“Distract them. When the time comes, I’ll break down the walls. We’ll get the vetala. We’ll escape.”
He nodded. Neither of us mentioned how all our plans hinged on one thing:
Could I hold on to myself?
“Are you ready?” asked the vanara.
Vikram darted one last look at me. He didn’t look at me with an unspoken farewell in his gaze. He looked at me with understanding. For a moment, I felt as if fire braided the space between us. It was charged and alive, lit by a shared dream: to wish.
A practiced smirk slid into place as he turned to face our captors. The moment he turned, I brought the golden fruit to my lips. My reflection distorted on the metallic rind. I sank my teeth into it, expecting them to cut on the demon fruit. But the rind yielded like silk. A strange taste flooded my mouth—iron and cold.
Like blood and snow.
9
THE BEAST PRINCESS
VIKRAM
The moment he turned, panic dug into his skin.
This was it.
He’d practiced calm before, but nothing like this. Three vanaras stood in the doorway with arrows notched and bows drawn.
“Before you cart us away to certain death, I’d like to hear a recitation of what we’ve done wrong.”
“Read the list of the prisoners’ crimes.”
The yellow vanara cleared his throat. “Taking our fruit!”
The gray vanara nodded. “And?”
“And?” repeated the yellow one, frowning. “What do you mean and? What else did they do?”
Vikram stole one more glance at Gauri. She was hunched over in the shadows of the cell. Swinging her head like an animal, she stared at him. Bright gold juice glistened on her lips and dribbled down her chin. The black of her pupils had spilled out of its rings. She was moving her hands. Trying to tell him something. And then he saw it:
Claws. Claws erupting and curling from her palms. Her thighs were bent strangely. Like haunches. Talons sliced out of her sandals. Gauri was not hunched over because she was in pain. She was crouching because soon she would be a demoness unleashed. Her gaze was livid.
She mouthed a command:
Use me.
“No more of this!” shouted the gray vanara. “You will come with us now—”
“Would your queen take so kindly to this corrupt trial?” said Vikram. “I think she’d be ashamed that this is how you uphold her legacy.”
The yellow vanara made a hurt and wounded sound before turning to the one beside him. “Would she really, brother?”
Behind him, Gauri pawed the ground. Panic frosted his thoughts. If she turned on them, would he be the first victim? As the vanaras argued, he glanced behind him. Her eyes were the same despite resting in a face that had the tufted ears of a leopard, and strange glittering antlers uncurling from her forehead. She tossed her head, lips pulled back from her teeth as she snarled and mouthed: Use. Me.
Right before his eyes … she grew. The tunic split down the middle, but it didn’t matter, because gold fur grew where skin once stretched. She stood, taller than a horse, back as broad as a bear’s. And then she roared. The vetala laughed even as the rumbling sound shook him from the iron tree and sent him tumbling to the floor.
The vanaras gasped. “She took it!”
“No—” screamed the gray one.
Vikram turned and grinned.
Too late.
Nothing human remained in her aspect except those glittering eyes. A snow leopard’s tail lashed from behind her.
Now, said her eyes.
Vikram sprang toward her, grabbing the vetala as he jumped onto her back. Somewhere in the shadows of the Kishkinda kingdom, he thought he heard the barest trace of delighted laughter. The vanaras loosed their arrows, but Gauri broke them in her teeth.
“Vetala!” he yelled. “We’ve kept our word. Now honor yours.”
The vetala shuddered. “Honor? There should always be better motivation than honor. Try something more appealing. Like half-clothed women or a vat of goat blood.”
“Tell us where to go!”
“Pretty monster,” said the vetala, patting Gauri’s massive head. She hissed. “Bad cat.”
The vetala licked his hand and held it to the windless air. “Into the wall.”
“Are you insane?” asked Vikram.
“Yes?”
“Straight into a stone wall?”
An arrow sliced through the air. Gauri brought down a massive paw and snapped it in half. Vikram thought he heard a laugh rumble in her stomach.
“Get out of the way or die,” he said to the vanaras.
Gauri began to gallop, her body stretching for the stones just before them.
