“Became someone to blame?” I finished.
“You have to understand that it was easy for us.” Her voice was choked on tears.
A familiar acidic feeling gripped my chest and I turned from Mother Dhina and spared a glance at Kamala. She was watching a peacock drag a bejeweled train across a tangle of brambles.
“Why are you telling me all of this?” I asked.
Mother Dhina blinked at me. “Gauri asked me to stay away for a while before I did as you asked. But I believe I would have come to you anyway. The Raja Skanda told us that you are here to offer spiritual consultations. Counsel me, then.”
Had she asked me this years ago, I would’ve had a more colorful response. But that was in a different time that no longer belonged to either of us.
“You haven’t asked a single question.”
“Weren’t you listening?” said Mother Dhina. “I have told you my story, my shame. There is no one left alive that I may beg of for forgiveness. So what would you counsel me?”
I kept waiting for the desire to see her cry, to let my mouth fill up with so much anger for another person that I could feel it claggy between my teeth. I waited and waited until it felt like a century had pried its fingers off my hate one by one. At the end of it all was nothing but pity.
Mother Dhina stood before me, her lips slightly parted to reveal a row of decaying teeth behind her lips. Nothing I could say would serve as absolution. Mother Dhina was past the point where she might believe in words. She had even given up on horoscopes.
My gaze fell on a statue that no one had moved for years. The stone was fashioned in the lithe shape of an apsara, her torso jutting dramatically to one side, hair frozen in tendrils of polished diorite and granite. It looked surprisingly heavy, but I remembered that the one time I had moved it aside, it had been light. It was hollow, after all, and the space inside was large enough to hide small things within—things like books you didn’t want to part with or candies wrapped in linen or even … a pair of slippers that didn’t belong to you.
I pointed to the statue. “Look inside.”
“You must be daft,” she said with a huff. “That statue is far too heavy to be moved.”
“Just because it hasn’t been moved doesn’t mean that it can’t be,” I said, conjuring the most sage voice that I could.
Mother Dhina went to the statue and, with a pointed glare in my direction, moved to pick it up. It gave way with ease, as I knew it would. The only sound was the soft whumph of upturned earth.
“It’s hollow,” she said.
She reached in, drawing out a pair of dirty but altogether unscathed slippers. The tassels were still intact, as were the annoying pair of bells that used to jangle each time she stomped through the harem. Mother Dhina held them in the air for a full minute before clutching them to her chest, as though doing so could seal some terrible void within her.
“The daughter,” she said through soft gasps, “she had hid these from me. I could never find them.”
I considered scrubbing my face and telling her who I was and that I had forgiven her, but that wouldn’t be true. I did not forgive her. I pitied her. I preferred our screen. She had her veil. I had my costume of a sadhvi. That would serve us both.
“I should go to the harem now,” said Mother Dhina, her gaze not moving from the slippers, an awed smile on her face. “Enough time has passed. Is that all I should do? Start the fire?”
“That is all. If you see Gauri, you can tell her I will be at the palace gates. She can let me and my horse out that way, facing … north?”
I checked with Kamala that this was the right direction and she grunted. Mother Dhina was still staring at the shoes, her fingers tracing the seams of silk that shone like light upon water.
“You’re not a sadhvi, not a thief and not entirely a charlatan,” said Mother Dhina. “Who are you?”
If I could tell her, I would. But that answer was beyond me, so I gave the only one that felt right.
“I’m a dead girl walking.”
* * *
Kamala kept pawing at the ground.
“Let me, let me, let me,” she pleaded.
“No.”
“I’ll be so very nice. If you let me, I’ll only nibble at your skin. You won’t even bleed too much. I swear on my soul.”
“You have no soul.”
Kamala considered this. “Just let me, let me—”
“There are no bodies to be found there. Trust me. She gave me her word no one would be injured.”
“Then let me make sure,” wheedled Kamala. “Let me make sure that the nasty crone kept her word—”
“No. We are waiting for Gauri and then we are leaving.”
