by Varsha Ravi
She bobbed a simple nod of acknowledgement, fisting her hands in the thick fabric of her skirts and leaving the dining room behind. The embroidered silk slipped under her sweat-slick fingers, cool and dry. But she couldn’t throw off the viscous drip of blood, the tacky way it threatened to soak into skin and bloom unseen below the surface. She felt like it might harden, sharpen within her, might turn to jagged chips of garnet that would rend tissue like rose petals. Her chest felt tight, as if she had already begun to break apart.
Lost in that reverie, she walked straight into a pillar. It shifted, one of flesh and not stone, and fingers ghosted across her shoulders, drawing back enough that moonlight spilled between them. Kiran peered down at her, the multicolored glow of faraway fires reflected in the oily black of his eyes. “Are you alright?”
She looked away, taking a moment to steady herself. She felt strangely tethered, the world no longer fragmenting into black glass and bloody memories. “Yes. Were you looking for someone?”
He took a step back, tugging at the cuffs of his woven shirt. “You, actually. I was wondering if you’ve found anything regarding the spy.”
The spy. The things your parents would do to you if they learned of your treachery, a small voice whispered in the back of her head, steel against stone. Think of it: the way they might open your neck, your chest, your skull—
“Suri,” Kiran repeated, close enough that the air smelled of him, of camphor and vetiver incense. Earthy and sweet. It cleared the iron from the air, just for a moment, and she met his gaze. His brows were knit with concern, the pads of his fingers pressed to her forehead. “You’re cold as ice.”
“I’m fine,” she said lightly, but didn’t step away. “I haven’t found anything. Have you?”
He shook his head ruefully. “I was hoping you would’ve had more luck. The temple does not leave me enough free time to make the search a priority, though I know I should.” His fingers slipped from her skin, and he scrubbed at the bruised skin underneath his eyes.
“We can look now,” she said, the words stealing out of her as if they had a mind of their own. “For the spy. I have suspicions, at the very least, places to start.”
He blinked at her, faintly alarmed. “But you’re unwell. You should rest.”
“I told you I am fine, and I meant it,” she retorted, folding her arms. The tremors had passed, but she recalled the way they had unsteadied her, shifting bones against bones. “If you are free, then we might as well try to find something useful.”
The corner of his mouth quirked up. “Lead the way.”
Suri took a deep breath, and it was the first one that didn’t feel like it might choke her. “The army chief, Head Chief Venkateshwaran. He just returned from Karur, the village that was attacked. He should have past correspondence with the king, which the spy compromised. They might have left hints of their presence behind. It’s worth checking for.”
The army chief’s rooms were in the east wing. Suri fiddled with lockpicks she’d slipped into her skirts, but when they turned the bend of the east tower, they found the doors crooked slightly open. Despite everything, relief slid through her, slow as syrup. Despite everything, she didn’t want to show Kiran this side of her, not yet.
Cracking the door open, she scanned the room and found it empty. The air was stale and smelled of cloth and cloves, and when she ducked inside, there were unbound letters scattered across the four-poster bed. Behind her, he gently propped the door open with a wooden block, then came to look over her shoulder. “What are these?”
Suri rifled through the stack, treatises on war and combat. “Nothing of importance. Look through his shelves. I’ll check the desk.”
The wood was spattered with ink and dust, dried wax clumping in spots that shone matte in the faint candlelight. Imported leather-bound books and thin pages of written correspondence and reports alternated in stacks that listed to either side. The middle of the desk was left bare, save for a single sheet of silk cloth. A salutation had been scrawled, dark ink smudged from haste, but apart from that, it was empty.
“I found something,” Kiran said, pitching his voice so low she nearly didn’t notice it over the noise of the revels outside. He handed her two letters, creased with old folds. The surface of the first was translucent, writing spidery and neatly printed. It succinctly explained why the chief believed Sakal needed troops more than Karur—a budding insurrection, violence from Najan nationalists who wanted to purge the borderlands of Athrian influence. The second, an approval of the plan, was written on rich cardstock, marked with the seal of the king.
Neither seemed tampered with.
Kiran looked faintly disheartened, and she looked away so he wouldn’t see the dissatisfaction reflected in her eyes. It wasn’t as if this was the end of the search—there were other places to check, other people to investigate. But a dead end was a dead end, and right then, it would’ve been awfully nice to find proof they weren’t losing time searching for evidence that didn’t exist.
Her gaze snagged on a spot of color at the edge of the chief’s letter. Plum-colored like dried blood, but with none of the dark brown residue, none of the sweet burn of iron. Kiran squinted at it, cupping the edge of the letter so he could get a better look. “What is that?”
She brought the slip to her nose from instinct more than anything else. Her chest felt empty. “Flowers. Crushed roses.”
There were no roses in Sakal, nor in Karur. The wastelands grew grass and grit, nothing more.
It would’ve been a stretch to call his expression happy, but there was an edge to his features, faintly pleased. Suri forced her gaze away, straightening the letters and replacing them upon the shelf. “This is something we can use. It’s somewhere to begin.”
