Himself.
I twined the bracelet together, letting it hover mere inches from his skin. I had no expectation, no method, no strategy. I was blind and clinging to a bruised piece of hope. But it was all I had.
“You once said your soul could never forget mine,” I said, sliding the mended bracelet around his wrist. “Do you remember now?”
He inhaled sharply, like something had rent through him. Around his wrist, the bracelet glowed like a caught star.
“Jaani,” he breathed, staring at me.
He clutched his chest, an amazed smile turning his face incandescent. I grinned so widely that I thought the air would bend around us, pushing us together. His fingers entwined in my hair and he tilted my face up. I was leaning toward him hungrily, but in the next instant, his smile faltered. Amar’s brow crumpled with pain. He stumbled, his knees buckling.
“What’s wrong—” I started, moving to help him.
The door swung open. Nritti stepped in and our eyes met. I knew, then, why she had avoided looking at me. She had known who I was the whole time.
“Let me kill you,” she said soothingly, drawing out the blade. “I’ve already told all the beings outside that you have corrupted the Dharma Raja. They will descend on you like dawn upon the vestiges of night, and I will do nothing to honor your memory.” She paused and spared me a smile that sent icicles blooming across my chest. “I will not wipe up your blood. I will not mourn you. I will not care.
“Trust me,” she said, stroking the edge of the blade. “It is better this way.”
Nritti spared a glance at Amar. He had sunk to his knees, his hands clutching his heart.
“Stop this,” I said through gritted teeth. “Give him back the noose. You’re killing him.”
She tilted her head to one side, staring at the blade.
“I’m not killing him,” she said calmly. “Not yet. The Dharma Raja is weak.” She stretched the noose tight and Amar seized up, his breath coming out in staggering gasps. His face paled.
“Stop!” I cried, lunging toward Nritti, but with a flick of her wrist, I was thrown back against the wall.
My head slammed against the metal with a resounding thud. Nritti laughed and twisted the cord between pale fingers.
“I take no pleasure in squashing an ant. But you are a very peculiar insect. And all because the all-powerful Dharma Raja made a foolish mistake.”
“What mistake?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
“You once knew me so well. You know how I am. Why would I give up the secret before the game is done?” Nritti took a step toward Amar.
I fought to get to him first, but each step took me farther and farther away from him until my body was pressed against the rickety frames of the room.
“You said I was killing him,” said Nritti, kneeling beside him. She glanced at the dagger then at Amar. “Who am I to make you a liar?”
My body contorted into a scream. But all the sound I might have scraped up from every recess of myself was useless against a sharp blade. I watched, paralyzed, as Nritti sank the blade into his heart. Amar shuddered, his body tense. The muscles of his neck stood out in sharp relief. His eyes rolled back, the whites of his sockets glistening before they focused on me.
“Jaani,” he said, a shaky smile curling his lips.
Amar tapped his lips twice, one hand fluttering to his heart. And then he went still. I blinked back tears, and a scream wrenched from my throat. Grief cut me, separating me like a soul from its body. I was nothing more than a being of fury and heartbreak.
“Don’t worry, my friend,” said Nritti.
She yanked the dagger from Amar’s chest. It came away with a sickening, unclasping sound. Nausea roiled in my gut. Whatever magic Nritti used kept me pinned to the wall, but that didn’t stop my limbs from trembling.
“I won’t let you languish alone. Let me put you out of your mortal misery and finish my efforts,” said Nritti. “It’s an honor, truly. You will be the last person to die. After that, death is nothing.”
27
A TANGLE OF THREAD
Nritti flicked her wrist and this time I fell to the ground, my knees slamming into the packed earth. Blood thrummed in my ears. Pain radiated through my body. I looked at Amar, sprawled across the floor, his wrist flung out. The bracelet gleamed pale as moonstone against his skin. His eyes were fixed on the fathomless ceiling above us. He may have been immortal, but Nritti’s control had rendered him into a mere echo of himself. He was worse than dead.