“You are not very kind.”
“You are not very patient.”
Kamala harrumphed and snuffled my hair, sending showers of something wet and stinking down my neck. I suppressed a groan. I wanted to sink into a frothing hot bath and collapse into pillows bursting with feathery down. Instead, I had Kamala’s increasingly bony spine to look forward to.
“Are the Dharma Raja’s representatives still there?”
“Yes, yes, but they are restless as trees in a storm.”
“What do you think it means?”
“They are waiting. They are salivating. Their spittle drops into the ground, fat as newborn babies, heavy as the sighs of lovelorn boys … oh, how it mocks me.”
The smoke rose and formed inky coronets atop the parapets of the harem. Shouting voices converged, thick as the smoke itself, until it became a collective fug of surprise. Night had draped herself languorously over the courtyards I had once roamed. No stars gleamed above. No moon watched my treason. I waited for Gauri, my breath held for the moment to see her once more … and then I did.
She was riding toward me on a horse the color of rain-drenched tree trunks. All the guards had fled their watch for the palace gates and had rushed to fetch pails of water to extinguish the fire. There was no one guarding the iron gates, but still I had waited. I wanted to see her go. Besides, I had something that belonged to her.
Gauri’s face was shining by the time she pulled up to the gates. I clambered onto Kamala’s back and together we dashed into the bramble of forests. As we ran, the moon striped us silver. Damp leaves kissed our skin and we wore crowns of starry dust motes. Beside Gauri, magic thrummed in my veins and I believed, after so long, that perhaps we really could be the things we dreamed of—dancing bears or twin sea dragons with tails made for ensnaring oceans. But now I knew that it wasn’t the magic of past stories that made me feel this way. It was the same thing I recognized in Naraka but could not name. Love. Impossible love.
When we stopped running, Gauri heaved, eyes squinting on the fire that was beginning to die down, leaving nothing but smoke. She turned to me and her lips were pursed.
“The fire has been smothered. Why did you bother waiting? You have done your duty.”
I jerked my head toward the smoke unfurling into the skies. “Any casualties?”
“Nothing but a couple silks, I imagine,” said Gauri. “Mother Dhina constructed her fire quite cleverly. And painlessly. But while I am indebted to her, I imagine that it is you that I have to thank.”
I smiled. “No need.”
“I need to know why you did it.”
“I already told you.”
“No, you didn’t,” she said, this time her voice soft. “I recognized your necklace the moment you came into the city walls. My sister had given it to me before she disappeared, no doubt taken by some foolish king.”
Her eyes were hard and glassy with unrestrained tears. “Do you know what happened to her? Did she send you here to look after me?”
I couldn’t hide my hurt when I looked Gauri in the face.
She hadn’t recognized me.
My own sister had no idea who I was, even after she saw the necklace around my neck. My words to Mother Dhina rang true. I was a dead girl walking. I was a ghost making peace with
the places I once haunted.
I took the necklace off, letting my fingers graze its small seed pearls just once before I handed it to Gauri.
“I saw her once, in a faraway land that no horse or boat can reach, but that all will find,” I said, my voice thick.
“How was she?” asked Gauri.
This time, tears were sliding down her face, shining against the helmet she wore.
A part of me wanted to grab Gauri by her shoulders and shake her into remembering me. But that would’ve done nothing. And so, as I had done so many years ago, I told her a story. I glossed over the grotesque and emphasized the beautiful. I created details where there were none, things pulled out from my imagination, things as I may have imagined them myself at some point or another.
In the end, I did whatever I could to stave off her nightmares.
“She is happy. She fell in love and ran away, but she misses you very much. Her husband is a kind man with a large smile, who treats her as an equal and never shares his bed with anyone but her.”
Gauri laughed, more tears falling from her eyes.
“I passed through her land not too long ago, and she asked me to bring this to you and tell you this: in the Night Bazaar, trees bear fruit of edible gems and the naga women enviously stare at one another’s scales. She told me to tell that she loves you, thinks of you often and will always be proud of you. She asks that you stay safe. Always.”
