The Library of Fates

by Aditi Khorana

  In fact, we were expected to be thrilled, honored that Sikander was seeking to build diplomatic relations with our little kingdom. That was Sikander’s new strategy, now that he had battled half the world. Or rather, that was the only choice left for the tiny kingdoms he hadn’t yet conquered. Agree to all of Sikander’s terms with regard to the negotiation of trade relations, developing trade routes from the east to the west, and the fate of your daughters and sons, and Sikander would be your most powerful friend.

  Displease him, disagree with him, question his motives, and another outcome awaited you.

  What concerned my father, beyond my own future, was the future of our kingdom. While Shalingar would have an ally in Sikander once I took his hand in marriage, would it also mean that Macedon’s ways would bleed into our own?

  In just a few weeks, Arjun was expected to make the journey to attend the Military Academy of Macedon—the best military academy in the world. For the longest time, I had desperately wanted to join him, and I still remembered the day that I learned that the Academy didn’t accept girls. I was devastated to learn that the fate of a woman in Macedon was so circumscribed. There were no women on Macedon’s Leadership Council, and all the diplomats and scholars sent from Macedon to Shalingar were men. Women weren’t allowed to own businesses in Macedon. Or work, for that matter. They weren’t allowed to attend school, or walk down the street unescorted.

  “How come you never went back to Macedon?” I asked my father now. It was an obvious question. My father traveled all over the world on diplomatic trips, but he had never returned to the place of my birth.

  Papa continued to look out past the horizon. The parade in honor of Sikander’s visit was thinning now, the tide receding, and most of Sikander’s advisors were already within the palace walls, waiting for us to come greet them.

  I looked at my father expectantly, waiting for his answer, well aware that there was something else embedded in my inquiry about his time in Macedon. It was a question within a question, like those dolls I played with as a child—the ones that nested inside larger versions of themselves. I was really asking him to tell me something, anything about my mother, whom he had met in Macedon during his time away.

  I wondered now if Sikander had known my mother too.

  “There was no reason to,” he said as he looked back toward the walled city. I followed his gaze, noticing the way whitewashed homes blushed in the early evening light, an empire of pink. That was what my father was talking about when he mentioned the light.

  I thought about things like that sometimes—how many elements it took to create the simplest of things—a pink sky, an unusually perfect day, a happy family, a deep friendship, a moment of pure delight.

  I wondered too what it took to undo these things. It seemed to me that undoing something was far easier than creating it.

  “I wish your mother were here now, to explain things to you.” Papa abruptly interrupted my thoughts.

  I glanced at him in shock. He had never mentioned my mother before, and as much as I had hoped that he might, that day it still stunned me to hear those words coming from his mouth.

  She was the mystery I most wanted to unlock. It called to me in my dreams, a vision of her, green eyes just like mine, and her voice telling me how much she loved me, how much she missed me. How desperate she was to meet me, wherever she was . . . if she was even still alive.

  “What . . . kinds of things?” I asked carefully.

  “Amrita, what’s about to happen . . .” My father shook his head. “I wish I could go back in time and undo things.” He paused before he added, “And I wish your mother were here to tell you about marriage . . . I have so many regrets, and now it’s coming back to haunt me, the past, and I—”

  “Your Majesties?” Arjun’s low voice called from the doorway. My father and I both turned, and I found myself doing a double take when I saw him.

  He was handsomely dressed in a crisp blue and gold khalat rather than his everyday kurta pajamas or slacks. His hair, usually a mess because he was always running his fingers through it, was combed down. He looked taller somehow, more like a man than the boy who chased me around the mango grove outside his parents’ quarters.

  “It’s time,” he announced to us, a tight smile on his lips.

  His eyes caught mine for a moment before he quickly looked away.

  “Go on, Amrita. Arjun will escort you,” my father said, before he gave me a kiss on the forehead.

  I squeezed my father’s arm to reassure him. His words about my mother lingered in my mind, what he had said about his regrets. I opened my mouth to ask him more, but the moment was already gone.

