by Varsha Ravi
The flames didn’t behave like water—they slid against his skin, smooth and dry as stone. His skin tingled where it had met the fire, and he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes to stave off the fatigue that lingered around the corner.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. The fire washed away the thick lethargy that threatened to weigh him to the cold stone below, but he could feel the effects of it waning. Now, even submerging himself in altar fire only brought the slightest of reprieves.
His throat still stung from where he’d coughed up blood the other night, the fire in his heart searing him through. He recalled the memory as though it belonged to another—the unearthly silhouettes of the fires in the streets, the curl of the jasmine flower behind Suri’s ear, the heady, sweet scent of it mixing with the smell of her, amber and iron.
The night was nearly moonless, dark as crushed velvet and just as absolute. Looking over the shadows just then, he felt as though the world had gone silent, as though all the life and all the beauty he had always known had abruptly disappeared, leaving him behind to search through empty graves.
He shook his head slightly at the macabre thought, leaning back and nearly slipping upon the stone. Already, he could feel the effects of the fire dissipating—already, sleep reached out gnarled, sugar-spun claws to hold him close.
Kiran didn’t fear sleep. He feared the moment before sleep, the crooked smile of oblivion giving way to weightlessness, gravity shattering souls against stones as though they were auguries, skulls.
But he was still human; even if the flames wrapped him in their warmth and kept him awake, he weakened as any other mortal weakened when kept from sleep. And, eventually, he grew weak enough that the darkness grew closer and closer and the quiet of the city stole into his blood and silenced it entirely.
Sensation crackled through his skin. When he opened his eyes, he was kneeling in a meadow choked with kantal blossoms, slender stalks rising to his shoulders. His robes were ripped and dyed red by blood, turning the fabric stiff and salted with iron.
The field was infinite, the robin’s egg blue of the sky settling down on the horizon, where the endless flowers flattened into a line of scarlet. Light saturated the air, but the sky was sunless and serene. When he rose to his feet, unopened, stifled buds crumpled under him soundlessly, poison soaking into his skin.
A vision, he thought, and hope spread behind his sternum. It was a naive thought, he knew, but he could not help the warm sting of it, the notion that perhaps he had not been entirely forsaken. That perhaps this fool’s quest of his was not doomed, after all.
Suddenly, his chest seared with heat; he hunched over, shoulders trembling with the effort of suppressing the cough. But when he drew his hands away from his mouth, his fingers were flecked with gold. The gold of kino flowers; the gold of ichor. It was cold against his skin, glittering in the glow of this barren world. It left a saccharine aftertaste on his lips, flesh scorched from the weight of divinity.
He went to wipe his hands on the torn robes, but another cough rolled through him, and then another, as if he was something meant to break apart. Flashes of prophecy obscured the meadow momentarily and he saw himself, skin fractured and brittle as mountain stone, splitting apart from flesh of ash and gold until there was only fire underneath.
His throat was raw, the inside of his mouth viscous with blood and fear. Cough after cough, as if he sought to expel something held within, a glittering red heart held in amber-flecked hands, beating muscle left to throb uselessly on pillows of scarlet and gold.
Kiran didn’t register falling to his knees, only the sensation of it, bare skin thudding softly against dark soil. His nails bit into his neck, clawing at the raw skin as a drowning child seeks air in a sea of blood and salt. Around him, the tendrils of the flame lilies lengthened and twined, forming cerise lattices spun with hints of gold. The tepals and stamens tangled with one another until the world was bled of all color but crimson, until the dawn was infinite and alive and savage.
The blossoms crushed him; and then there was nothing left to crush, and everything was nectar-sweet ichor and poison.
He woke slumped over the edge of the burning altar, hands wreathed in flame. There was something strange about his blood and bones, as if he had been broken imprecisely with a mallet, reformed with all the right pieces in the wrong places. As if he was not himself at all, but a shadow that wore humanity like it was a birthright and not a gift.
Wracked with nausea, he stumbled over to the brazier and bent over the hot coals, vomiting tepals that shone crimson and gold in the fading firelight.