He made a choked off sound, strangled and too soft, and she dropped her hands from the shelf, turning in time to keep him from crumpling to the floor. As it was, he leaned against the bannister of the bed, ragged nails curling into the carved wood. His eyes were shut tight, lips parted and heaving.
“Kiran,” she said, his name coming out too sharp, dissonant with horror. She wrenched him to the side roughly, scanning for injuries, but there were no entry wounds. It was either poison or illness.
He looked oddly unsurprised, pulling his other hand from the bannister and resting it upon hers, squeezing once. His mouth moved, and though the effort was too weak to produce sound, she could read his lips. I am fine.
“How can you be fine?” she asked, as sternly as she could. The timbre of her voice was all wrong, trembling where it should’ve held steel. His eyes opened, the smooth black of them marred by flecks of gold that swirled through his irises. The whites of his eyes disappeared for a moment, under the weight of black and gold, before reappearing fiercely, rapidly. He pulled away from her grip, pressing his hands to his mouth to stifle a gasping cough. They came away spattered with crimson.
In the distance, footsteps sounded, the familiar clip of heeled sandals against stone. Kiran wiped bloodied hands on his shirt, a practiced movement, before tugging her toward the shadowed alcove at the back of the room. He drew the curtain of rough cotton across until it hid them from view.
It was barely large enough for both of their bodies, and he stood close enough that she could smell the blood on his hands, on his shirt. A thin line of crimson traced the dip of his chin. She nearly reached up to wipe it away, but fever burned through him, blistering and relentless, and she feared searing her fingertips on his skin. Instead, she moved the edge of the curtain aside so they could peer into the chief’s rooms.
A servant stood by the doorway, shifting anxiously from side to side. “Head Chief?” At the resounding lack of response, he shrugged toward the now-open door, knocking the wooden doorstop to one side before ducking back out into the night. Distantly, she heard him say, “He said earlier he wanted me to bring some books by, but he hasn’t returned. I’ll have to give them to him tomorrow. Do you think the revels have finished by now?”
She watched him slide the curtain open, following him out into the empty room, and thought, distantly, of how she had not feared his blood, had not flinched away from it. He turned to watch her, bracing himself on the side of the desk. After a moment, he said, “I’m fine now.”
Now. She could not forget that word, cut so carefully to hide the danger of what had just occurred. “Was it—was that poison?”
The line of his mouth thinned, turning sharp. He shook his head, but didn’t say anything more, pushing off the desk and holding out his hand in a silent question. There was something altogether foreign about his expression. A cold, tempered fire in the lines of his face, the flames that covered the surface of stars.
She followed him out of the east tower, their feet near silent on the stone halls of the palace below. The screaming, ferocious song of the revels came alive around them, and when he looked back periodically, the uneven fires of distant braziers lit the planes of his face. He looked a little like he had been born from that silver-blue glow, a heart formed from fire.
There was something unsaid and tenuous between them as they climbed the foothills up to the temple. There always had been, she knew. But now it was impossible to ignore, silhouetted against the stars above, against the darkness of the night sky beyond it. So much of this strange, nameless partnership of theirs was borne out of both necessity and distrust, a resonating understanding that stood on brittle foundations. She was not sure what he meant to do by this—to build something stronger, or to let it fall away to debris. Or simply to see how far they could take this—how long it would take before reality snapped those thin, fragile bonds.
If there were gods, she thought, surely they laughed at them.
When he paused in front of the jasmine blooms, she felt strangely unsurprised, as if she had somehow expected this. Her plant had finally bloomed, and the creamy white flowers shone against the darkness of the soil. Kiran moved to cut off two flowers with bloodstained nails, then tucked one behind her ear and one behind his. He had not bothered to tie his hair back, and curls blew around his face in the light wind, pulling him further into the shadow of the mountainside.
He didn’t linger in the garden, instead following the path along the cliffs back to the temple. He ascended the steps quickly, barefoot, and she toed off her own slippers before joining him in the empty temple, the stone soft and strangely cold under her feet.
The fire in the brazier had been extinguished, and a grate obscured the statuette of Avya from view. Even the scent of fresh blossoms and incense smoke had disappeared, blown away by the wind and the smoke of the city below. If Suri had not known the temple, she would’ve felt like a voyeur, an intruder on some sacred, abandoned place.
Kiran laid down on the stretch of stone at the entrance to the temple. He patted the floor as if he meant for her to join him. Suri straightened her skirts and laid down beside him. The stone was cool to the touch, and yet this close, she could still smell blood, could still feel the fever in his skin.
Above them, the stars spilled out against the sky, glittering silver-white in the darkness. His voice was soft enough that the shouts of the city below nearly swallowed it up. “There is an old rumor that the gods reside in the stars.”
She looked over at him. “Is it true?”
His expression turned strained. “I wanted it to be, when I was younger. But I think I was wrong. They are here with us, in every word and every breath.”
He spoke with a glassy distance, and yet he was so clearly youthful, so clearly alive. So clearly mortal. Her hands twitched beside her, bewitched by this notion. Suri nearly raised a hand to his face, if only for the sensation of it, the knowledge that he was flesh and blood and attainable. He had rubbed the blood from his chin, but even in the faint moonlight, it stained his skin, turned it ruddy and warm.