One.
Vikram’s gut wrenched. He didn’t want to die slammed by a wall of stone. He didn’t want to die at all.
Two.
The air smelled sour. He could imagine the sound of Gauri’s beautiful antlers shattering.
Three.
Her fur glinted, light rippling over her body. Vikram held tight, bracing himself for a thud …
That never came.
10
A BOWL OF LUSH MEMORIES
GAURI
I didn’t know hurt. Or fear.
When my skin gave way to fur and my nails bent into claws, I knew what it meant to be stripped down to your barest self. It meant seeing the world for what it was. I took off my skin and released the thing that had always lurked, crept and slept within me: A beast. A monster. A myth. A girl. What was the difference?
My last thought before I turned was the wish I would’ve made. For freedom. True freedom. And even though I couldn’t speak it aloud, I could feel the weight of that wish filling me from the inside, pressing against my teeth. I felt that wish like a line of light, a boundary that my mind wouldn’t cross lest I lose myself forever.
We ran and I reveled. I could see and smell and taste. I licked starlight out of the air. Saw midnight cresting over a mountain. I thought I’d lost Vikram as we jumped through that wall, but then his scent caught me. He smelled of wanting and bottled-up dreams. And in some dimmed human part of me, heat flared.
The vetala stroked my head. “Run toward the scent of death, pretty monster. The Grotto of the Undead will be the first boundary to Kubera’s kingdom.”
It was not a difficult scent to follow. The smells of death lit up the world already, but finding where the scent rang strongest was painstaking. I pawed the ground, turning up the earth and trying to find that smudgy scent of stale death—mushroom pale, a crease of shadow in a skein of light, flattened sounds that trembled in my ears like the blunted teeth of echoes.
When I found it, I chased it. I didn’t know how long I ran. I ran until there were no more animal sounds. No more scents. This was death: the absence of all. I was still a beast when we finally reached the Undead Grotto. But my claws had receded. An antler had snapped off sometime earlier. The effects of the demon fruit were fading fast.
I shrugged off the vetala and Vikram like an itchy cloak. They tumbled to the ground. The vetala let out a stream of curses, but Vikram only stood and straightened his tunic. Whatever brief understanding we’d shared before I turned had disappeared. Once more, his eyes sparked as sly as a fox’s.
“Since you can’t respond yet and since you have no claws left, I will take this moment to remind you that you thought eating the demon fruit would be a bad idea. It was not. To which I say—” He drew a deep breath. “—I told you so.”
“Fool,” muttered the vetala.
I snarled and with one last burst of strength, swiped my paw behind Vikram’s knees and sent him tumbling. He gasped.
“I will,” he wheezed, rolling onto his stomach, “take your silence as a form of agreement.”
Vikram sat on the ground, tugging one dark curl around his ear. Even with dirt smudged across his ears and nose, he looked regal. His long legs were crossed in front of him, and he reclined against the rock outcropping as if the earth had
put it there just for him.
I turned to the Undead Grotto, which was a desert-like basin between two cliffs. Bone white trees rose from the uneven ground like spindly fingers. Lichen and greasy-looking flowers splashed over vermillion rocks. The moon was nowhere to be found. Even looking at the place made my fur stand on end. The Grotto was a place not quite out of myth. Scouts had sometimes returned to Bharata carrying tales about the place. How the wind taunted members of the scouting party. Those who wandered into that land refused to leave or were never found. Even those forcibly brought back were never the same. That much was clear from the landscape alone. Piles of abandoned armor. Even some weaponry. I padded through the refuse, pawing aside the rusted bits until I found a blunt knife. It was better than nothing. I picked it up in my mouth, carrying it back to Vikram and the vetala.
Vikram kept his gaze on the Grotto. “How much longer until the demon fruit stops working?”
“She is already turning.” The vetala huffed. “Don’t look so disappointed. I know what you’re trying to do, tall fox. You think the Grotto is a place you can fight through with the help of some demon fruit. But it’s not about fighting. It’s about seeing,” said the vetala. “Alaka has two doors before it opens its golden ones: the Grotto and the Crossroads.”