Two mornings after the revels, the city was silent.
Suri fisted her hands in her blankets, immediately unsettled by the consuming hush. There was no birdsong, no clamor of vendors from the streets. This was a weaponized quiet, the absence of sound between one’s last heartbeats.
Later, Kiran would tell her, the lines of his face harsh and cold, that Athrians mourned silently. Unlike Najans, who beat the funeral drums for days and days after deaths, grief was something that Athri handled carefully, with a measure of suppressed emotion. It was a gift of the war, a latent realization that they could not mourn every death with the ceremony it was accorded and still stand on the battlefield.
The adjoining maids’ rooms were already empty. By the time Suri had washed and dressed herself in mourning colors, damson and clean pearl white, Isa and Mohini had returned. The latter startled a little at seeing her up and ready, but Isa’s mouth merely flattened into a thin line. “Head Chief Venkateshwaran has died.”
She delivered the news with the reserved formality she defaulted to when truly rattled. Suri inclined her head in acknowledgement, unwilling to speak lest her own shock show too clearly. Finally, she asked, “What happened?”
“It was an assassin,” Mohini cut in, wrapping her arms around herself. In the thin sunlight flooding through the three windows, she looked wan and uneasy. “Killed him in his own room and dragged the body into a ditch. They found the blood under his covers, masked with clove perfume.” She shook her head, blinking rapidly. “It could have happened to anyone.”
It couldn’t have, Suri knew, a cold ache beginning to settle in her bones. The letters she and Kiran had found—how likely was it the spy had found them too, noted the smear of rose and decided not to take any chances? How likely was it the spy had not noticed the rose at all, had simply killed the chief in order to tie up loose ends? How long would it take before the king himself was deemed a loose end?
They had been in the room after the murder had occurred, there was no doubt about that. The air had smelled strongly of cloves, but Suri hadn’t known the chief well enough to note the strangeness of it. The room had been thick with foreign blood, and she had not noticed it. The thought chilled her.
Isa nudged her slightly—at some point, she had crossed the room, and now she stood with her back to Mohini, brows furrowed slightly in an expression that held not sympathy but a measure of caution. Suri gave a brief nod and looked away. “When are the funeral proceedings?”
“Soon, my lady,” Mohini said. “We returned to wake you.”
A small, bitterly amused smile played on Suri’s lips. “And I surprised you, I suppose. Let’s leave now, then.”
When they arrived, the body was already being mounted upon the funeral pyre. They had built it to stand at the eastern border of the temple, on the edge of the city. In the distance, the dry grasslands ceded and the mountains rose up, ripping into the frosty sky above.
In death, the strong-featured, bulky man looked pale and drained. Kita was conducting the formal procedures, but Suri could see the men of the crown—as they were wryly referred to in the lower city—standing by the base of the pyre. Kiran met her gaze, and though he didn’t speak, she could see clearly enough the tense horror that lingered in her own heart in the planes of his face. They had always known, from the first mention of the spy, that this was more than a game, that the
se were the soft whispers of violence that would curl into a scream of war. But thinking of death was different than smelling smoke and fire, watching ashes rise into the air and stain the sky gray.
“Suri,” Isa whispered, so close that she could get away with calling her without an honorific. Her voice quavered slightly—it was not something someone else would have noticed, but in seventeen years of knowing her, she had never faltered once. “You will take care of yourself, won’t you?”
Though the proceedings hadn’t yet finished, Suri tore her gaze away from the pyre and met Isa’s eyes, hard and fearful. And, just then, she was stricken by the realization that she could tell her. She could tug Isa back to her rooms and explain everything, beg her for help, lay her head in her lap and confess all her fears.
And yet, she couldn’t. Again and again, she was struck by the war chief’s supine form, rigid from rigor mortis. It was too late for her and Kiran—they were already inexorably tangled in this, and even then, she wondered if she could dissuade him from continuing. But Isa—strict, kind Isakthi, who was difficult to amuse but had the most beautiful laugh when one managed to charm it out of her. She had served her well all these years, and despite that—because of that—Suri could not pull her into this, could not drag her down into the grave along with her.
