Or something far more precious.
“The risk matches the reward,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.
“Gauri,” he said softly. Too softly. As if my name were made of glass.
I stepped back and forced a smile. “Any more time with me, and you might truly lose your mind. Maybe we’ll come up with the answer to the riddle faster if we take some time to think on our own,” I said quickly. “I’ll meet you here by nightfall.”
Something in his gaze retreated.
“You’re not going back to the Serpent King’s pool, are you?”
“I haven’t gotten this far into existence on stupidity.”
He nodded and flashed a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Don’t start now.”
I smirked, waved him off and stalked back in the direction of the groves. I had no intention of going to the pool, but I wanted to think alone, far away from where he could distract me. I couldn’t shake the sound of my name on his lips. It slinked through my thoughts, spreading roots and thorns. Even though all he said was my name, a question had gathered form in his voice. As if … as if he was asking whether I would let him worry about me, and let him rest his fingers at the nape of my neck, and let him memorize my unimportant secrets that would never bring kingdoms to their knees but still pinned my soul in place. Away from him, I knew the right answer:
No.
Our situation was strange. We’d been thrown together in a competition for something we both desperately wanted. Needed. If we didn’t win, what home would have us? I said I wanted to return to Bharata, but the Bharata I wanted—one with Nalini safe and my freedom secured—didn’t exist without a victory. There was no future without victory. If we didn’t win, we would be like ghosts: our forms held together by the sheer force of our unfulfilled wants, with nothing left of our lives but what had been and what could never be. In the face of that fear, maybe the mind couldn’t help but scrape together feelings toward the only person we had a connection to. That was all it was. A consequence of survival.
I repeated this to myself as I marched toward the grove of magical trees. Every time I heard a sound behind me, I would turn, expecting Vikram. After the first couple of times, I realized I wasn’t expecting him. I was looking for him. I shook my head and concentrated on the riddle.
To one it is invisible
Yet be careful if you lose much
To some it is everything
A history to clutch
Though it is life, it cannot buy time
Speak wrong, and I will take it as mine
My first guess was memory. But memory wasn’t life. And my second thought was breath. But breath has nothing to do with history. I was so deep in my thoughts, turning the riddle over and pushing out the memory of Vikram’s smile, that I almost didn’t see the three people standing before me:
The Nameless.
24
A PLANTED HEART
GAURI
“You should not be here,” they said.
I dug my heels into the ground. “Why not? Lord Kubera has not forbidden the contestants from entering this part of Alaka.”
“We are honoring our lost sister,” said the first, turning her gaze on me. She may have looked young—lovely, even—but her gaze held that flat heaviness of someone whose spirit was ancient. As one, the Nameless reached for the blue ribbons around their throats. Maya’s necklace pressed against my skin. I tried to honor her, to live up to the stories she told me. But I’d failed.
“I’m not preventing you from honoring her. I was just walking around the groves.”
“This grove is for her. Because of her. Because of us. Choose another.”
I looked behind them to the bone white trees. When we walked past the grove earlier, I had dug my nails into my palm, fighting the urge to wander through this haunted grove. Something about it called to me. But what? No leaves sprouted from their ivory branches and no fruit graced their boughs. No earth covered the small grove; it was as if someone had shoved slivers of bone into ashes and called them trees, and the bones had forgotten how to be anything else.
“Queen Tara never liked visitors to her orchards anyway.”
“Queen Tara?” I repeated incredulously. I knew that name. She was the missing queen of the vanaras, the one who had planted demon fruit and been cursed as a result.
“This is her grove.”
Without warning, hunger coursed through my veins. I might not know what the tree of demon fruit looked like. But my blood recognized this place. The Nameless stepped backward, and one broke from the trio to place her hand against the bone white tree and rest her forehead to its bark.
“Planted of a sister’s heart, unwillingly given,” said the first.
“Fixed to the ground of a beloved’s bone, unwillingly given,” said the second.
“Watered by tears, unwillingly given,” said the third.
Their words chilled me.
“And what of the demon fruit?” I asked.
The first, who had not removed her hand from the bark, stroked the tree. “The fruit lies in the heart of the tree. But it can only be taken by a man who has given away his heart. None else can take the fruit. And yet no man may eat of it.”
“Why would you ever honor your sister’s memory in a place like this?”
The Nameless smiled. “It is her heart that the Queen took. This is our sister’s legacy. Our vengeance. This is the last Tournament. When we win, our sister will be honored forever.”
* * *
I got away from them as fast as I could. I muttered something vaguely polite right before running to Vikram. I didn’t care that it wasn’t even nightfall yet. The words of the Nameless rang through my thoughts. My tongue felt thick and my mouth turned dry. I had eaten that fruit. I had eaten something grown from bones, heart and tears. Worse … I craved it. That bite of power. Of invincibility. Maybe the demon fruit brought a curse with it, but to me it felt like safety.
Vikram hadn’t moved from the spot where I’d left him. Only now, his face was pale. And his hair was tousled, as if he had tugged at the strands one time too many.
