by Varsha Ravi
She lowered herself to the cement and sat beside him, crossing her legs. “Yeah, my grandmother helped me plant it when I moved out. The jasmine is my favorite, too.”
He shook his head slightly, in disbelief or dissuasion. Dropping the blossom, he took the sapling into his hands again. “I used to know someone who loved jasmine.”
“I thought you had amnesia,” she said, raising her eyebrows.
Kiran ran the pad of his thumb against the edge of the sharp, sweet leaves. “I’ve remembered my mortal life. I assume the memories of what came after pose more of a danger to whoever bound me.”
“You were human?” she couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice. He glanced up, amusement and something sharper mingling in his gaze.
“I was, for a bit,” he replied, oddly remote. “I’ll tell you the story, one day. For now, we should get this planted. I’m not entirely sure I remember how.”
And yet, strangely, he did remember. Every single movement came to him with such swift, unwavering precision; Suri was reminded of what her grandmother had said when she had given him the plant, about it taking a liking to him.
“God of tulasi?” she ventured hopefully when he’d finished and leaned back on his heels. “God of plants? Planting? Agriculture?”
“You’re insulting several different gods right now,” he said, reaching his hands up to scrub at his face. They left streaks of dark soil on his cheeks, and it made him look a little more human. After a moment, he spoke, his eyes still fluttered shut. “You should sleep, Suri.”
“Is this because you told my grandmother you’d take care of me?” she asked without heat, already beginning to straighten up. A contradictory part of her wanted to stay to spite him, but she was tired, and she had an exam the following day.
“It has nothing to do with what I told Rana,” he reassured her. “It’s late, and you’re tired. Wouldn’t want you to faceplant into the soil, now would we?”
Suri made a rude gesture at him, and he smiled without opening his eyes. She moved to return to the apartment, then glanced back. For a single, oddly indulgent moment, she watched him trace the night sky above with closed eyes, and then she shut the screen door behind her.
Judging from how little Kiran knew about pop culture and modern history, Suri estimated that he hadn’t been in the mortal world for a while, at least a century or two. But he picked it all up quickly enough.
Even though he knew functionally how most of the machines in the apartment worked, that didn’t stop him from sticking his head in her room late at night and informing her he’d broken the “hot box gadget” again. It got to the point where—after breaking the microwave, dishwasher, and communal washing machine—she forbade him from touching any of them if she wasn’t in the apartment. The mere thought of the damage he’d unleash in a department store served as endless nightmare fodder.
Fortunately, Kiran seemed disinterested in the outside world. Apart from spending the mornings at her grandmother’s shop, dressed in lurid, clashing outfits from her closet, he was content to burn through her collection of old books: classics she’d inherited from her grandmother, dry nonfiction that had belonged to her parents, and worn nursery tales her brothers had read before they’d gotten their brains splattered on asphalt eighteen years prior.
Oddly enough, he had a morbid fascination with reality television. Most days, she came home to him curled up on the couch with a bowl of stale popcorn watching one of those elimination shows, where people fall in love and promptly fall out of love and it’s all tallied and held out for the world to judge.
She’d dared to ask him why he found them so interesting once, and he’d ripped a piece of popcorn apart until it was butter and shreds. “Why do they make the shows? Because they’re entertaining.”
And she knew he found them entertaining for an entirely different set of reasons than the rest of the world did, saw it in the line of his smile, tilted sideways like humanity itself was a joke only he was privy to. But she hadn’t said it, hadn’t needed to.
Part of her inherently resented him. Even if he hadn’t been alive when her family had died, he represented everyone who had, all the gods who had cast their gazes upon slowing hearts and bloody skin and deemed them insignificant.
Another smaller, crueler part of her simply sought to understand him, a mortal ascended. She wondered if his heart was painted in shades of gold and sable, whether she could open him up and find blood that had once run red crystallized into glittering jewels of divinity.
But she never asked, and he never explained the miracle of his soul. They fell into a kind of routine that way—rain-soaked early autumn days went by and life passed, untouched and viscous around them. And then he stopped sleeping, and the stories began.
The first time, she’d thought she’d been lost in a nightmare of her own, that something horrible had happened and once again, she hadn’t noticed until it was too late. But she was laying on her bed, heartbeat rapid and lips pressed tight.
When she padded into the living room, he was leaned absently against the side of the television stand. There was a careful neutrality in his expression, and yet it had been hastily made—even from this far, she could see the worn, jagged edges of it. An old, familiar mask breathed into new life.
“I forgot,” he whispered, the timbre of his voice low and rough. He stared at the empty, mussed couch as if it held nightmares.
“Forgot what?” she asked warily, stepping forward until she was beside the table.
Kiran turned dark gold eyes on her, haunted and heedless and not quite human. “That I don’t sleep.”
She waited for him to explain, but he didn’t. He just exhaled and tilted his head back, languorous and trembling. The silence stretched and tangled between them, and then he said, “I apologize for waking you, Suri. You can go back to bed now.”
“And what will you do?” she pressed, pushing herself onto the table and letting her legs dangle over the side. “Try to go back to sleep? Watch reruns of old sitcoms?”
