by Varsha Ravi
The voice had come from behind her, she realized, slowly coming back to herself. She heaved a breath and turned to find a figure standing at the entrance, one foot braced on the first step. The sun had still not come up, but the crimson sky had lightened into an eerie, brighter red, and the combination of that faint light and the shadows around the figure limned them in a stark, unearthly contrast. They took a step forward, shadows falling away.
It was a boy—her age, if she had to hazard a guess. A wicker basket was tucked under his arm, identical to the ones lain at the base of the statue—a priest, perhaps, she thought, responsible for taking care of the temple—and a jagged piece of flint was curled in his other hand. He had not said anything apart from that initial question, and had simply stood on the threshold of the temple, waiting for her response.
“I—” she cleared her throat and continued, as steady as she could, “I’m looking for the high priest of the temple. The one who lives here.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, but there was no other change in his expression. The boy ascended the steps—an old, ingrained routine—and slipped past her to place the basket and flint on the steps leading into the inner sanctum. He turned and smiled, humorless but not as cutting as the boy king’s. Wry, perhaps. “That would be me. Is there anything you need?”
Another misstep, worse because of all the practice that had gone into avoiding such things, but Suri knew she did not conceal the majority of her shock. Perhaps it was the rumors, or the boy king’s frustration, or Mohini’s fearful discomfort, but she had expected someone—someone different. Taller, at the very least. The boy had, at most, an inch of height on her.
Yet, despite his height and ascetic frame, he appeared cherubic and stretched thin, a phantasm. There was a faint sense of otherness to him, discernible now that he had come closer. As if he could thrust his hand into the smooth stone of the altar and pull out a beating heart, blood running down his—
“Princess?”
His voice pulled her out of her reverie and she blinked, unconsciously taking a step back. The soft flesh of her wrist hit one of the talons of the carved bird. “My apologies, I—” she cut off, narrowing her eyes. “How do you know who I am?”
The boy raised an eyebrow, moving to stand in front of her. He raised his hand, indicating her dress, her necklace, then the small black tattoo under her collarbone. It had gone unnoticed since she had arrived. “Athrians are too hardened to the morning’s chill to wear anything with more than a few layers, if that. Your necklace is made with enough gold that only a noble could afford it, but I’ve never seen you, and your pendant is the old Najan symbol of the broken star. And that tattoo is a luxury, offered only to Najan royalty as children.”
Her voice was unrecognizable even to herself when she spoke; a stony rasp. “You know an awful lot about the world for a recluse.”
The skin around his eyes crinkled, but he didn’t smile. “I wouldn’t consider myself a recluse, despite my recent absence. Why are you here, Princess?”
Suri tipped her chin up, curling her fingers into the carved stone. The nickname, the boy king’s favorite, struck a familiar chord of old, bitter resolve, even though it sounded different coming from the priest, the inflections distinct and lilting. “I thought I might pay you a visit. I’ve heard a lot.”
The boy took a step back, leaning back against the archway of the sanctum. Even now, he was inscrutable, nearly identical to the stone statue he cared for. “You have? And what have you learned from it, about me?”
She opened her mouth to speak, yet nothing of what she could remember seemed to hold any substance. It was all true—none of it was true. He drinks fire and dances with gods and can split stone with a single touch and—
Suri exhaled, shaking her head slightly. “Nothing. That is why I came.”
“Really?” he said, voice soft but dry. “And here I thought you simply desired a place to pray.”
Instinctively, she glared at him, mouth twisting with dismay immediately after. But instead of fury, his eyes glinted with surprise and amusement. He held his hands up in a placating gesture, one of faux surrender. “I will make you a deal—I won’t tell Viro about that letter as long as you do not send another. Fair?”
Her heart dropped somewhere into the pit of her stomach. Out of instinct more than anything else, she slipped a knife—Solitude, bright and fair—out of her skirts and crossed the distance between them in two long strides, pressing it to his throat. The silver metal glinted against his neck. At the very least, he wasn’t any long-lost Eryan prince with skin that dark, the color of burnt cinnamon bark.