I remembered the rhyme from the ruby: Alaka is past the place where memories devour and the held-breath place to put an end to cowards. Which one would the Grotto be?
A cold wind shuddered through me. I felt my mind unspooling, my body shrinking. Those powerful demoness muscles were now draped onto a smaller set of shoulders, a thinner set of bones. The world dimmed and receded.
Oh, I thought, at the same time I heard my voice rasp:
“Oh.”
And then:
“Oh no.”
The only thing that had stayed on my skin since the moment I turned was Maya’s necklace and my sandals. My tunic hung off me in strips. At this moment, Vikram was pretending that there was a spot of great interest just beyond my shoulder. The vetala had squeaked and drawn up his tattered wings over his face.
“Give me your jacket,” I demanded.
Vikram—who was now pretending that his life depended on looking at the spot right beyond my shoulder—grumbled, “When you ask so kindly, you’re impossible to resist.”
He threw the jacket to me. Shrugging out of my tunic, I kept my eyes trained on his face. Gratefulness flooded through me. Most men wouldn’t have thought twice about looking. Some would have pressed it further than a look. To so many men in Bharata, your body wasn’t yours. It infuriated me. But the one time I tried to do anything about it, I only hurt someone. Once, I had a soldier whipped for what he tried to do after cornering a serving girl. Luckily, Arjun had gotten there in time to pull the man off and let the girl escape.
The whole time he was whipped, the soldier had screamed in defense: “The Raja Skanda doesn’t care!”
“Do I look like my brother?” I had sneered.
That day, I felt proud. As if I could protect people. Skanda found out what I said and had the girl brought to his chambers that night. I only found out the next morning, when the girl stopped me on my way to the barracks. Her eyes glistened with tears: “Spare me your mercy next time, Princess.”
It haunted me thinking about how many people I had harmed just for trying to protect them. For one moment, I squeezed my eyes shut. Then I tightened the jacket.
“How’s the view?” I asked, turning.
Vikram blinked, not looking at me. “Excellent. Best I’ve ever had.”
“Good for you, Vikram. Because it might be your last.”
I picked up the blunt dagger and walked past him to where the vetala hummed and drew circles and stars into the dirt.
“Keep your word, creature. Get us to Alaka.”
“There now,” said the vetala, crawling toward us. “Did I not say that it is a matter of perspective? And am I not an honorable corpse thing? Lean close. Lean close. I shall tell you things.”
Vikram’s shadow fell over me as we both crouched before the vetala. The creature drew up its ragged knees. It opened its mouth as if to speak. And then … it spat into our eyes.
I jerked back, dragging my arm across my stinging eye.
“I don’t need my knives to kill you, vetala,” I bit out.
“I better not go blind,” groaned Vikram, rubbing his fist into his eye.
I tried to jab him with my elbow, missed and lost my balance.
“You are most welcome,” said the vetala silkily.
I touched my left eye—the one he had spat into—and found it strangely cool to the touch. Vikram met my gaze.
Where both of his eyes had once been brown, one of them was now bright green. I glanced over the rest of his face, noticing things that had been invisible mere moments ago. The dying light tugged his sharp chin, cut jaw and hooded gaze from Otherworldly to beautiful. When I looked into his eyes, my breath caught. I saw things and people swimming in his sight—a woman with gray streaked in her temples, a fistful of blue flowers, a stout king with a one-winged bird on his shoulder. Empty cradles and darkened halls. And a boy. A boy who held himself as if there were a storm gathering bolts of light within him. Vikram, too, looked disturbed. His brows were pressed together, and when his gaze fell to Maya’s necklace, his lips parted in wonder.
What had my eyes betrayed?
He turned suddenly, and his eyes widened.
“Gods,” he breathed.
I followed his line of sight and horror gripped me.
Before, the Grotto had seemed a lifeless, barren thing. Now shapes twisted before us. Creatures clung to the bone white trees. Creatures who were not resting in the branches or frozen in death, but awake and skittering.
And staring straight at us.