He spoke without looking at her, soft and amused. “I suppose so. Maybe I’ll watch old seasons of Heartbreak Hotel.”
But he wouldn’t, she knew—he’d watch television, and the words would go straight through him and the nightmares would stay, would echo through bone and blood. They never left, even if she was too afraid to close her eyes. She’d seen it all, felt it all, and even if he didn’t remember who he was supposed to be, she knew he remembered this, too. It was muscle memory, knowledge that seared and scarred.
So she just slid off the table and padded over to the couch, creased where he’d screamed awake. It smelled a little like him, smoke and soil. She curled into the abandoned blankets. “Tell me a story.”
The corner of his mouth quirked to the side, but he joined her, leaning back against the opposite arm of the couch. In superhero pajama pants and a hand-me-down sweatshirt, he looked boyish and kind, ironic when you considered he was neither. “Why?”
“You owe me one,” she said simply, tugging the fleece around herself. “And I like stories. You must know a lot, having lived as long as you have.”
He grinned crookedly. “Are you calling me old?”
“Maybe,” she replied, returning the grin despite herself.
Kiran wrapped his arms around his knees, brows drawn together in concentration. After a few minutes, he tilted his head up, faintly triumphant. “I think you’ll like this one. It’s a bit long, though.”
“Really?” she challenged, the word already a little fuzzy with sleep.
“Yes,” he said. That odd, bright spark had not left his expression, though now Suri couldn’t help but wonder at it, how it looked less and less like triumph with every passing moment. “It’s about princes and princesses and love and death, like all the best stories are.”
“Promise I’ll like it?” she asked, head dipping forward with fatigue even as she struggled to stay awake.
“Swear on Idhrishti’s grave,” he said
softly, amused even though the phrase meant nothing to her. And then he leaned forward and brushed the hair away from her face, close enough that when he began to speak, she could feel the warm breath on her cheeks. “A long time ago, in a faraway land, there was a princess, and she was afraid of blood.”
2
Enesmat
It didn’t take long before the nausea set in.
Suri accepted a glass of palm wine from the waiter, offering an amiable smile. Without meeting her gaze, they slid away to accommodate the next guest. Hehyava. The word followed her like a ghost even here, to the edges of the empire.
It was a cruel sort of name for a princess, but one that held a certain sort of awe to it, a certain measure of respect. Strange, considering she knew the people saw her with neither.
This was a lesser state function, some celebration of a new conquest or a new marriage, and she usually would not have been expected to attend. She was exempted from most functions, even ones in the capital; she knew the glances the other guests were surreptitiously throwing toward her were less about parsing her demeanor and more curiosity. Who will die here tonight?
The doors swung open, and the servants beside the door announced the newcomer’s formal title to a room of people who cared little and offered nothing but mild applause. She took a sip of her wine, acrid and too sharp, and left it on the imported oak table beside her, leaning forward to consider her mark.
The deputy governor was a young man in his mid-twenties, ideal for his position—he had been born into a noble family and followed directions without curiosity or defiance. It had made him arrogant and careless, and after the applause faded, he strode into the room with the self-assured insolence that ignorance bred and bloomed.
Hehyava. Reaper.
Suri pushed off the edge of the table and snagged two more glasses of wine off a passing tray. She handed one to the man and took one for herself, smiling coyly. He glanced around, wary—this late, he must have heard the rumors of her presence, the empire’s illustrious blade—but whatever he’d thought to look for, he had not found it. There were no tall, shadowed figures cut in imposing shades of gold and blue, smelling of blood and iron. There were no scythes to fear, no scarred faces and cut lips to run from.
There was only her. Hesitantly, he smiled back.
A soft life had so clearly rotted the wisdom from his mind, if it had been there to begin with. She plied him with a few more drinks and he accepted them, and when she suggested they leave for some fresh air, he agreed laconically, eyes glinting dark.
As she’d expected, he didn’t take her home, to the grand, sprawling house the deputy governor shared with the viceroy of the border province. He led her out toward the outskirts of the city, toward the ports and the sea and the festivals. The air smelled of spices and brine, and for a moment, she felt faintly homesick. The moment passed, and she followed him down uneven, dimly lit streets toward an inn set on the water.
Sahet was a border city; it skirted the northern edges of the empire, where the lowlands of occupied Eryan land—the kingdom had been cut down to half its old size in the previous war—met the jungles that separated the Najan Empire from the southeast parts of the continent. The empire stretched from the Sahen border across toward Dauri, and then swung down toward the rest of the peninsula. There were a few kingdoms that hadn’t yet fully surrendered, giving up slices of land with every new war, but the rest of the world recognized their grip on the peninsula.
Here in the provinces, they worshipped the old gods, built towering, beautiful temples out of marble and crushed pigments, and celebrated their exploits with blossoms and spilt holy water. It was one of those celebrations tonight, and the streets were full of peasants wrapped in dyed cotton and garlands of tied flowers. The procession continued down the avenue, incense-soaked and incense-sweet, as they sang hymns and held up a jewel-encrusted palanquin, carrying a marble statuette decorated in silks.