The sky was no longer red, but the milky early morning glow did little to soften the planes of his face. He held her gaze calmly, coal-black eyes smooth and unreadable.
When she spoke, her voice was low but steady, thankfully. “How do you know about the letter?”
The boy tilted his head and a lock of hair fell into his face, cutting his gaze into pieces. “I am not the sort of person you want to kill.”
She snorted, pressing the knife into his skin. It reddened, but did not bleed. “Why, because the gods favor you? Spare me your ego. How do you know about the letter?”
Instead of answering, he raised a hand and covered hers where it clutched the knife. The raised flesh of a scar on his palm brushed the back of her hand. He was strangely overwarm in the cool summer morning, and she would’ve thought him feverish had she not seen with her eyes the clean lack of expression on his face. “The aviary is dear to me. Ask the captain of the guard if you distrust me. And, as it is clear that no one has taken the time to inform you, the gods favor no one.”
“Then what are you?”
He smiled, lovely but hard. “An accident.”
Once again, she felt that strange sensation, pressing fingers to a mirror only to find the reflection fluid and slick under her skin. An alloy of sacrilege and an unfamiliar, jagged ache.
But she dropped the knife from his throat, retreating back to the edge of the altar. The boy reached up a hand and rubbed at the reddening bruise that cut across the base of his throat, pensive. His eyes flicked up to hers, but before he could speak, Suri said, “Why? Why is it such a bad idea for me to send a letter back to my family?”
“Apart from the natural suspicion that your presence here is an ill portent for the safety of my nation,” he said, drawing himself back up, “Anything that you send—regardless of whether you truly mean to betray us—is bound to implicate you in suspicion and paranoia this early on.”
“Nobody saw me.”
“I did,” he said, but there was no triumph in his gaze. “And if—when—the next time someone catches you, it is unlikely they will be as understanding as I am. Especially if you choose to carry on with this business late at night.”
Suri bristled at his tone, the faint distaste that carried with every syllable. “And why do you care so much about me and my safety? If I’m a danger to the safety of your nation?”
Instead of taking the bait, he glanced away. Away and out, to the outline of the city below them. It had begun to wake up, slowly stretching out its arms and reluctantly getting ready for the day. Without looking back at her, he said, “On the off chance that you aren’t, I would prefer you not get yourself killed by sheer stupidity. And if you are, then I consider it within the bounds of my responsibility to keep you from endangering the king.”
“How virtuous of you,” she said, not bothering to keep the bite out of her voice.
“I try,” he said, and the cool, detached quiet of before had disappeared, replaced with that wry amusement. He tore his gaze away from the city, where it had begun to settle on the east spire of the palace, and looked back at her. “Have you acquired a formal translator yet?”
“What?”
“I am going to assume that means no,” he said, pushing himself away from the wall. He picked up the piece of flint from where it lay at the entrance of the sanctum and rubbed a thumb over it, though
tful, before walking past her to the second indent in the altar. He lit the wick and she watched, mesmerized despite herself, as the oil caught fire. The boy looked up, flames dancing across the surface of the oil and heat blurring his expression, and braced himself on the edge of the altar, fingers brushing against the fire. “I’ll translate for you, and I won’t tell Viro about your first letter. All for the rather small price of not damning us all. Deal?”
She could taste the words on her tongue, everything she was supposed to say—everything she had been taught to do in this situation. But they were saccharine-sweet with decay, rotted by helplessness and the slow knowledge that she could not precisely reject his offer. She swallowed hard, met his gaze with cautious indifference. “I don’t even know your name.”
He raised his eyebrows. “All those things you heard about me, all those things the people of the city presume to know, and not a single one offered my name? That’s unfortunate.”
