The Heartless Divine

by Varsha Ravi

  Outside, the hymn swelled as the people of the city prayed to their benevolent goddess. How she wished that such a goddess truly existed, that this was a world where gods granted wishes and created beautiful things out of ash and cracked, dry ground. But it was not, and though Anyu chided her for those wishes, he could not truly scorn her for them, not when he told her stories of those worlds every night.

  The deputy governor’s blood slipped off the blades and into the muddled water, red swirling through it like ink. The sight sickened her even now. After the knives were clean and dried with the inside of the sash, she replaced them and retied the fabric. She glanced toward the dead man sleeping on his cot, embroidered flowers under his curled fingers, and finally opened the window and crept out, climbing up and onto the roof above. The revels had not yet finished, and the air was still sweet with faith and song.

  Her hands felt heavy with the heft of her knives even though she had put them away. If she was in Ashanth, this would be when Anyu found her, and took her to the edges of the cliffs and told her fairy tales of distant lands. But Sahet was alive with entirely different stories, of foreign gods and lovely monsters and hope that her family could not kill even with a hundred wars.

  She tucked her loneliness into her sash, the way a hehyava might tuck away a finger bone or a severed heartstring, and swung her legs over the edge of the inn’s roof, watching the moon fall toward the horizon.

  Anyu met her at the docks, brows arched expectantly. There was nothing harsh about the planes of his face, though, not like the imperious slant to Rohit’s features when they passed one another in the corridor, as if blood bonds were so easily washed off. Not like their parents’ cold dispassion.

  “You smell like incense,” he told her, taking her trunks and helping her off the barge. His eyes glittered. Those were their father’s eyes, hard and inexorable. “Did you join the revels?”

  “Should I have?” she retorted, pulling her mantle closer around herself and following him down the quay and toward the edges of the city. She hadn’t participated in the revels, but Sahet had been thick with the smell, the festival heavy in the air even in the morning. It had not been something she could simply wash off with water and amber soap.

  His lips twisted sharply as he hefted the trunks over his shoulder. “You should have, so you could return and tell me all the strange stories you heard. I tire of weaving new ones night after night.”

  It was a lie, of course. He never tired of those tales, not after twenty-one years of breathing them and seventeen of pouring them into words. She knew that well enough. When they had been young enough that neither of them could reach the tops of bookshelves without stools and magic, he had told her that sometimes he felt like dreams split him from the inside out, dreams that bloomed into tales of faraway worlds. He had told her that he gave those stories to her in the hopes that one day they would grow into life, buds opening like blades and catching on the edges of reality. He had told her, quietly so their parents could not hear, of a world he had dreamed up—a kind world, where war was a thing of days past and life was not something they crushed in calloused hands.

  That was the world he wanted to create, and he had whispered tales of it to her. And she hadn’t believed him, not really—back then. his blood disqualified him from the throne even though he was the oldest, his skin smooth and dark as cadamba bark; his mother’s skin. There would be no bastard king, no crown given to a child of southern blood. But he was strong and skilled and clever enough that the Najan crown—which prized power over everything else—had lent itself to him, as he was the most powerful of the king’s three children. He was born for the crown, as Suri saw it, and so she endured the blood because there would come a day when she would not have to kill anymore. And he would bring it.

  Ashanth was carved into the sides of cliffs. The city walls were tall as gods, battlements and parapets carved into them all the way around. It was a warlike capital for a warlike people, and even when the guards stepped aside and allowed them into the inner city, they looked ahead to the heavy defenses of the castle. Moats were obsolete now, but her parents had dug one rumored to go a hundred feet deep, rumored to be filled with sea snakes and poison.

  The people let them pass in silence. This was not deference, she knew. It was fear, and it was respect. They did their work so the people could do theirs, and so Naja worked, a careful, diligent ecosystem built on the bones of stolen land and stolen blood.

  When they arrived in the throne room, her parents were already seated on their thrones of iron and gold. They nodded to the servants beside the door, and they came forward. Isa tried in vain to catch her eye, but Suri looked away, handing over her trunks wordlessly. She left to put them in her rooms, and the doors shut behind them, leaving her and Anyu behind with the king and queen.

  She kept her gaze on the rug below, a deep crimson wound through with gold and navy where it showed stars against the night sky. It was a scene of victory, though, like all the other decorations in the palace, and so it was mostly red, the red of glory and of blood.

  “You have new work,” her father said, his voice a low rumble. There would be no pleasantries exchanged, she thought bitterly, no asking whether the journey had treated her well. This was business, nothing more.

  The queen tilted her head down toward them. “We’ve arranged for you to marry the Virasankan of Athri. The wedding is set for the autumn equinox of the coming year. Your assignment will be to leave for Athri once summer comes and undergo the necessary preparations to marry him. Once you have wedded and you are recognized as a queen, you must kill him, and take their lands for us. After this is done, if you wish, we will release you from your work.”

  Suri looked up sharply. It was a foolish thing to do—it betrayed her eagerness with clean, obvious intensity. But she could not fathom this, not wholly. The hope of it rattled around inside her, broken glass or perhaps the disassembled pieces of children’s toys. “Released?”