  “Go on,” he said again, more gently this time. “They’re waiting for you downstairs. I’ll be there soon.”

  I nodded slowly before I crossed the library toward Arjun, noting his broad shoulders, the stubble on his jaw, the loose smile on the edge of his lips, his dark eyes examining the shelf to my right. I followed his gaze: Something sparkled amid the tomes. I discreetly ran my fingers across the dark wood till I discovered something cool and delicate wedged between two books. I realized what it was even before I saw it.

  A ring.

  I gasped, turning to look back at my father, making sure he didn’t notice me snatching the bauble into my palm. I quietly inspected the treasure that had been hidden expressly for me. In the place of a gemstone, the gold delicately curved into the petals of a jasmine bud. I slipped the ring on my finger. It fit perfectly.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, looking back into Arjun’s face, returning his smile.

  “For good luck,” he responded, his eyes twinkling.

  Hidden gifts: It was our language; it always had been.

  It started when we were children. Arjun was allowed to leave the palace whenever he wanted, something I envied. I was allowed to leave, but going out into the world beyond the palace walls was such a fraught production that on most occasions, I avoided the entire nuisance of it. For one thing, at my father’s insistence, I had to cover my face with a veil.

  “We have to protect your identity,” my father insisted. “We don’t want you to lose your anonymity and not experience life in a normal way. Or worse, become a target,” he always added, his voice stern.

  And then there was the matter of my having to be escorted by a member of the palace retinue, which made leaving the grounds decidedly less fun than I hoped. But Arjun had traveled the world with his parents and, more recently, on his own.

  When we were children, every time he went away, I cornered him upon his return, demanding to know what he had seen. Every time, he was vague.

  “I went to a temple.”

  “Which temple?”

  “It’s high up on a mountain, with a slanted roof and lanterns hanging from the rafters.”

  “Who goes to this temple?”

  He would shrug. “People.”

  “What kinds of people? Where do they live? Whom do they pray to in the temple?” Impatience creeping into my tone.

  Arjun would sigh. Or sit down, or bite his lip, running his nervous fingers through his hair, apprehensive that his answers would never placate me in a way that was satisfying to either of us. “It’s really not all that interesting, Amrita. And I’m no good at describing things anyway. You’re the one who tells stories.”

  “You’re the one who gets to travel.”

  “So?”

  “So at least bring me back something.”

  And so he did. From the ocean, a shell. From the desert, a dried fossil of a sea horse. From the temple, a thread of jasmine. From a shop, a silk scarf. I had a collection of things that Arjun had brought for me from the outside world, that he would hide in all corners of the palace for me to find. Sometimes he left me clues about where his presents were hidden. A note tucked into my schoolbooks, arrows made of stones that I would fin
d in the mango grove outside his living quarters, and occasionally, a sly gesture or glance.

  I had, over time, made peace with the fact that he spoke better in gifts than he did in words.

  Now I turned the ring in my hand as Arjun and I crossed the wide, pillared corridors of the residential west wing, past the potted palms and portraits of my ancestors, our feet clacking on the marble checkerboard floor.

  “I had it made,” he whispered. “An artisan in Shalingar. I know jasmine is your favorite flower. You can’t carry the fragrance with you all the way to . . .” He went silent for a moment, as though he didn’t want to say it, as though he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge it. “And I wanted you to remember . . .”

  That was all he said, his eyes fixed on the guards, dressed in emerald and gold khalats, who saluted us as we made our way down the corridor. He refused to look at me, but I couldn’t help but watch that profile I was so familiar with that it may as well have been my own. His regal nose, his square jaw, his full lips tightening into a line as his face fell into a mask of composure.

  “It’s good luck,” I repeated his words.

  “Too bad you’ve never believed in luck,” he said to me, and I caught a brief smile fleeting across his face.

  “Maybe I should start now. I need it,” I told him.