“Perhaps they thought saying your name would summon you.”
The boy grinned, a strangely youthful gesture on him. The fire turned the slick black of his eyes into something wilder, darker. “Like a wraith. Perhaps.” He walked around the fire, now burning sedately, back to the entrance to the sanctum. He smelled of camphor, and faintly, of earth. He held out his hand to her, and after a moment’s pause, she reluctantly took it. It was calloused and faintly scarred, slender, thin cuts crisscrossing the back of his hand. He grasped hers tightly, the formality a parody of sorts. “Kiravelan. That is the name my parents gave me But you may call me Kiran.”
She narrowed her eyes, but replied, “My name is Suri. Though I suppose you already knew that.”
“I did, but the reciprocation is nice. Makes a transaction of it.”
In the distance, the bells began to toll, five chimes in total. Kiran’s gaze flicked toward where the bell tower stood on the outskirts of the city. He smiled at her, gesturing back at the palace. “You had better return to your rooms, before they realize you’ve disappeared and raise a city-wide alarm.”
Her mouth flattened into a thin line. Even as she turned to leave, avoiding the fire as she returned to the entrance of the temple, she kept her eyes on him. “I’ll be back.”
“I’ve no doubt about that,” he said softly, but not without amusement. He raised a hand in farewell. “Until next time, Suri.”
There was something strange about the way he pronounced her name—the vowels soft and clipped, the end drawn out—but she didn’t have time to consider it deeply. She tore her gaze away from him and the temple, slipping her shoes on before returning down the beaten path to the empty gardens below.
By the time she made it back to the room—just barely dodging a patrol of guards circling around the west wing—the temple looked empty, as abandoned as it had always looked save for a single stream of ash-gray smoke rising into the mild, blue sky.
In spite of her last promise, she didn’t see him for the rest of the day, though not out of a lack of effort. Avyakanth was in less than a month, and Suri had nothing to wear, save for Najan dresses. They were formal enough, surely, but the festival was an expression of the kingdom’s culture as much as its religion, and they would look more favorably on a princess who had deigned to wear their finery. This meant they were constantly flitting from shop to shop, giving Suri enough time to properly contemplate her plight. It would be simple enough to let her family know she was compromised, but that would hurt her pride too much, not to speak of the loss of her reward—freedom. The job was likely doomed, but it was faraway, distant danger, easy to disregard.
The next day brought the same laundry list of errands to run, possibly even more. There had been a time, when they had first arrived, when Suri had been allured by the thought of exploring the city, a liberty she wasn’t often afforded in between jobs. But little exploration had truly taken place in between the long hours spent in humid, cramped shops and dinners at the palace.
Suri’s eyes ached at the thought of the long hours ahead, and she heard the knocking on the door a little too late, once it had escalated from a mild, short sound to a steadier, constant banging.
She rolled her eyes and opened the door, expecting to see Lucius, holding a basket of freshly picked tulips. Kiran’s hand was raised in the air, poised to strike the door again. For a brief second, she did not recognize him, and her hand wandered lazily toward Death, the knife she always kept by her waist. It was a quick, cursory movement, but his eyes tracked it, and she dropped her hands.
Suri opened her mouth to say something, but found, bemused and faintly frustrated, that she couldn’t. She huffed a laugh and spread her hands in a question.
He smiled amiably, and it fit surprisingly well. He pointed a finger at himself and then said, simply, “Translator.”
“I already have my maids.”
“They can take the day off.”
She narrowed her eyes, fully aware that the withering look in her eyes was sure to raise suspicions if anyone happened to walk by. Taking a step closer, she hissed, “Are you this worried about me killing your king?”
Never mind that he was right to worry. Never mind that she had not slept the entire night, had spent it staring out into the moonlit dark and wondering what his blood would feel like on her palms, whether it would be as warm and bitter as the blood of the others she had killed.
Kiran simply held her gaze, irritatingly calm. “I thought you might visit.”