  Her mother was clever and ruthless, and she looked down at her daughter as if they did not share blood, her eyes smooth, pale. “Yes. Released. We know you’ve wished for it many times—” Now Suri turned to look at Anyu, accusing and shocked, but her brother would not meet her gaze. “—and you have served well. So this shall be rewarded. If you desire freedom, you will have it. Once this work is done, you may leave the capital behind. We will supply you with the required funds and supplies to build a new life for yourself.”

  Released. The word set a fire inside her, her heart beating to some new, lovely song, lilting and sharp like the hymns from Sahet. She folded her arms, unwilling to fully bind herself to her hope, to this fool’s gold. “The Athrians marry for love, do they not? Has he agreed to this?”

  Suri conjured up what she could recall of the Athrian boy king. His entire family had died in the war nine years ago, his parents and sister slaughtered along with many of the chiefs and their ministers. He had ascended with no prince regent, no backbone of support beyond a handful of other survivors in the city. She had seen him last at a ball a few summers ago, celebrating the Eryan queen’s birthday. He firmly refused to attend Najan state functions.

  He had reminded her a little of Anyu, if only because she thought he suited his crown of obsidian and gold quite well. But that was where their similarities ended. Anyu was cut from a cloth of dreams and nascent blossoms, and the boy king had been crudely carved from the mountains that had bore him, cut from thorns and cold rage.

  The Athrians married for love, and she knew, without a doubt, that there was no world in which he could learn to love her. If given the choice, he might sink his fingers into her chest, rip out her heart, and set it on fire, as though he could burn down her crown, her family, with those same flames.

  The queen regarded her with familiar disdain. “He has. In an odd turn of fate, he has set his pride aside and done the politically intelligent thing for his nation.” She didn’t comment on the irony of this, on the tragedy of it. Such sadn
esses were of little importance to her mother and father. “Do you accept?”

  It was amusing that they would turn to formalities now. This had never been a choice, or a request. It was an order—go to the deep south, marry the king and kill him. There had never been any chance of her refusing it.

  And yet, she wondered. About the boy king, and the land he ruled, and the way she would ruin what remained of it, turning it over to her parents without a care. It was not often that she thought of things like this with sympathy and hesitation, but this was to be the last of her work and she could not forget the way the word had rang when her mother had spoken it. Freedom, honey-sweet and wound through with glimpses of faraway lands she had never allowed herself to love. It might sting, of course, to know she built this freedom off the corpse of another kingdom, but her life had always been built off of corpses, off of ash and bone. If she had refused her first assignment, she would’ve been killed at age six. If she had refused her tenth, she would’ve been killed at eight. And so on and so forth.

  She turned to Anyu, trying in vain to piece together an answer to this senseless question with the lines of his face. His head was bowed, the pin on the collar of his coat glinting in the sunlight. A ring of flowers encircling a crown—the symbol of their army, of their throne.

  If she left, she left the empire in his hands. And he would take care of it the way he had taken care of her when they were youths, two unwanted children—a girl and a bastard—in a castle that threatened to swallow them, an empire with sharp teeth.

  “I accept,” she said, and her parents dipped their heads in acknowledgement as they rose from their thrones. They were carved in the western style; beautiful, blunt sculptures of tigers built into the iron and gold. Across the back of her father’s throne, there was an inscription in written Najan, and above it, a depiction of the first prince staking the ground upon Ashanth with a spear. There was a cold beauty in this world, but it was beautiful all the same. And now she would leave it.

  She ducked her head in a bow as the king and queen passed her, shutting the door behind them. The sound of it—wood against wood, fading footsteps—unsteadied her, and she leaned to the side, grasping at a loose tapestry to steady herself. Her legs felt soft and malleable underneath her.

  “You must send me letters of your exploits once you’ve left us,” Anyu said, and she turned to face him, pressing her back up against the tapestry. The silk and cotton yielded under her fingertips and she sank into them, inhaling the familiar smell of amber and stone.

  “Anyu,” she said, because she felt like if she said anything else, she might shatter into tiny shards of bone and hardened heart, crystallized into brittle glass. Taking a moment to slow her breaths, she shut her eyes. The tapestry felt like it might swallow her, might fold her into its depths and allow her to disappear completely. “Anyu. Is this your doing?”

  “Does it matter?” he asked, and he sounded genuinely curious. She opened her eyes, and saw him passing his fingers over the edges of their father’s throne. Not with covetous intent, as Rohit might have performed the same movement, but with a certain pensive thoughtfulness, a starry eyed distance that came over him when he thought of the future that lay in front of them, paved by stones that glittered and shone in the light.

  He glanced up and smiled at her, his mother’s smile—warm and affectionate. It was an affection that did not exist in her or Rohit—she had wanted it once, thought she might absorb it from Anyu’s blood the way she learned his stories and wrote them into her heart. But that affection had never helped him nor his mother—the king had not considered him as an option for succession until after the courtesan had passed away and he had lost those lingering dregs of softness and youth.