  “You’ll be fine. You’re good with people. He’ll . . . love you.”

  “Perhaps it’s better if he doesn’t,” I whispered under my breath as we turned toward the grand stairway. I tried to smile, attempting to shore up my confidence.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s an option,” Arjun responded. “It’s impossible not to adore you.” He was still looking straight ahead, and his words released a torrent of butterflies in my stomach.

  I wanted time to stop. I wanted to turn, to run, but where? I could already hear the brass band playing Shalingar’s national anthem in the gallery below.

  In the quiet hollow of my chest, I was lamenting the fact that I was powerless in the face of my own fate, and something within me was screaming, flailing against all the walls of my own existence, fighting for another outcome, for another choice.

  But on the outside, I remained calm. I did what I knew to do whenever I greeted dignitaries: I slipped a cool mask of composure over my face. I held my head high, flashing the diamond-studded shoes Mala had selected for me, my fingers light on the redwood banister as we descended the grand stairway into the Durbar Hall, a vast gallery with a glass dome and frescoes of Shalingar’s history painted into the ceiling.

  “Are you sure you want to wear it?” Arjun asked, his eyes glancing at my finger.

  I nodded. Wearing Arjun’s ring felt like an act of defiance but also reflected something true within me.

  I knew why my heart was racing. And it didn’t have to do with my fear of Sikander.

  I wanted to choose my own future.

  I didn’t want to be Sikander’s bride.

  What I wanted was too impossible to say aloud, too dangerous, too fraught.

  And yet I knew that I desired it with my entire heart: To stay in Shalingar. To be my own person. To serve my people. And to be with those I loved—Papa, Mala, Bandaka, and Shree. But also Arjun, I realized in that moment. Especially Arjun.

  Two

  MY HEART WAS POUNDING like a drumbeat as I descended into a sea of red coats. They stood in formation as the band played Shalingar’s national anthem.

  “Where is he?” I whispered to Arjun, squinting my eyes as I smiled at the crowd of men standing before me.

  They didn’t smile back. Their faces were somber, immovable. Their large, rectangular bodies formed a wall of sameness. Even their haircuts were identical.

  “I can’t recognize him,” Arjun said. “All I’ve ever seen is his likeness on a coin.”

  Shree, Arjun’s mother, had shown us the coins, along with maps of the region, giving us lectures on the Silk Road, teaching us Macedonian greetings, which we employed the moment the band stopped playing.

  “Kalispera.” I nodded as I bowed before a tall, broad-shouldered man with silver hair. He nodded back at me, his eyes narrowing as they took me in. I quickly looked away.

  “Kalosìrthes.” Arjun shook hands with another man whose palms were at least three times the size of mine.

  When the musicians started playing Macedon’s national anthem, I knew this was a signal. Our own guards saluted in formation as a man walked across the threshold of the hall, his feet plodding heavily across the parquet. He too wore a maroon jacket, but his was trimmed with gold, medals across his chest.

  I had held those coins in my hand, inspecting them so carefully, trying to identify who he was from those gilded discs. But it was tantamount to reading my fortune in tea leaves.

  He looked past me and Arjun, his head held high, his hand over his chest as he listened to the brass chorale that seemingly went on forever. Was their national anthem a war chant? I wondered as I watched him.

  In person, he looked nothing like the face on those coins. In fact, I would have been hard-pressed to find anything exceptional about the physicality of the man standing before Arjun and me. He wasn’t tall or broad like his men. He was slight and carried his body as though entirely aware (and dismayed) that he had somehow been assigned the wrong one.

  I carefully studied his face. It was creased with deep lines, his hair almost completely gray. He looked much, much older than my father even though I knew they were about the same age. His face looked weathered, severe, humorless. There was no evidence of all those victories. Or maybe it was evidence of what a lifetime of military victories can do to a person.

  I was still watching him when the music stopped. For a moment there was silence.

  It was Sikander who broke it.

