“Eons and blinks.”
I couldn’t abandon Gauri. Not now. Not when I had come so close to seeing her for the first time in weeks. I had to move quickly.
“Tell me the moment the Dharma Raja’s representatives seem to move. Or do anything. Can you do that?”
“I can, I have, I shall, I will,” sang Kamala.
“Good.”
I tugged her reins, about to lead her to the palace temple when I heard a soft jumping sound behind me and felt the pointed edge of a dagger at my neck.
“Stop where you are, imposter.”
I stopped.
Kamala bent her head to me. “Surely I can eat that one.”
“No,” I hissed.
“No? You won’t stop?” said the voice, laughing. Gauri.
“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the horse.”
Kamala snorted indignantly.
“I heard you talking to my brother.”
“So what?”
“I know exactly what you plan to do and I won’t allow it.”
This time, I turned around and faced her. Gauri was a full head taller than me. Strange that she used to run to me, wrapping her arms around my waist in a hug. I fought the urge to throw my arms around her. There was murder in her eyes, a calculating gaze no doubt caused by a quick and sudden immersion in court politics. And she had a military background to add to that. Smart girl. The moment I held her gaze, she paused, lips parted for just a moment before she looked away.
Had she recognized me? I wanted her to. I wanted her to see who I really was beneath the saffron robes, torn hair and ash-covered skin. But she shook her head, as if ridding herself of a momentary lapse, and refocused her dagger at my throat.
“You heard what I said to your brother. That means nothing in Bharata.”
A smile quirked on Gauri’s face.
“You don’t strike me as a charlatan,” she said.
Her tone, a questioning lilt, slammed me back through memory. In a blink, we were back in the Bharata I remembered, the capitol carpeted with lush trees and heavy with the perfume of wind-fallen fruit. And Gauri was once again the hesitant, soft-voiced eight-year-old who asked what we would be in her next life. Twin stars? Makaras with tails long enough to wrap around the world? I swallowed the lump in my throat, tamping down the memory like a dead fire.
“And you don’t strike me as a murderer,” I said, flicking aside the point of her dagger. “I want to help you.”
Gauri looked taken aback. A familiar rosiness spread across her cheeks.
“Why would you do that? What did you really come here for?”
I hadn’t known until now, but I saw it, felt it. I came here for her. Because it didn’t matter whether I had lived in another realm for years that I thought were mere days. It didn’t matter that I had tasted fairy fruit, fallen in love and broken a heart. Some bonds were impervious to all manner of experience. And the truth was that, no matter what happened, we were sisters.
“I came here because I’ve known about the villagers’ concerns for some time. I once lived in Bharata,” I said. “It is my home, and like anyone else I want to see that it will be safe. Loved. Cared for. The citizens prefer you far more than they do the current raja—”
“Careful, sadhvi, what you’re saying reeks of treason—”
“People always have their favorites,” I said calmly. I hated myself for even encouraging her to leave this place, to risk her life when I knew that I couldn’t protect her. But there were worse things that could happen to her if she stayed. She would be a prisoner. She would never get the chance to make her own choice. And if there was anything I could give her, some parting present for never being there when she grew up … it was that. A choice.
“What I’m suggesting would help you as much as it would help him. You could go and reclaim those lost soldiers. Boost morale. Do you really think you can do it?”
Gauri nodded, her eyes shining. “I know I can.”
Tears burned behind my eyes. Come back safe.
“And will you go alone?”
Gauri nodded again. “It is safer that way, not to risk anyone’s lives. And I know where they’re being kept. I’ve received word.”
She fell silent, her gaze distant and eyes fixed on a shaded area sequestered in a copse of once-bright lime trees. I knew that place … it was a rendezvous for lovers.
“The person you received word from,” I said after a while. “You love one of them, don’t you?”
Gauri started, a protest on the tip of her lips.
“I…,” she began before weakly trailing off. She quickly regained composure and her eyes narrowed. “That’s none of your concern.”