She forced a faint smile and turned away, unable to meet her handmaiden’s gaze. “Of course. Always.”
12
Lyne
Suri woke lost in nightmares. It was an old affliction, the way the horror would not leave her even when she opened her eyes to darkness, even when she pressed cold fingers to the skin above her heart just so she could feel the butterfly wing beat, resonant and real. As a child, she would spend hours still in the grasp of the nightmares, terror-spun claws sunk deep into soft gooseflesh.
Tonight, it was the same recurring dream she had grown up with. There were others, but this one never wavered, never changed. It was more reliable than her own heartbeat.
In it, she was hovering on the edge of the freeway, the moonlight shining down on a world of darkness. She would walk along it, bare feet against the damp road, and find a car tilted sideways. The metal was scraped and burning, windows glassy with heat and spattered blood.
The windows were all rolled down, and she would peer into them. A woman in her early thirties was slumped in the passenger seat, her bright brown eyes—Suri’s eyes—open with shock and pain. Her breaths came unevenly, and she held out trembling hands to pull herself up. But she was so slow, an insect in amber, dead from the moment of conception.
Even when Suri shouted for her to get up, sobbed and cried and pounded her hands against the side of the car, she would not rise. She was an interloper in this world, a twisted voyeur, and her flesh passed through metal and skin without resistance.
Beside her, hands loosely curled around the wheel, sat her father, his head tipped forward and hair dripping with blood. She often could not make out his face—when she was younger, before her grandmother had shown her photos of her family, their faces had all been blurred, as if she was stuck in a phantasm of her own life. Here, she could only make out the line of his jaw, traced with sweat from the heat and blood from impact against the steering wheel.
And in the backseat—she had to crane her neck to see them—laid two young boys. One, a lanky, blood-streaked child of near four years old, was leaned back against the car seat, neck twisted at a crooked, sickening angle. The younger one, little more than an infant, had not yet died, though Suri had lived through this nightmare frequently enough to know that he would soon, from the smoke and fumes. Until then, he simply cried, wailing and wailing, the thin, tremulous sound cutting through the dark flesh of night like a knife.
It never ended. That was where the agony of the nightmare laid—the screams continued even after she’d heard her fill, even after she felt as though she were drowned in death. And she could do nothing to end it, nothing to help them. There were times when she would arrive at the car, and a few of them would still be alive. And she would pull at them, fingers going through flesh, and whisper and shout and scream and beg, and still they would not hear her.
She knew they were long dead, knew there was no sense in longing for a family she had never known. She had seen the graves, coveted them. Their love was something distant as stars to her, a warmth she would never feel. But still, there was an incorrigible, puerile part of her that wondered if she could bring them back if she tried hard enough. If she tried harder.
Suri laid in bed; she could feel her heartbeat in her skin, in her bones—it was a syncopated, rattling sensation, one that tangled with the numbness in her chest until the fear faded and only fatigue remained.
After an indeterminable amount of time, she pulled herself out of bed. Blinking numbers on the alarm clock on her night table told her it was nearing five in the morning.
She heard a soft noise in the living room and padded out, the carpet plush under her feet—so achingly different from the rain-damp asphalt of the dream. The house was shrouded in darkness save for the lights of the kitchenette, spilling out into the nook and casting it in a muted white glow.
Kiran was sitting at the table, his legs drawn up so he was cross-legged on the straight-backed wooden chair. His black hair was damp, but she could not remember if he had showered. It framed his face in soft, tangled curls, water dripping down and splashing against the surface of the table.
He was eating macaroni and cheese out of unwrapped tinfoil, a plastic spork poised in his slender, scarred fingers. He stabbed at the pasta every few seconds, examining it with distant, alien scrutiny before lifting it to his mouth and chewing. Without looking up, he said, “It is late, Suri.”