Gauri pressed the necklace to her lips before tying it securely around her neck. She checked the straps of her horse before smiling at me.
“Thank you, sadhvi. I wish you well on your journey. If you see her again, please tell her that I love her and that I think of her often. Tell her that I will come back alive. For her.”
Tears blistered in my eyes, but I would not cry. I had done what I came here to do and for that I was happy. Kamala pawed the ground. There was no time to share my stories with Gauri or explain all that had happened since the last time we met. “And thank you for everything you have done for us today,” said Gauri. “I have every intention to return alive, and when I do, I will make sure people will remember you and sing your praises. Tell me how I can reward you. Where can I find you?”
I smiled. “Don’t you remember? We can always find each other in our same constellation. The Solitary Star.”
Gauri’s gaze widened, glittering with the promise of tears. I dug my heels into Kamala’s side and as we leapt into the forest, I looked back only once, to see Gauri grinning and waving, just as a veil of trees stole her from view.
24
THE LADY OF THE FOREST
Arrow-sharp tree limbs cut the path ahead of us. Darkness draped across polished jet trees and shadows shivered into existence—slow as a turning head. Only daubs of moonlight marked where the trees stopped and the sky began.
We moved quickly over the hills and scrubland. I kept my face close to Kamala’s back, taking comfort in her heavy breaths and the muscles of her flanks gaining thickness and life with each passing step. Now that Bharata was behind us, my thoughts lurked once more like monsters. I kept thinking of Amar, and a pain more real than all the scrapes along my body clawed into my skin, sinking nails deep as years.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him next to me, his hands in my hair, his lips against mine. But each time they opened, all I saw was dark. I had no idea where he was, what he was doing. My last glimpse of him remained seared into me, until my thoughts were clouded with his eyes dulling in pain and unlocking all those memories buried deep within me.
The world I had known now loomed sunless and lurid. Trees were dying. People were wilting. Cities were crumbling. And I knew that this downward spiral had something to do with the ruined balance of the Otherworld. I had to get there. Even if it turned out that everything I did would be as useful as pitting a broken leaf against a buffet of wind, I had to try.
Kamala slowed to a trot before a copse of trees that crouched over foul-smelling warrens. A hundred mushrooms pale as bodies bloomed out, teeming over the roots of trees so that at first everything seemed blanketed in flesh.
“This is where the Dharma Raja’s representatives are?”
Kamala pawed the ground, “Yes, oh yes. Can you not feel them, maybe-queen?”
“No.”
“That is because you are not trying!” scolded Kamala. “You must let yourself go. You must let yourself be dead. Imagine you are their succor and absolution, imagine their bloodlust, their eyes…”
I closed my eyes, forcing myself into stillness, into quiet. I tried to find a hole in the silence around me, some place where noise was a tangible thing, something I could cut through and cloak around me … I imagined myself as the pale mushrooms, flung out and life-leeched … I imagined myself wanted, like a thread untamed, something that needed to be resolved and tucked back in, something that needed to be hunted …
… and then I heard them, saw them, smelled them. Their paw prints, meaty stamps of blood dampening the forest floor lit up like puddles of light, and I leaned close to Kamala.
“Follow it.”
Kamala cackled and laughed, her body swelling beneath me, veins like rivulets of sapphire bulging with life, her mane a dense tangle of opaque frost that I wrapped around my wrist, holding tight as we sped through another mass of trees.
There. Waiting just outside the shadows, three massive hounds napped, heavy as boulders. In the distance, a sound lit up the dark, soft as a dream. It was a glorious and syrupy sound, something I wanted to drench myself in forever. I swung my leg around Kamala, intent on following it, when she growled in warning.
“Don’t,” she hissed, jerking her head to the dogs.
They were beginning to stir awake. Their paws twitched beneath them, muzzles trembling with some invisible scent.