You are my concern, I wanted to say. You are my sister. But I said nothing. I just let her words hang in the air.
“The best motivation is love,” I offered.
Beside me, Kamala nodded vigorously. “And food!”
Gauri’s eyes widened. Like a ghost of sound laid atop the other, I heard what Gauri did—a sort of mangled neighing.
“Your horse is rather strange.”
Kamala nodded again.
“So what’s your plan, sadhvi? I heard what you said to my brother. If your grand design is announcing that I should go, he’ll never let you leave alive. He’ll call you crazy and denounce you. Trust me. I’ve been around long enough to witness how he handles dissent.”
“Then we won’t give him the chance. You will leave as soon as our meeting concludes. Right under his nose. And when you return, you will praise him.”
Gauri balked. “Praise him? He did nothing!”
“You would do well to learn how to play the games of court,” I said. “Sometimes an illusion is just as good as the actual thing. The difference lies in the telling. Make this one concession. Find out what happens next. If you bring back these soldiers and word gets out that it was your idea and your escape, he may punish them on your behalf.”
Gauri considered me. “What are you?”
“A maybe-false-queen!” butted in Kamala.
It must have come out as another deranged horse whinny because Gauri nearly jumped.
“I told you,” I said, not meeting her gaze. “I’m a person who lived here once upon a time.”
“You know far too much about the political schemes of Bharata.”
“My father was a diplomat.”
“No, he wasn’t! No, he wasn’t!” sang Kamala. “Lies are fun. Lies are nice. They taste like rice soaked in milk and sliced and diced with cardamom and—”
“Is your horse ill?” asked Gauri.
“No, not at all,” I said and smacked Kamala on her flank. “She’s eager.”
“For blood,” said Kamala.
I forced a grin on my face. “Send the harem wife that you trust the most. We’re going to need her to cause a distraction.”
Gauri nodded approvingly. “If you’re starting anything at the harem, that will get his attention. It’s where he spends most of his time anyway. Give me some time before you send the wife to start a distraction. I need to gather my belongings and say some goodbyes.”
“You have my word,” I said, before adding, “and my admiration.”
Gauri leaned close. “So far, I like you, whether or not you’re a real sadhvi, although I have no doubt that you aren’t. But make one wrong move, hurt a single hair on the head of the harem wife I send to you, and you can be sure that I will have you kicked out of these gates or worse. And my brother will be none the wiser.”
In my head, I heard the Gauri from what felt like only four days ago. She had thrown her arms around my waist and told me she would protect me. At least I knew the protective instinct wasn’t something she’d lost.
Gauri jogged off in the direction of the harem and I pulled Kamala along to the palace temple. “Well? Any word? Any news about the Chakara Forest?”
“None-none-none,” sang Kamala. “But they are still there.”
“How can you recogn
ize their presence against all the others?” I asked. “Surely death isn’t just waiting inside the Chakara Forest.”
“Death is just a little pulse, like a splinter in my veins. But this is different. He rarely leaves so many representatives at once. Certain people, the Dharma Raja culls individually, and then there is a surge in my heart like fire and a thousand carmine flowers blooming all at once.”
“Representatives?” I repeated.
But then I realized. The hounds in the halls, their mouths thick and writhing with human spirits, their coats brindled like emerald and diamond. Living jewels turned monstrous. They were Amar’s messengers, his representatives gone to fetch troublesome souls and bring them back to Naraka. But why have all of them in one place at the same time?
“Beasts,” whispered Kamala, affirming my suspicions. “Four-eyes. Tongues like lashes. Fun to kick. Prone to chasing and nervous flop sweat. They chew on bones, but only the tibias and femurs of virgins with mixed eyes. Preferably when one eye is black as a cygnet and the other is green as a grass shoot.”
Not a very pleasing image. Now, all I could see were giant hounds chasing down the souls of those who wanted to cling to life a little longer. It also meant that they were waiting to gather something and bring it back to Naraka, but why? And why would he need so many? At least I knew where all of the beasts and the people would end up: Naraka.