Nritti’s shadow fell across the floor. She was coming for me. I began to crawl toward Amar, ready to fold him to me in my last moments, but I stopped. That was what she wanted. What she expected. But that was where she was wrong. She had mistaken my strength for weakness. I loved Amar. I loved him enough that it catapulted my fear into frenzy, my hurt into hope.
I didn’t run to him because I had loved and lost.
I ran from him because I loved him. And I would not lose him.
Nritti sent a sickening wave of magic my way. For a moment, I faltered. My legs nearly crumpled beneath me. Tongues of flame lit up the floor, turning everything around me ghastly and shadowed. But I didn’t stop. I didn’t turn. My gaze was fixed on the obsidian mirror glittering at one end of the room. In the portal’s reflection, Naraka’s stone halls twinkled.
My feet stamped into the ground, closer and closer. Heat seared my lungs. The moments between escaping Nritti and entering Naraka sprang out like thorns, each one pricking at me, each one sharper than the next, each one a knot of pain. Until—finally—my hands touched the mirror’s cool surface. My singed fingers skimmed something smooth as glass … and I pushed.
* * *
The stolen moment from entering one world to the next raised the hairs on the back of my neck and twisted my insides, but then, I was through. Behind me, the portal shivered, the surface curdling black.
I stood in one of Naraka’s pale halls. Lanterns sprang along the stones. Beside me, a carven niche in the wall held a small statue of a mynah bird. I grabbed it and, with all the strength I had left, pitched it straight into the mirror. The surface crackled, light seaming along the edges.
I didn’t know whether it would keep Nritti away long enough for me to do what needed to be done. But I had to try. Against her, I was powerless. I was mortal. She thought that was a weakness, but I knew better.
Being mortal meant that I had a thread hidden somewhere in that tapestry. Being mortal meant that I could free myself from the tapestry. It meant that I still had a chance to claim the powers that were once mine, to fight back against Nritti.
I blinked back tears, trying to forget how still Amar’s body looked on the floor. He wasn’t gone. He couldn’t be. I flew down the halls when I saw it—the throne room. A sieve of dust coated the floor. The air settled heavy and neglected around my shoulders. Outside, the sky of Naraka was a lurid yellow and ice spidered and crackled against the ledges.
The moment my feet hit the floor, a familiar tug in my gut wrenched my gaze away from the window. The tapestry. Its pull had not diminished; if anything its strange lull from before had turned into a pulsing, writhing frenzy. It twisted in and out of sight, shapes sinking and remolding the longer I looked at them. In one second, the threads became bleached as bone, bulging out from the surface until it turned into the beveled form of a white elephant who shook his head with sorrow and bent his trunk to collect a thunderstorm. Airavata.
Color burst prismatic into the threads, each piece of silk or worsted crewel sliding into the burnt landscape of a realm I knew so well—Bharata. Again and again, the tapestry changed: a horse with its ribs poking out of its sides, garnet eyes rolling back into its head; a young man clambering onto a throne; Gauri riding in the dark; the sea of cells beneath my feet in Naraka … each individual in its confines shivering, waiting, wondering. I even saw my father in those threads. His brow was creased, his fingers skimming over the mirrored walls of his prison, wondering when he
would be released into the next life. And I saw myself. Not as a former queen who had once commanded the tapestry, but as a woman with her back bent in sorrow and age, still wearing the same saffron sadhvi robes, peddling tales to anyone who would listen.
Tears ran freely down my face. The tapestry was taunting me. Every single one of those images was an invitation to fall to my knees and admit that I couldn’t save them. That I couldn’t save myself. I steeled my heart’s frantic, veering beat.
The tapestry was testing me. It wasn’t prophetic. It could augur nothing from entrails of thread. It was a design. And designs could be altered.
Somewhere in that swirling thicket was my thread.