  “Chandradev.” He greeted my father by his first name. His voice was a jeer, or maybe it was just the Macedonian dialect.

  I turned to see my father, descending the grand stairway. His uniform contrasted sharply with Sikander’s. My father was dressed in a simple raw-silk tunic, the only ornament on him the wedding ring he always wore.

  He smiled. “Sikander,” he said, walking past me and Arjun so he was standing face-to-face with the man who, it was rumored, had stoned his father’s entire council to death.

  Tension gripped my shoulders as I watched Sikander’s visage unexpectedly open into a smile. I noticed that his front teeth were broken and that they had been capped in gold. I caught my father’s expression as he took note of Sikander’s teeth. For a moment, he looked taken aback by the sight, but he recovered quickly as Sikander reached to embrace him.

  When they stepped back from each other, Sikander softly said, “It’s been a very long time.”

  He was standing a mere half pace from my father. I tried not to think of how many people he must have killed in his life, how many people had died in battles he had waged.

  “It’s been far too long. It’s an honor to welcome you to my home, Sikander,” my father said. He hesitated before he said, “Meet my daughter, Princess Amrita.”

  “Your daughter—” Sikander’s eyes caught mine. He looked startled for a moment before he spoke. “Ah yes, the last time I saw her, she was but a baby.”

  “Welcome, Your Majesty.” I bowed before him, and he laughed. It was a short, staccato sound, not a real laugh.

  “No need for that,” he said, touching my bare shoulder. His hands were ice cold, making me flinch. He quickly stepped back, his head tilted to the side.

  “She looks just like her mother,” he said. My father opened his mouth.

  “You knew my mother?” I interjected, before my father had a chance to speak.

  “I did, little one. A very long time ago. She was quite a force to be reckoned with,” he said, his eyes manically bright.

  I turned away from him and caught my father’s eye, wait
ing for him to say something, anything. But my father was impossible to read, his eyes flitting quickly away from mine. Perhaps my interruption had forced him to reconsider his words, or maybe he hadn’t anticipated the mention of my mother.

  But shouldn’t he have? I wondered to myself.

  I wanted him to take charge of the situation. I wanted him to deliver a response that would quell my curiosity, shift the axis of power that Sikander had somehow managed to capture the moment he mentioned my mother.

  But he didn’t. Or he couldn’t.

  Instead, it was Sikander who turned to my father, narrowing his eyes. “Surely your father has told you about her?”

  Three

  MY EYES SCANNED the Great Hall. Orange trees grew from large blue-lacquered pots around the edges of the space. On their branches hung brightly colored gold lanterns, imparting a warm, golden glow in the large, stately room.

  The dining table was decorated with copper platters covered with figs and pomegranates, rose and marigold petals scattered across their surfaces.

  There was always beauty here. Shabahaat. It was one of my favorite Shalingarsh words. It meant beauty, grace. Our language had nearly fifty words for the different varieties of beauty, but Shabahaat also included a certain subtext; it alluded to how beauty made one feel: full, whole, transformed. And I desperately needed to feel whole rather than the fractured emotions I was currently experiencing.

  A thick, discomfiting tension hung over us, as though we were enclosed in a hut made of kindling on the hottest of days.

  “Don’t you want to be a part of civilization, Chandradev? It’s certainly charming, this . . . kingdom of yours. Very quaint. But I know how we can bring the grand avenues and lofty stadiums of my kingdom to yours. Consider it a gift. A gift that comes at a price, of course.”

  “Typically, things that come at a price are by definition not a gift,” my father intoned, his finger resting on the sharp, golden edge of his thali, the platter filled with mounds of sumptuous food.

  I glanced at the immense spread of food before us: spicy prawn curry dotted with cashews and pomegranate, black lentils in cream with wild greens, roasted brinjal with ginger and tomato, raita frothy with fresh green flecks of coriander and cucumber, tomato-raisin chutney, tiny orbs of lemon pickled in sugar syrup, glass after glass of ruby-colored wine.