“Hurry, hurry,” whined the vetala. “This isn’t just about the two of you fools, you know.”
I covered the eye the vetala had spat into and looked out onto the Grotto. Nothing but bone white trees met my eye. But when I covered the other eye and looked out, bodies teemed and writhed, gnashing their teeth.
“One eye to see the illusion … another to see through it…” said Vikram softly.
“But then why were we able to—” I stopped.
Vikram caught my gaze and quickly looked away. Why had we been able to see through one another, as if we were nothing more than panes of colored glass?
“The body is its own illusion. Now you can see through it,” said the vetala. “Rather like fleshy thuribles. They’re just keepers of things. What’s inside you is the thing those beasties like the most. You are, basically, a bowl full of lush memories. They want to scoop them out, sink their teeth into them, drown themselves in the imprints of living moments.”
“How do those monsters tease out our memories?” asked Vikram.
The vetala smiled and ice poured down my spine.
“They can sniff the shapes of memories rising off your skin like steam. They will tug on them. And you, like a drowsy fat bumblebee lulled by the blue throat of an intoxicating blossom, will fall into the arms of whatever illusion they craft.”
I sucked in my cheeks and patted the jacket. I was ready. Vikram looked more hesitant. The color had drained from his face and he was staring at the Grotto as if he knew exactly which nightmare was waiting for him.
“If you die, you die. Do not feel bad. I died. And I am quite fine,” said the vetala. “If you do, however, manage to be killed—and by the looks of you, I would not be surprised so much as irritated—please try to keep your heads. You’re no use to me decapitated.”
Since I’d already transported us to the Grotto, Vikram agreed to let the vetala climb onto his back. The vetala smoothed Vikram’s hair, crooning: “Nice donkey.” At the end of the sloping cliff, I checked once more to make sure that the enchanted eye worked. Vikram let out his breath to speak, and I prepared to hear formal, solemn words like “death comes for all of us anyway.” What I heard, instead, was:
>
“Race you to the end?”
It was such a bizarre thing to say that I … started laughing. I was shocked that I had a laugh left inside me and even more startled that it chose to announce itself moments before a battle where death had victory pinched between its thumb and forefinger. Once freed from my belly, the laugh warmed my bones. Maybe that’s why the best laughs tend to break free on the edge of lightless horror. Only then can they give wings to a drooping spirit. I needed that. And whether or not Vikram knew what he had done, I felt grateful.
The vetala groaned. “You are bound to die.”
All it took was one step for the Grotto to transform. The wind picked up my hair. One moment, I could see the slit of light at the end of the Grotto. A cave opening. At the back of my head, I heard Maya’s voice: The Lord of Wealth once ruled Lanka, a city of gold. Gold everywhere. Gold in the trees, in the rivers, in the air. Perhaps it was gold. Gold just on the other side. All I had to do was reach it.
But in the next moment, the world transformed. Thick clouds of mist rolled in front of us, hiding the light. I felt Vikram at my side, but I couldn’t see him. I held my breath. Who will the Grotto taunt me with first?
I didn’t have to wait long. Out of one eye, I saw a dark hand stretch toward me. Faded blue tattoos flecked her arms like dull stars. Nalini’s beautiful face twisted in hurt:
“You left me there to die.”
11
A POISONED SPOON
GAURI
I kept moving.
You’re not real.
“Vikram!” I called out.
Nothing.
“You were supposed to keep me safe. I trusted you,” she said. “I did everything you asked. All I asked was for hope. Don’t you remember? I came to you. I begged you. And what did you do?”
Shuddering, I moved forward. One step. Two. The mist grew heavier, blanketing my feet. My heart sped. The ends of the sherwani jacket got caught around my legs. I tried to look through the enchanted eye, but it could see only through the spirits of the Undead Grotto. Not the mist. Beneath me, the ground turned craggy. I was used to fighting on uneven surfaces, but usually I had boots and both eyes open. Here, I was walking on threadbare sandals, one hand clasped over my eye and my sense of space and depth faltering. My toe caught. I fell, flinging out my arms for support.
A Crown of Wishes Page 7