Perhaps there’d be a way to figure out how to follow them. To get back to Amar. But how could I save him if he wouldn’t know me? How would going to Naraka even make a difference?
“Do you think clouds prefer to drop rain all at once or to test the ground occasionally?” asked Kamala. She was staring at me with a strange intensity. It was either hunger or thoughtfulness.
“Why does that matter?”
“Because you are splitting yourself, maybe-queen-but-certainly-liar.”
Splitting myself.
“You are a fraying, fragmented bone. And no one, not even I, would deign to eat such a thing.”
“What do you expect me to do?”
“I don’t expect anything,” said Kamala archly. “I expect sunshine and moonshine. But I am telling you to stop being a broken bone. You are in one place, so be in one place. Or I’ll bite you.”
Be in one place. I was here. I wouldn’t leave Gauri. It wasn’t like last time, when I had no choice but to flee or die. Right now, she was the one who needed me. And truthfully, I needed her too.
By now, we had nearly reached the palace temple. Beautiful sandstone walls arced around us. I stayed outside, near the pillared mandapa halls where deities with half-lidded gazes considered us stonily. There was a figure moving toward us, an emerald veil pulled low over her face. She must be Gauri’s friend from the harem. I wondered who she was. The figure didn’t look familiar. The woman moved slowly. She was older. Stockier. She had none of the lissome watery-grace of the harem wives I remembered. She moved like someone who had no one left to impress.
Sweet incense wafted from the temples. The afternoon sun of Bharata looked like thick yolk as it dribbled slowly into evening. The parched air had lifted. Insects practiced their enigmatic songs in stark bushes and wilted flowers.
The harem wife approached. I practiced how I would greet her. Should I bow? Should I do nothing?
“What’s your plan?” asked Kamala.
“I’m going to ask her to start a fire.”
Kamala’s eyes gleamed. “Oooh … I do love when they’re served up hot and piping and charred.”
“You and I will be gone by the time the fire starts. It’s just a distraction for Gauri.”
The harem wife was finally here.
“It is a great honor to meet you,” I began. “I am so pleased that the Princess Gauri has placed you in her confidence. It will make this next task much easier.”
The harem wife stopped, her fingers still tightly clasping the edge of her green sari. She removed it, slowly, from her face, peeling back the silk until it showed a chin that I knew wobbled when she screamed, thin lips now parched dry from repeated inhales at a water pipe, a smirk scalded into the sagging flesh of her left cheek, and eyes made for watching you burn and never once—not even to wipe away particles of dust and ash—blinking.
Mother Dhina.
23
A SHARED CONSTELLATION
All my words, whatever they wanted to be, fell out of me in a long whoosh.
“You,” I breathed.
I forgot that I was wearing the garb of a sadhvi. Mother Dhina glared and took a step back.
“How dare you speak to me in such a manner, beggar? I don’t know why Gauri placed our trust in you.”
Our trust? I had to be mishearing her. The Mother Dhina I knew had never helped a single person. I didn’t even know whether she cared about anyone beyond her daughters and they were probably married and long gone from the mirror-paneled foyers of Bharata’s harem.
I dug my heels into the ground, preparing for a slap that never came. And why should it? I wasn’t Maya anymore. That girl really had become a ghost. I was clinging only to the emotions she stirred in me—hate and anger. But also … regret. There were so many times I had waited outside the gossamer curtain of the court’s inner sanctum, waiting for them to notice that I was more than my horoscope. More than some girl they could tack all their half-remembered suspicions to.
I gathered my breath, and said something I didn’t expect:
“I apologize for insulting you and your—”
“My daughters died of the sweating sickness,” cut in Mother Dhina. “I am not Princess Gauri’s mother. In case that is what you thought.”
Parvati and Jaya dead?