“The birth of Kazha,” the deputy governor explained, as they skirted around the procession, his soft hands encircling her wrists. Her skirts, beaded and reflective in the faint light, sagged with the weight as they stepped from stone to stone. There was a distasteful edge to his voice when he spoke, harsh and derisive. He was Ashanth-born and Ashanth-raised, and the coarse rituals of peasants must have seemed barbaric to him. “They have been celebrating it for the greater part of the day, but this is only the beginning.”
She feigned surprise, even though she’d already attended. Her parents often sent her on jobs during the festival week, if only because the fervor and joy adeptly hid the shock that followed death. “Kazha?”
His features softened at her ignorance—how childlike she must seem to him, a girl of seventeen years swaddled in the patterned silks of the capital. She toyed with the edge of her sash, flightless birds embroidered in gold thread across the edges. “The Enesmati mother goddess, patron of Erya. You should not worry too much. Even though she serves savages, she is a kind goddess, and so the revels are gentle, too. The southerners of Athri serve Avya, and I’ve heard he bids them to bleed.”
Suri let her breath catch in shock and horror, and he laughed at that show of vulnerability. His humor shielded him completely from the truth, just as clouds thickened and smoothed across the glow of the moon until the night sky above them was black as pitch. He led her toward the inn, greeting the innkeeper and then taking her up the stairs toward his room. This was done in flagrant disregard of the rules of Najan courting, and if anyone had seen them, they’d have turned up their noses, revolted by the wild, heedless love of youths. But the innkeeper had spared them little more than a cursory glance, and the deputy governor was drunk to the point of uselessness, fingers dipped in the Lethe, and so no one saw them, and no one would remember.
The room was sparsely decorated, nothing more than a basin of water, a coarse mast-wood trunk, and a cot beside the window. This was where he took all his lady loves, she guessed, after nights in taverns and those so-called barbaric festivals. To snag a pretty, flushed noble girl from the capital—it was an added bonus, but it would be no change from the routine, not for him.
Even before the door slammed shut behind her, he pushed her up against it, presumptuous in the way men of his kind often were. Hungry, desirous, indolent, like young gods who believed the world twisted and bent to their whims.
His fingers caught on the edges of her beaded bodice, on rhinestones and glittering golden thread. It was tight against her skin, made in the Najan fashion so it cut off above her midriff, allowing her silk sash to wrap around her waist. His other hand traced down her side toward the knot of her sash.
She counted the beats of silence before the celebration in the streets below came to a crescendo, and the hymns shattered the night-dark quiet. His fingers worked diligently to undo the knot, and she slid her hands down the slits in her skirts, pockets cut for her work, and pulled out her two knives. She pressed one to the inside of his wrist and the other to his neck, and twisted soundlessly so their positions were switched and he was pressed against the door.
He was drunk enough that it took some time for the reality of the situation to set in, but not so gone that he could not understand the cold, sweet blade at his throat. Suri’s blood sang with the promise of this bargain, her nausea sloughed off like snakeskin, like a phoenix throwing off old ashes.
“What is this?” he rasped, trapped by the truth of the knife, eyes bright and bemused. He looked at her as a man might look upon a child with blood on its hands, with pity and a sliver of terror.
And perhaps she was a bloody child, but it had been a long time since she had warranted pity. Languid, she pressed her knife in closer to the hollow of his throat. Solitude etched lines into the smooth, untested skin. “You have been stealing from royal coffers.”
He flinched, either at the cold of the knife, or at the lilting knowledge of her voice. He tipped his chin up, proud and quavering, and said, “I have not.”
“Oh, but you have,�
� she whispered, dipping closer so her voice brushed the shell of his ear as the steel slid, sickly sweet, against clean skin. “Did you think the crown would not notice?”
He was trembling, now. “Why are you here?”
Her lips curled in a smile. It was the only question to ask, after all, but they both already knew the answer. She told him, “To clean up.”
And then she crooked Solitude to one side and slit his throat.
The blood came first, as it always did—rushing from the wound, soaking her fingers and her flesh, as if she were meant to carry it all. The smell—rotted, soiled metal, warm with life—assaulted her next, and she swayed for a few moments, pressing his dying body against the door. She felt paralyzed by this revulsion, by this weakness she could never leave behind.
Then she recovered herself and pulled back, before carrying his body carefully to the low cot beside the window. Already, the air in the room was heavy with iron, and she longed to open the window and let the smell of the incense smoke and blossoms wash away the acrid odor. But it was simply a wish, a dream of a world where she could visit faraway cities and open the windows without fear.
She pulled a creamy white cloth out of her pocket, marked with the icon of the ring of braided flowers and the crown within, and slid it under the interlaced fingers resting on his chest.
Suri bent beside the deputy governor’s basin. She washed her hands until the blood had gone, until the smell had gone, until all that remained was pain—the sensation of her nails on her own palms, scrubbing against reddened, raw skin. She dried her hands with a cotton towel beside the basin, and then set the towel on fire with trembling hands, and watched the fabric disappear into flames and ash on the wood floor.