  Anyu smiled at her, and his smile held untold dreams inside. “Go and marry that king, and kill him, and never return to Ashanth. But you must write me letters, of the stories you hear and the stories you make so I do not run dry, left here alone. Understood?”

  The words were wry with the weight of parody, twisting their father’s orders into a joke that hid the truth of what she was being offered. Suri leaned into the warmth of the tapestry, and allowed herself a small smile back. “I will.”

  The world was dying.

  Kiran knew this the same way he knew he was dying—the burn of a long-forgotten wound slowly substituted by a lingering chill. Flames whipped across the sky and blood dripped on the stone beside him and he was dying, but he couldn’t bring himself to care when confronted with the decay of everything he had ever known.

  It was a dream, but dreams were little more than specters of a future he knew would come to pass, and so he scraped his gaze across the crumbling world and tried to put it into words he would remember when he opened his eyes.

  He was kneeling beside the altar he had grown up with, his hands forming bloody handprints on the uneven stone. Smoke and iron hung heavy in the air, but he was alone. Almost alone. The fire kept him company, even as it left to burn down the remains of the city, and the body did, too. A silhouette was balanced against the far pillar of the temple, slumped against crumbling stone and lit from within.

  The body was closer, laid carefully on the dust and ash, and the fire did not touch it. But it was no matter—they were already dead. Kiran squinted. She was. Blood-soaked fabric clung to her skin where it wasn’t white with ash, and her mouth was set in a very faint frown, one that spoke of pained regret.

  He did not know her, but that held little importance. Prophecies wore a hundred different faces, and catastrophe knew millions of names. Still, he memorized the angles of her face. Viro would want to know, at the very least.

  His heart shuddered in his chest, and pain wracked him briefly. It was a lasting kind of anguish, a pain that had lived in him until it had made his heart its own. A heavy, soul-deep agony that drained the light from his flesh. Not the pain drawn out by a knife, and yet the ceremonial dagger was still loosely clenched in his left hand. The blade scraped against the carved stone as the flames whistled through the emptying bones of the city.

  Kiran was dying, but he could no longer tell whether it was from the blood staining the stone red; he could no longer tell whether this death had been pulled from his body long before the knife had ever met his skin. The anger had taken that knowledge from him, had blurred the lines between gold and red. His mouth tasted of blood and ash.

  Dawn blazed on the horizon, sunlight meeting smoke and the glow of old fires in between emaciated buildings. He had woken to see the sunrise every morning of his life, and yet he had never seen one like this. A heavy, crackling quiet blanketed the ground. Bitterly, he thought, I always thought death would be louder than this.

  But it wasn’t. He felt faintly fatigued, and it was possible that, before this moment, there had been something of substance to push him to this edge. A bang that had elicited a whimper that had resounded through the knotted bones of the earth. This is not how it is meant to be, he thought, and it was impossible to know whether that strange discomfort stemmed from the silence in the air or the fire that wrapped around his bloodied body.

  He could not feel his heart, and that was wrong. The girl was dead, but she was not burnt, and that was wrong. He was dying, but there was still suffering—there was still death, and harsh barrenness in the dusty, packed earth surrounding the burning temple—and that was wrong in a way that was nearly unfathomable to him.

  Why? he thought. He pressed his raw, red fingertips into the stone, pressed against the growing numbness in his chest and prayed for what was most likely the last time.

  It was a useless endeavor, of course, to ask the gods for what they would not give. Prophecy did not work like that. When he woke, it was likely he wouldn’t remember this. If he was lucky, he would remember the shadows of it. The smoke in the air. The blood on the floor of the temple. The frown on the girl’s face, and the ash that colored her hair.

  The fire lingered on his skin even now, casting the remnants of his home in golden lig
ht and the premonition of catastrophe.

  His hands slipped from the stone, and he fell to the ground prostrate. His pulse thudded in his ears, but even the rhythmic sound was far away. He was untouched by this fire, and he was untouched by the blood, and he was untouched even by the death that was ripping him apart in his heart of hearts, holy and broken.

  When he had asked Kita how she thought he would die, she had reprimanded him for being morbid. And then he had asked again, and she had given him a death that seemed both too beautiful and too terrible for him. She had said she suspected the divinity in his blood and the earth in his skin would pull apart, and that he would fall to dust and watch himself fall to dust.

  Where does the divinity go, then? he had asked her.

  She had shrugged. To the sky. That is where all divinity goes after it is dead.

  But the sky was too far away, and there was not enough left of him, divine or not, to guarantee safe passage on a trip so long. But he could feel himself drawing away from the pain around him, even now. The warmth of the fire was the only thing left. His anger wrapped around it and kept it safe, even as his heart fell to dust.

  3

  Lyne

  Living with the reincarnation of someone who he’d once loved wasn’t too painful for Kiran, except for when it felt like he was smashing his body against a car door, which was a good majority of the time.

  But it was a familiar pain, like this had happened a hundred times before and would happen a hundred times more before the gods finally released him. It burned like memory, like joy, like loss. The singular positive to the entire situation was that as long as she continued to stare at him like he was chopped liver, he’d probably be able to last through it all without doing something foolish, like falling in love again.