“I figured out the riddle,” he said. “The answer is blood.”
It made sense. You could not see your own blood. If you lost too much, you died. Some people swore by their lineage. And blood was life, although having more of it wouldn’t change the time of your death.
“I think he wants us to place some of our blood in the pool before he will let us enter.”
My fingers trembled from my meeting with the Nameless. I clasped them together. I didn’t want to die here. I didn’t want to become like them, wandering through this palace and playing a game over and over, hoping for a different outcome. But I needed strength if I was going to win.
“I’ll meet you by the pool at first light,” I said.
“Where are you going?”
“To steal sleep and hope I don’t remember the nightmares.”
“On the night before possible death with all the food and festivities and dancing all around us, you want to go to sleep?”
“Celebrating as if it’s your last night on earth generally makes for reckless mistakes the next day,” I said, folding my arms.
“I solved the riddle. I demand a reward.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What do you want?”
Vikram nodded to the revels taking place beneath the banyan tree. The music already made me feel heady with the frenzied drums and the musicians’ lilting song of yearning and claiming. He stepped closer, to the point where I had to look up to meet his eyes. A vulpine grin crept onto his face. In that moment, he looked like mischief and midnight, like a temptation that always slipped away too fast and left you at once relieved and disappointed.
“I want one dance with you.”
25
A TALISMAN OF TOUCH
VIKRAM
The bones had stood out too sharply. A little too knowingly. As if they had been waiting for him to find them. Maybe thos
e bones belonged to someone like him. Someone who believed that magic meant they were destined for more. Maybe they believed it right until the moment they died.
Vikram wasn’t so blinded by the idea of magic that he thought it was a toothless and beautiful thing. He knew it bit. But he hadn’t imagined it could bite … them.
If he lost, what use would magic be? The life that waited for him in Ujijain was a husk of an existence. He couldn’t return. And yet he no longer felt that glittering certainty that victory danced within reach. He felt … outside of himself. Grasping, once more, for that hope and belief.
And so he danced with Gauri not out of want, but out of necessity. In the ashram, pupils carried luck charms in their pockets or hid tiny figurines of deities all over their rooms. Vikram never understood that compulsion to hold what felt sacred. Now he did.
It was the connection people craved; the feeling that touch connected them to something beyond themselves. That was why he needed to dance with her. He craved that connection to the moment when magic had snapped his reality and showed him that his destiny as a puppet was only a path. Not a promise.
Before he met Gauri, he thought that the invitation to the Tournament of Wishes marked the entrance of magic into his life. But that moment was nothing more than what it served: an invitation. Gauri was the real beginning. He knew it the moment she flew toward him, lips pulled back in a snarl, eyes black as winter and just as unforgiving.
Vikram pulled Gauri to the revels. The air felt heavy and damp, as it always did during the rainy season. He drew her close until their bodies were flush. He wanted to memorize this, the way her leg pressed against his, the way strands of her hair got caught in the small buttons of his jacket. Even the way she glowered at him when he grinned. When he touched her, he didn’t feel like some thread in a tale, pulled along without will. He was something that reached out and responded.
Gauri laughed when he stumbled through the movements of the dance.
“You are a discredit to your title, Vikram. Fox Prince, indeed,” she said. “I’ve never seen a clumsier fox.”
“What I lack in skill, I make up for in enthusiasm.”
“Do you even know how to dance?”
“Not at all,” he said, spinning her in a circle.
“I can tell. Were you lulled by the music?”
“The company.”
“Now you’re just trying to be sly and charming.”
“I am a credit to my title, after all.”
Twice, he had pulled her so close that her gaze threatened to eclipse his thoughts. When she danced, her eyes softened. No longer harsh and winter black, but vast and … not breathtaking, but breath-guzzling. Breath-devouring. This close, her eyes shone like fragments of night sky. If he looked closer, he wondered whether he’d see stars burst into life behind her lashes.
Twice, her lids dropped and her eyes traced his lips just as his traced hers. But he always pulled away in the end. He’d spent enough time with her to guess how she would interpret a kiss. She would see it as a reckless act of bravery, a thing to be done before death. It would have been a reckless act of bravery. But not for those reasons.
They danced until even the stars limped out of the sky. Only a few stragglers remained to watch the revels. A handful of hours were left between now and dawn. And at dawn, he knew that she would be up and ready to fight, so he led her away from the dance.
“Finally,” she said. But he thought he heard faint disappointment in her voice.
When they trudged upstairs, he took the couch at the opposite side of the room without comment. Within moments, she was asleep. One arm flung over her stomach. One ankle tucked beneath her knee. He’d never seen anyone sleep in a knot, but Gauri made the pose look like the soul of slumber. He allowed himself a single moment to wonder what it would be like to know that warmth, to rest his cheek against her bare shoulder and trace what dreams fluttered beneath her eyelids. And then he closed his mind to her.
As he expected, Gauri was up with the dawn. She woke him up none too gently, but made up for it by shoving a cup of chai in one of his hands and a plate of uttapam in the other.