She didn’t know if there was a trace of something mocking in the words, or whether it was residual paranoia from having to guess around the meaning of everything the boy king said. She ground out, “I was busy. I am still busy.”
He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t look like anything. She wondered what it would take to knock that clean, pleasant disinterest right off his face. “I’ll help. In place of your maids. Can we leave now?”
“Suri?” A voice sounded from within the room. She swore under her breath, ignoring the amused expression on the boy’s face and retreating back to find Isa scrubbing at her face. Her hair hung around her head in a cloud. “I thought we were leaving at seven.”
“It is seven,” she said, wincing. “I’ll wait for you to get ready—”
“No need,” Kiran cut in smoothly, leaning against the doorjamb so he would be visible to Isa. The other girl straightened up immediately, though sleep still clouded her eyes. He’d pulled up the hood of his cloak so that—from Isa’s vantage point—she couldn’t discern the details of his face, and he’d traded in the traditional white wrap and robes for thin cotton clothes. “The king wants to discuss something with Her Highness, and I can aid her for the rest of the day.”
Suri lifted her shoulders in a half-shrug, and Isa nodded, sated, before dipping her head in acknowledgement and returning back through to her adjoined room. Kiran was waiting for her in the corridor, and he pushed off from the windowsill when she returned. They walked in relative silence until she finally asked, “Where did you get those clothes?”
The corner of his mouth twitched up, as if intuiting that this was only the first of many questions. “Walking around dressed as a priest attracts unwanted attention. Small changes like this lend me a measure of anonymity. I would expect you to understand.”
She did, but that wasn’t the point. “Won’t they recognize you regardless?”
The boy king could walk around in rags, and it would not change a single thing about who he was. Inbred wealth shone through grime and shadows. But the priest just shook his head, led her down the steps. “Sometimes, sometimes not. Usually they don’t recognize my voice, so I keep my hood up. Where do you need to go first?”
It was a clean, enviable segue, one that marked the end of that conversation, at least for the time being. He managed to evade the majority of her questions, regardless of how innocuously she tried to phrase them, guiding her around the city with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to hiding himself from others. The most information she got out of him was th
at he served as the high priest of Avya, the Athrian patron god of fire. He didn’t deign to elaborate on how he carried out all his duties without anyone’s help, or how he had been chosen. He did add, though, that he advised the king on affairs when it was relevant. It didn’t particularly explain why he spoke of him with such a familiar, exasperated protectiveness, or how he knew Tarak, but he refused to give on those details.
He was true to his word in that he translated better than both Isa and Mohini had, though it was a mystery where he’d learned Najan with such fluency. The seamstress responsible for Suri’s dress for the festival raised an eyebrow and jerked her head toward him when she thought he wasn’t looking. “Where are your usual maids, my lady?”
It was refreshing to be able to work with someone who did not treat her like she had crawled here out of a sewer, and the days that had gone by had ingratiated her with the woman. “He’s… my manservant.”
She glanced over at where he was leaned against the walls of the cramped room, examining a finished wrap with too much focus. He was far too observant to have ignored her comment, but his expression was unchanged.
“Really,” the seamstress replied, amused. “I cannot speak for how that will affect your reputation. I hope he’s competent.”
Suri wondered how the seamstress would respond if she knew who he was, but just smiled. “Barely.”
Kiran peeled himself off the wall and followed her out into the street. He dodged a wagon rattling down the street with fluid ease, leading her down an alley toward the jeweler’s. She didn’t have to look over to know what kind of expression he was wearing. “Manservant?”
She turned away, hiding her smile. “That is essentially what you’re doing for me. Don’t you have more important things to do than follow around a single noble?”
He adjusted his cloak, pulling the hood closer around his head. “I can handle my responsibilities. And besides, you are to be the next queen. If Tarak and Viro meet with you, I should too. Though I am offended that you consider me barely competent.”