memories. My memories. Against everything, a half-smile quirked at my lips.

  And then there was my mother’s necklace … still dotted with rusted blood. The sapphire pendant dulled to a near navy-black. I clasped it around my neck, the barest ghost of strength warming me. By now, the sun was beginning to rise and a gray dawn ate away the night.

  I knelt on the ground, my knees pressed against my chest. Ripped from Naraka, my soul was left grasping. All those memories had flown through me. For one peerless second, I was whole. I knew, only vaguely, who I had been. The Rani of Naraka. But it lacked all the real weight of knowledge. It was just something I had been told. There were other things, though, that I couldn’t forget. I knew that what was between me and Amar was real. And I had destroyed him, lulled by what Nritti had shown me. We had been friends. We had been sisters. What happened?

  I was no apsara like Nritti. That day, what felt like a century ago, she had told me that I was a forest spirit, a yakshini. But I had seen me. I had recognized myself … sooty dark skin. Coated with stars. And I felt that she was wrong … that maybe, she had lied. It wasn’t arrogance, just a deep-seated instinct in my chest. But instinct, so far, had betrayed me. I had nothing to go on but what two people had shouted at me before a burning tree. Even now, even after everything Nritti did, I loved them.

  I clambered out of the hole, gripping the two tokens I had of Naraka. Beside me, a silver puddle of water caught the light. I had not seen myself since my time in Naraka. My father had said I looked different. Changed. But leaving Naraka had changed me too. When I looked down, the sari of darkest sapphire was gone. No anklets adorned my feet. No bracelets cuffed at my wrist. I was wearing the torn, turmeric-yell
ow robes of an ascetic sadhvi woman.

  In Bharata, sadhus and sadhvis were considered dead. They held no records. No land. No property to claim their own. Some were even known to attend their own funerals, to signify their separation from the mortal world. Somehow, being exiled by both Bharata and Naraka had turned me into one of them. A member of the living dead. My skin was gray, slicked in ash like rough, interlocking scales. I knelt over the pool, my heart hammering. What had I become?

  Black hair coiled around my forehead, strung with porcelain beads. My skin was the same sooty, dusky complexion I had always known, but there was something more. My face had changed. I had finally grown into my nose. My forehead was high. Full lips curved downward in a grimace. Thick brows framed my eyes and my gaze was an angry, furious … heartbroken thing. But I was not unlovely. And, more than anything, I began to recognize a little of that woman from the memory. The woman who had pruned a crystal rose in a garden of glass. The woman whom Amar had looked at, as though she held the universe in her gaze, as if galaxies lined her smile, as though she were myths and love and song contained in one body.

  Tears burned behind my eyes. Cursed impulse. Foolish decisions. I kicked ash and bone into the puddle, scattering my reflection before I turned once more to the bleak landscape. There was no one attending the fires. Family members or loved ones who had lit the pyres had since left.

  There had to be communes for sadhvis. Places where people would allow them to enter their homes. I remembered from the archives in Bharata that they were at once revered as much as they were repulsed. No one would break bread with a sadhvi. But no one would turn her away either. It was best to throw money at her feet, bow and run away before she could ask for more.

  Mother Dhina’s needling comments flickered in my head. “Sadhvis hold communes with ghostly bhuts, whisper to snakes and make their beds on funerary ash. Perhaps you should join them, Maya.”

  I grimaced. She had been right.

  Still, how would I get to Naraka? How would I find my way back to the Otherworld?