I pulled Kamala behind another tree, safely at a distance from whatever was making its way toward us. I wasn’t sure what I had expected the moment we got here. I thought the hounds would be circling something or on the verge of leaving, but someone had commanded them to stay and sleep, to lie in wait.
The voice became louder and louder and then I saw her. Nritti. She was singing, summoning. She walked slowly through the moonlight and I saw her, for an instant, as if through prisms.
I saw her on a sunny day, her arm linked in mine, laughing about something incoherent and fuzzy with memory. I saw her by the banks of a river, crooning to a sea of fish that swam silver and gold to drop pearls at her feet. Though they lasted no more than a blink, I clutched at my chest, feeling for some invisible slash inside me, some strange wound where all those memories had escaped. When I looked at her, my heart thrummed to a bruised and mournful beat, but I didn’t know why. In my head, she was a shining apsara, beloved and dear as Gauri, if not more. How could she be evil?
Nritti was still singing. Her hair was pinned back with butterflies whose wings shimmered like stained glass. She wore a salwar kameez of green silk, ringed round and round with opal gems so that the light caught and stayed with her. Her arms were outstretched, beckoning something unseen toward the napping hounds. Golden beetles darted in and out of her hair and her smile was soft, generous. Her expression so heart-stoppingly sweet that my legs twitched to run to her, to tell her my secrets.
“Stop that,” grunted Kamala, unmoved.
“Why? She’s … perfect.”
“Hmpf. She smells like blood.”
I grinned, and my head was dizzy and cottony, drunk on her singing.
“Are you jealous?”
Kamala bared her teeth at me.
The beings following Nritti soon came into view and all of my drunken thoughts stopped abruptly.
Children.
There were at least ten in the clearing, and the chatter of voices and laughter hinted at more. The hounds stood up, shaking their brindled coats, watching the crowd of children carefully. Their haunches twitched and drool puddled around them. They were hungry. Every now and then, their eyes darted back to Nritti and a sick
ening realization went through me: they were waiting for a signal. Waiting, I realized, to take the children.
But that couldn’t be possible. That was not how the balance worked. That was not how the threads operated. They were overlaid and knitted in their own patterns. They could never be lulled into a situation and deliberately broken. It violated the careful balance of the tapestry.
A young girl with braids that hung to her wrists stepped forward, wrapping her arms around Nritti in an embrace that tugged at my heart. Gauri had once hugged me like that. The girl was lulled by Nritti’s voice and who could blame her? It was a voice heavy with loveliness. Nritti’s song was unlike anything I had ever heard. It had no words. Instead, the sounds conjured clear images in my head. She sang of warm warrens in the ground, slick caves behind waterfalls and the stillness of water. But it was more than a melody; it was an offer of friendship, it was a … request. Nritti’s song grew faster, the tone shifting. Now she sang of the acceptance of changes, and her melody summoned images of ripe pomegranates bursting with ruby seeds and lightning slicing through the sky.
Kamala hissed and tendrils of steam rose from her flared nostrils.
I watched as the girl nodded, smiling. Her expression was clear: Take what you want.
Nritti stopped singing. Around her, the children froze, smiles slicked onto their faces, their cheeks coated with sweat. They were so entranced they probably didn’t even notice their feet torn, brambles and burrs and thorns piercing their ankles.
The butterflies in Nritti’s hair dipped in and out of sight. They were nothing more than illusions.
The golden beetles stopped moving, shimmery chitin flashing black and matte as coals. Beady eyes wriggling themselves free of magic until they took on the hunched, feathered shape of cormorants. Even Nritti’s dress began to change color … from emerald to nothing more than ash and a translucent black cowl. Her skin and face, so lovely and bright, faded. She was color-sapped, bleached white as a bone. Her hair turned stringy. The voice that had lulled all the children to this one spot lengthened into a croak. Nritti’s lips pulled back into a smile of spite. Jagged teeth peered out from the ruin of her lips and she screamed her song. But this was no song of asking, it was a song of taking, and the louder her words became, the more I saw what it was she wanted.
The Star-Touched Queen Page 21