“Ready to die?”
He groaned. “I realize you’re newly adjusting to a sense of humor, but have mercy.”
“Not known for it.”
He raised his glass to her. “It’s never too late to start.”
The world was gray and dark when they left their chambers and trudged through the grove. Gauri kept looking over her shoulder at a copse of skeletal-looking trees, one hand on the weapons belt slung around her waist. At the pool, Vikram held out his arm and Gauri quickly drew a knife across her forearm and then his. He didn’t wince when the blood unfurled in the milky water, staining the riddle invitation scrawled across the pale surface. The water trembled. The pool sank into the earth, transforming into a set of sapphire staircases that formed a serpentine coil straight into darkness.
“Well done, mortals,” called a voice from the depths.
26
THE SEVEN BRIDES
GAURI
I imagined that the Serpent King’s lair would look like a snake’s burrow—a hole in the ground littered with bone fragments, and shed skin boasting a phantom of its former brightness. But this subterranean palace was beautiful. At the bottom of the stairs, a large chamber sprawled out. Glassy stalactites spiraled from a cavernous ceiling flecked with bits of quartz and silver. A wave of still water covered with a thin piece of glass formed the floor.
At the bottom of the stairs, I grimaced. The stairs were the only entrance and exit. If we had to fight in the middle of the room, it strained an exit strategy. Even though the room was barren, the atmosphere felt strung taut. It felt … watched. I waited. In battle, I could sometimes guess when an enemy soldier would charge out of the dark. You could feel the air gather and release. As if it had guessed what was coming next and chose to step aside.
The dark unraveled:
Tail.
Torso.
Teeth.
“You came looking for a monster,” said the Serpent King. “And now you have found one.”
I wanted to take from this monster just as he had taken from the Lady Kauveri’s sister. I wanted him to be as ugly as his actions, with mottled skin and yellowed fangs, a bloated brown tail attached to a puffy torso. But when I turned around, he was anything but hideous.
He was taller than any man I’d ever seen, but maybe that was because he had raised himself higher on his own serpent coil. His black hair was threaded with silver—not the dull silver that streaked hair as one aged, but actual silver. Aasha said he was descended of the demon naga Kaliya. But he was demonic only if you considered his beauty so severe that it bordered on sinister. The Serpent King moved toward us with a liquid grace before stopping and tilting his head. A knowing smirk turned his lips at the corners.
“You wish I weren’t so beautiful,” he said to me.
I frowned. “I—”
“You have nothing to fear,” said the Serpent King, resting his gaze on Vikram. “My heart cannot be tempted from the one who possesses it.”
He could read minds. Could he manipulate them? Or hypnotize? Perhaps that was how he seduced Kauveri’s sister. My hand moved closer to the weapons belt slung around my waist. The Serpent King pulled his lips into a snarl and hissed. A cobra hood flared out behind his neck, as blue as the heart of a flame. His teeth lengthened into fangs. I braced my legs, preparing for an attack.
“That is what you think of me?” he said. “That I forced her hand? That I snatched her heart from her chest?”
Vikram moved to my side. The Serpent King turned sharply to Vikram, and his cobra hood flattened and disappeared.
“Wouldn’t you agree, Fox Prince, that if you can be more than your blood then I can be more than mine?” He turned his gaze back to me. “You may play in the Tournament of Wishes, but you sleep in the Palace of Stories. Let me tell you a tale.”
He moved forward, forcin
g us back a step.
“Once, there was a naga with demon blood in his veins who saw a beautiful girl singing by the river. He returned every day for a year to listen to her voice until her song ran through his veins instead of blood. He revealed the secret of his own venom in exchange for the magic of a mortal name just to share the same language with her. And once he could speak, he asked her to sing in his palace beneath the sea and promised her his whole heart, poisoned as it might be. She accepted.”
The Serpent King’s eyes softened. He moved forward again, pressing us back even farther.
“Let me tell you another tale,” he said, so softly that it might have seemed meek. But I heard the tremor in his voice. It was barely restrained rage. “Once, there was a demon king who terrorized the river and poisoned it black until a god danced upon his head and banished him to the watery depths. The demon king learned his lesson. And he taught that lesson to every one of his descendants, down to the smallest hatchling, so that they would learn to ignore the poison threaded through their veins. His descendant fell in love with a river and the river loved him back. But no one had forgotten the deeds of his ancestors. And no one believed either him or the river who loved him.”
Doubt fluttered at the back of my head. I thought back to those empty birdcages and the wings overhead, soaring and changing with every intersecting story. But Kauveri was the sister of the Serpent King’s wife. If the story wasn’t true, then why would Aasha say that Kauveri wanted his venom? Kauveri’s demand was proof of how she considered him: Untrustworthy. Out of control. Maybe she thought to free her sister from his clutches by using the venom. Maybe that was the only reason Kubera had invited him to the Tournament. I notched my chin higher as I stared down the Serpent King. I was ready to fight, but Vikram placed his hand on my arm:
A Crown of Wishes Page 16