And I had to untangle it from the black, widening hole of the tapestry. I marched forward, letting the tapestry call to me, sing to me, serenade its secrets and entwine about my ankles. I let it fill me and guide me to myself. I flung out my hands, breathing slowly and deeply, pushing out all the sounds I imagined in the background—of mirrors crackling, and an entrance tearing. My fingers skittered over the tapestry, hovering over threads that I knew weren’t mine … and then I felt it. A pinch in my soul, and something startling me, like a word caught in my throat.
I reached forward, my eyes burning at the sight of the tapestry. Sweat beaded on my skin and my breath fell out in damp heaves. My thread was slick, shining as indigo and oil. But it was caught in something, another thread that was white-hot and iridescent. Nritti.
I braced myself, knowing what would happen the moment my skin touched the threads. I remembered my insides wrenching around Vikram’s thread all those days ago. I remembered the tapestry weighing me and finding me wanting. I remembered his past flickering like a beating heart in my hands. It had been hard then, and that was just one soul. Now, I was plunging myself into two lifetimes.
The two threads seared against my palm. Pain flared behind my eyes and I was falling, my feet slipping against the dusted marble, my whole body tilting around the inferno of the tapestry. I clutched the two threads and my hands burned. I screamed, but never heard myself. The room had lapped up my shrieks.
The skin on my hands peeled back. I was being pried open, each bone lifted from my body to make room for memories—memories stout as trunks, thin as lightning, furred and fanged, solid and slippery. Memories that were mine and Nritti’s. Memories that were starving for recognition. Memories so hungry, they consumed.
The threads called, and I answered—
It was too late to turn back now.
28
LOST NAMES
I remembered my lost names. I unfurled them, smoothing their worn creases, inhaling their scent of star-swollen evenings and monsoon dusks. Nritti had lied. I was no yakshini by the edges of forest glens. I was more, so much more. I clasped my lost names to me—
Yamuna. The name barreled around my ankles, brackish and forceful. A river striped with tortoises and water that glowered and snapped. A force that could drown.
Yamini. The name pressed a cool hand against my heart, warm as freshly wrought stars flung into the winter-black of night.
The names gave me strength. They gave me history. They gave me one more secret to myself, and I would know them all. I opened my eyes, squinting against the brightness as two images spun around before converging into a single scene.
* * *
Nritti was dancing in Patala, a part of the sprawling Otherworld that held neither sun nor moon, but remained bright with sparkling, unearthly jewels. She danced in a hundred courts, content. Happy. The pride of all the devas and asuras. And then she met Vanaj, the youngest son of a mortal king, brought to the Otherworldly court for his role in vanquishing five rakshas who had plagued sacred grounds.
He loved her.
And she loved him.
And in such bliss does devastation grow.
* * *
They spent years in each other’s arms. Wandering groves, living as hermits in an ashram of marble where nothing grew around them but lush fruit trees. No one murmured their discontent but the silver fish in the nearby rivers. Nothing interrupted their lovemaking but the cusp of dawn and the famished growl of their own bodies.
* * *
Then came the war of the two sundered families.
And Vanaj was called away.
* * *
Nritti stood before me, her lovely face wasted, gaunt. She stood in Naraka’s palace, facing the thrones where Amar and I sat.
“You must help me, sister. He is dying. I know it. I have done everything I can.” Her voice cracked. “I have performed the severest of penances. I have begged each sage. I can do no more.”
Amar looked at me and my heart clenched. I knew that gaze. Resignation. Already I knew where Vanaj’s thread hovered, flickering, unraveling from the grand tapestry. But there was nothing that could be done. Some threads left no ambiguity for life or death.
And Nritti saw it in my face.
“Traitor,” she hissed.
“What can I do, sister?” I beseeched her. “Even we are powerless. But I can follow his soul, remake him anew. You need only wait and he will be your Vanaj again.”
“I. Want. Him. Back.”
“You cannot,” said Amar softly. “We know your pain, but—”
Nritti laughed, her eyes wide. “You? You don’t know my pain. Neither of you do. You sit there, commanding life or death as though it was nothing but a foolish child’s game.”