I had no fondness for them. Yet I wouldn’t wish such an end to their lives either. Where had I been when the world was pulling up its roots and razing the places and people I knew? I wondered if they walked past my chambers while I slept, dreaming up nightmares and gardens that splintered underfoot.
“I am not anyone’s mother,” said Mother Dhina softly.
Her face was unguarded. Grief transformed her and for a moment, the Mother Dhina I knew sank away. I saw a woman with ruined beauty, kohl-dark eyes ringed with dryness. I saw a woman who had placed her faith in an era that had not treated her any differently, that had taken her children and left her with the double-edged sword of a long life.
“Broken-bone, broken-bone, smash her with a silver stone,” trilled Kamala in my ear. “Maybe-queen-maybe-liar, you share something with this crone. Is it blood? Is it sinew? Let me rend and taste her tissue.”
I shoved Kamala. “Why don’t you go graze?”
“Graze?” she retorted. “I do not graze.”
“Go stalk a peacock.”
“You are not very nice,” said Kamala, huffing and trotting away.
“Now you want to take away my last consolation in old age,” said Mother Dhina, her voice heavy with accusation. “You want to send Gauri into some no-man’s-land and you expect me to help.”
“She expects you to help, and if you didn’t agree with her yourself, I doubt you would have accepted,” I said. “Besides, I can assure you that it is not what either of us want.”
That much was true.
“What would you have me do?” asked Mother Dhina.
“The Raja Skanda is fond of his wives, yes?”
A cruel smile turned up the corners of Mother Dhina’s lips. “Oh yes. He adorns them with jewels and spends each night in their company. He gives them the largest rooms and drives out the old. He lets the wives stomp on those of us who had been there first, who had served the realm longest, who had yielded the palace children that didn’t live long enough to deserve names.”
Her voice had lost none of its smoke-rasp, but where it was once husky and sultry, it was now like dragged-over stones. The darkest sense of triumph snuck into my heart. Now she knew what I had known all those years.
But I felt something else too. Pity. The thought that it would even find its way to me w
as its own irony. Still, I felt it, a humming in my throat. A desire—though I tamped it down—to forgive her. I knew the future that had been before me, and I had escaped. Even if it felt like days since I had left Bharata, I always knew that my future there had been a lonely cage. Mother Dhina had only recently come to that conclusion.
“Start a fire in the harem,” I said.
Her eyes sparkled. She smiled.
“Don’t harm anyone,” I added quickly. It was best not to stoke Mother Dhina’s particular brand of cruelty. “The last thing we want is for Gauri to be blamed for any deaths.”
Mother Dhina considered this and nodded reluctantly.
“Send them all to me. All the wives, all the women of the harem. The Raja Skanda will be able to take care of the fire, but by the time that happens, Gauri will already be gone.”
“You speak her given name,” warned Mother Dhina. “That is far too familiar for my liking.” She took a step closer to me, her eyes scrutinizing my face. Whatever ash and paint streaked my features, her gaze seemed to chisel everything away. “Do you know the Princess Gauri from before?”
I swallowed. “No.”
Mother Dhina stared at me for a long while. “You remind me of someone.”
I could guess who.
“She died in childbirth,” said Mother Dhina. “She left behind a daughter who needed a mother—” She broke off and her face, even through the veil, was stony. I knew who she was talking about. Advithi. My mother.
“She was not afraid to trust and hold someone’s trust in return,” said Mother Dhina, in a tone of begrudging respect. “Though that didn’t earn her any admirers. Or my friendship, for that matter.”
“And her daughter?” I prompted, trying to hold back the tremble in my voice.
“She had an affliction, one could say,” said Mother Dhina. “This was during a time when the realm gave credence to horoscopes.” She sighed. “That time is gone. But the girl had a poor one. A dangerous one. And we were living in strange times, not nearly as strange as now. But it was a start, you understand. We were not used to it. We wanted answers and had none. We wanted an explanation for our grief but could find none. So many of us had lost children, brothers, families in war … and so the girl became, well, she—”
The Star-Touched Queen Page 20