“I never told you who I was,” he said, turning to look at her. That cold fire had not yet faded, but now it was softened by a kind of wistfulness, a kind of threadbare yearning.
She wanted to tell him that he did not have to give her his past, even though she longed for it. But she was rendered speechless by the promise of his words. She waited for him to speak, and counted the beats of the shouts below.
Kiran pushed himself up on his elbows and leaned back against the altar, tilting his head back against the edge of the gray stone. The jasmine flower had become crooked behind his ear.
“When I was born,” he said, “The sky split open, and the earth filled with fire. It wasn’t my fault, nor my parents’—Avya had been spurned, and was punishing Athri. We just had the poor fortune to be hit. They were killed immediately by the blast—I survived, but I was… not the same. Changed, they say. Avya has told me in the time since that the fire saved me, that that was how he found me, after he had finally calmed down. An infant still wrapped in cotton, set down in the center of a fire.”
Kiran pulled down the edge of his shirt, revealing the silvery outline of a scar over his heart, a cluster of jagged lines that created something resembling a six-pointed star. “He saved me, gave me life. But… I am unbalanced. An uneven creation of mortal and immortal. One will win out before long, and I doubt it will be my human heart. I’ll burn myself out, in the more literal sense, before I reach thirty years of age.
“It does not affect me much. I still breathe, my heart still beats. I’m afflicted with visions of the future that manifest themselves in brief, accurate hunches or in prolonged, recurring nightmares. I can hold fire, though I can’t create it. The most important thing I will ever do, I think, is die.”
Suri flinched, turning to look at him so sharply that she listed forward. It was a crooked, abrupt movement and he held out a hand to steady her gently. But he did not hold her gaze. “I will die a week after Avyakanth. With my death, Athri will regain its old prosperity, its old strength. My birth has weakened it, made it more volatile and prone to chaos. My death will restore the balance.”
He said the words as if he were reading off a script he had been given. Suri felt the shock of it roll through her—it was not a surprise, not truly. It explained the way people deferred to him, the strange worry both Tarak and the king struggled to hide. And yet she couldn’t accept it. It was too cruel, to create someone as a tool of peace only for them to die to enact it.
Suri wanted to express the hollowing, barbed outrage that warmed her. And yet she couldn’t—not with the same eloquence, not with Kiran still avoiding her gaze as if he was afraid of what he would see. Finally, she said, the words disjointed, “It’s unjust. To do this to you. I thought your gods were meant to be virtuous.”
He inclined his head. “In a way, they are. Without their interference, I would’ve died an infant. I am a dead man walking, Suri. At least this way, I can help my people before I join my parents.”
Suri knew death the way she knew her own heart, the lifelines of her palms. She could not fathom this, but at the same time, she recognized the truth of it, the fated tragedy of it. “And so your beloved divine virtue is nothing but a farce.”
Kiran’s mouth curved in a faint grin. But it was too sharp, too bitter. Where it was meant to hold fondness, it held a kind of carefully restrained sorrow. “There is no such thing. The world changes by our own hands, Princess. The gods are with us, but they can only guide us. And even then, there is no knowing what guides them—what will in turn guide us. We can only hope it is something beautiful, something kind.”
It was a beautiful concept, the idea that they had power over their own fates. Suri shied away from it as she would’ve from fire, from poison. There had always been some higher power that had influenced her actions, held an iron grip over her decisions. The notion that she had entangled herself in t
his prison of duty—that she still had the power to break out—was frightening and intoxicating.
“Do you resent them?” she wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the gods, or to the king and the captain, or to the city. Or simply to humans, whether it stung to have simple, inexorable reminders of his shortened life.
He glanced down from the sky. The stars danced in his eyes as he spoke. “I envy them, at times. But I have never resented them.”
Something occurred to her, and she turned abruptly, taking bloodstained hands in her own. “What happened in the chief’s rooms, then, that was…?”
“My body decaying,” he said, lips twisted in a wry smile. “There have been moments like that for as long as I can remember, but as I grow older, they become more frequent. More intense.”
A shrill, piercing sound cut through the night, and they both looked back at the city, glowing with colored fire. A crackling rocket flew into the sky and then broke apart, showering the buildings with crimson sparks.
“It’s beautiful,” she said softly.
“And it will not last,” he added, but there was no hint of anger, of mocking humor, in his voice. Only a distant warmth, that of stars and the gods that had left them behind. “In that lies half the beauty.”
Looking at him then, Suri could believe he would die within the month. There was something ephemeral about the outline of him, tenebrous against the darkness of his temple, already far removed from the rest of the city. It felt almost as though if she reached out, she would not touch him—as if there was some unnamable, unknowable distance that lay between them, a chasm that held love and sorrow tight, with no intention of ever letting go.
But when they rose to descend the mountain, he took her hand to guide her through the dark. And despite everything, it was warm—it was alive.
Kiran bent close to the altar and splashed fire on his cheeks.