Amar stood up, his face stony. “There is nothing we can do.”
“Yes, there is!” she screamed, tearing at her hair. “He doesn’t have to die! Who let you decide? Why are either of you fit to take away life? Death is unnecessary.”
She hissed, hurtling her curses at both of us. She would not listen. Even when I tried to find her, day after day, year after year. I spent hours poring over the tapestry, seeking out her thread, but it was as though she had vanished.
* * *
I saw Nritti stalking burial grounds and defiling ancient temples. She walked through crowded villages, murmuring under her breath. The moment she touched something—tree bark, cow skin, a boy’s forehead—they burned and burned. She entered in silence and left in chaos. She trailed it, dropping fury like candies.
The golden-skinned apsara with the quick smile and eyes like crystal was gone, replaced with an equally beautiful but terrifying and bloodless version of herself. I saw her watching me through the obsidian mirror that we used to summon one another.
I saw her pressing herself against it and snarling:
“One day, your inadequacy will sneak up on you, like shadows upon bodies. One day, your pride will fall like glass. And when it does, I’ll be there to take back what is mine.”
* * *
I remembered the terrible decision that fell to me. A deva had been cursed to rebirth as a mortal man. I weighed his crime of theft and measured his life thread, spinning out his doom and death, inscribing those truths on his forehead. For his terrible crime, a terrible end—death on the battlefield, a bed of arrows for his funeral pyre. He would take no wife. He would bounce no child upon his knee or know the joy of love. But he would be illustrious and wise. And when his time on earth expired, the heavens would embrace him once more.
And as I spun it, sang it and wrote it, so it became.
* * *
Fury and rumors flitted to the Otherworld, that the Rani of Naraka had befouled her title with her decisions. I paid no attention to the rumors.
But Amar did.
“If this continues, they will storm our palace. I cannot let that happen. We have the sanctity of the balance to maintain.”
I flinched; something in his words felt strangely distant. “Do you believe them?”
“Of course not,” he said, waving a dismissive hand. But I caught a tremor in his fingers. “Still, we need to control the peace. We must care what they think.”
“Why? It won’t change anything.”
“It’s your”—he caught his words—“our reputation.�
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* * *
The realms held council in illustrious courts above the clouds, where thunder stalked in the corners and lightning crowned each throne. The air was uncommonly bright, livid with sunshine and splendor. Many-limbed devas reclined on carved clouds, clutching ambrosial soma in golden goblets as they questioned me.
Throughout my questioning, the Dharma Raja stood by my side, a silken shadow against all this light. I believed in myself, and with Amar supporting me, my decision was invincible.
“How could you be so cruel?” exclaimed one. “No wife in his mortal life?”
“His wife would not be reincarnated with him. I will not give him another.”
A woman with a white veil, whose skin glowed like dawn, shot me a trembling smile.
“And what about his brothers? Did they not also partake in his crime of theft?” retorted another.
“They did,” I said.
“Then why must he endure a whole life as a human when his brothers live less than a year in that realm?”
“Because they were accomplices. Not the instigators of the crime. It was he who committed the most wrong. It is he who must live the longest.”
The deva beside me stomped his feet and lightning flared behind him.
“And what say you, Dharma Raja? How will you defend your queen’s decision?”
I remembered holding my chin high, surveying the crowd with the tasteful indifference of one who knew she was impervious. And I remembered when that moment fell with his next words:
“If you doubt her, then I propose an agni pariksha. Fire will always tell.”
The devas and devis nodded approvingly to themselves. A trial by fire. Humiliation burned through me. I dropped my hand from his and the world broke between us.
* * *
Betrayal felt bitter and acrid in my throat, and the ghost of it was everywhere, taunting my reflection. How could he do this to me? How could he doubt me so much to expose me to the ridicule and glances of the celestial world? All this time, Amar said nothing. Our bed became a cold thing and my heart froze with it.
The Star-Touched Queen Page 24