“I know,” she returned, walking around the curve of the kitchenette and taking the seat opposite him. She hunched her shoulders, the worn bed shirt suddenly too thin in the early morning chill. She rubbed her hands together, nails bitten and spattered with chipping polish. “Nightmares.”
Kiran inclined his head in understanding, laying his tinfoil bowl down on the table. He toyed with the edge of the spork for a moment before laying that down as well, one prong cutting deep into the foil. He met her gaze; the skin under his eyes was bruised, and there was a pinched, tired gauntness to him, a haunted desolation. His mouth twitched, as if to attempt a smile, a kind of lasting expression, but the effort was fruitless. He had nothing left to give. Finally, he said, “I’ve been remembering things.”
She leaned forward. “Have you remembered who bound you?”
The god blinked in momentary shock at the jagged, vindictive edge to her words, and she shared it, briefly. But her own anger did not surprise her, not truly. After a pause, he simply shook his head, mouth twisted ruefully. “Nothing so grand. I can’t recall people, or lives, or the context lent to them. Only…” he drew in a breath, carding a hand through his hair. “Events, sensations. I will see places in flashes, and then they will be taken away in the next breath, but I can still remember the shapes of them, the imprints. Things such as those.”
Suri wrapped her arms around herself. Tentatively, she asked, “What was your life like, back then?”
His smile was joyless. “You would not want to hear of it, Suri. Even without the entirety of it, I can understand that. It was not a fairy story like those you favor.”
“Promise me you’ll tell me,” she insisted. Part of her, that same dizzying, impossibly foolish part that thought death was something reversible even when it cut hearts clean in half, wondered if—if she could make him vow, perhaps it would mean he would stay. That even after the innermost seal broke, he would think to return. “Promise you’ll tell me, when you remember.”
“Suri,” he said softly. Only her name, twisted cleanly out of balance, as if he’d been raised saying it a different way. For a moment, he looked like an old man in a youth’s body, clothed in soft, scarred skin and too-bright eyes. “My past—it was not kind. It was not beautiful, and it was not pure, and I do
not think any of my lives ended well, not a single one.”
“I want to hear all your stories,” she said, fierce as fire. “Every single one. I don’t care whether they have happy endings or not.”
Kiran studied her, amber eyes clear and pensive. Then he crumpled up the empty aluminum foil, glistening with rehydrated cheese. He formed it into a ball and then rose, tossing it gently into the wastebasket, cutting a glance at her mid-movement. “I wanted to thank you.”
“Me?” she asked, bemused. “What did I do?”
He gave a soft laugh, surprised and humorless and a little fond. He returned to his seat, drawing up his knees once again.
“I have an inkling,” he said, tracing the whorls of the wood in the table absently with his free hand, “That being here, with you and those you love, is the happiest I have been in a long while.”
Her cheeks warmed. “Then I’m happy I was able to help. Everyone adores you, you know. My grandmother, my friends.”
“Is that what we are?” he asked abruptly, glancing up from the table. There was an odd intensity in his voice, overwarm and yet not unfamiliar. “Friends?”
“Yeah,” she said, and the word stuck in her throat a little. She smiled, and she was so tired she could feel it in her bones, but she felt a strange, strained joy, too. “We’re friends.”
Kiran didn’t speak of what he remembered of his past. All the same, it was impossible not to see how it ruined him.
He didn’t sleep, hadn’t since the night Suri had heard him scream himself awake, grasped so tight by horror and fear. But gods didn’t need sleep, not the way humans did, and it had never truly affected him—no dark, bruised under-eyes, no bloodshot gazes. He still did not sleep, but now he looked the part. As if all the years he had left behind, all the years he now felt, were draining him slowly, steadily, of that jagged, reliable cheer.
He didn’t sleep, and he didn’t often speak, not unless spoken to. Sometimes, while reading at the café, he would turn his head and look out the window, and he might shiver just once, a full-body tremor that carried blood and ash and bone. Sometimes, he would lapse into silence, without warning and without reason, and she would turn to prompt him and find him trembling, gold eyes glassy and distant. And he would not explain, and she would not ask him to, but the questions remained between them.