by Varsha Ravi
In a way, it was. He was not much taller than Suri, slight and lean. She doubted any of them had forgotten what he looked like shirtless, but he didn’t look strong. Divinity, she was sure, made body building a low priority on his list.
“Are you doubting my abilities?” he asked her.
“Yeah,” she said bluntly. She bounced on the balls of her feet—she was more than half a foot shorter than him, but she looked blade-sharp, defiant. “I mean—I’m happy we’re here, don’t get me wrong. But you’re scrawny as shit.”
Kiran’s mouth curved in a smile, amused. He spread his hands in a question, steadying himself leisurely against the edge of the ring. “How about this? If any of you beat me, I’ll buy you dinner after this. You can team up, if you wish.”
Aza snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Any of us? And we can team up?”
“Yep,” he replied, magnanimous.
“You’re broke,” Suri called, cupping her hands around her mouth. “I’ve never seen you carry money in my entire life.”
“Exactly,” he said amiably. “Who wants to go first?”
They glanced over at each other, silently discussing. Suri knew him well enough that she absolutely refused to step forward. He was planning something. Ellis seemed interested, but in the slapstick way of someone intrigued by coming disaster. Miya held up her hands, silently pulling out. Dai still looked like he was about to vomit.
“You’re all assholes,” Aza said, even as she stepped forward. “Cowardly assholes. But it’s okay, because I’ll beat his ass, and then we’ll get dinner. You all owe me for this.”
Kiran grinned, a brief, jagged slash on his face. He nodded at them, pushing off from the edge of the ring. “One of you will have to referee. Don’t worry, it won’t take long.”
“Cocky bastard,” Aza muttered, taking up fighting stance. Her black hair was pinned away from her face with clips, and it made her look a little bit like a thorn bush, dark and sharp.
He took up the same stance, but on him it seemed almost flippant. Miya whistled, high and shrill, and Aza surged forward, compact and agile. Suri didn’t see Kiran move at all—the fist cut toward his face, and then Aza was folded on the floor, one arm pinned behind her back. His touch was firm, but not forceful. Aza groaned and tapped the ground beside her and he leaned back, letting her move away.
She crossed her arms, legs sprawled under her. “What the hell was that?”
“Experience.” Kiran pulled himself to his feet and extended a hand. He nodded toward the rest. “Any questions?”
They looked slightly shell-shocked, but Suri wasn’t surprised in the slightest. Taming a wild animal didn’t mean it forgot how to kill.
He split them into two groups based on who wanted to learn how to actually fight—Aza and Miya, the latter still dead-set on the cathartic experience of punching somebody in the face—and those who were interested in self-defense, which was just Ellis and Dai. He insisted Suri learn both, so she darted from group to group as he went through the motions.
Despite the initial shared suspicion that he would be as useful a teacher as the Internet, he clearly knew what he was doing. Experience, he’d said when Aza had asked him. Not practice—experience. Suri couldn’t help but wonder which of his lives had taught him to move like that, as if violence itself was a dance he’d glutted himself on. But she also knew he wouldn’t tell her, even if she asked. Some demons were meant to stay nameless.
Ellis and Miya took to it quickly, and despite Dai’s constant complaints, it wasn’t long before he managed to reasonably mimic Kiran’s movements. Suri was the sole outlier.
Aza, on the other hand, spent most of her time honing her skills, with the aim of fighting him again at the end.
She pointed at him defiantly as he moved around her to correct Miya’s stance. “I want a rematch. Several rematches. As many rematches as I need.”
“And you can have them,” he said, eyes twinkling as he shifted Miya’s arms. “The offer for dinner is off, but I don’t expect to leave tonight until at least one of you can engage me for thirty seconds.”
Thirty seconds. It seemed absurdly short, but Suri found herself wondering if any of them would be able to do it. Her stance faltered, and he patted Miya’s shoulder as he came to stand by her. The easy smile had fallen from his expression.
“Afraid I can’t be your star pupil,” she joked, letting her arms drop.
Kiran shook his head, tense without ire. “I’m making you learn both at the same time. I don’t expect it to come easily.” He gestured for her to assume the stance again and then adjusted her arms, gooseflesh prickling where his fingers ghosted on bare skin. Once he was satisfied, he stepped behind her. When he spoke, the words tickled the curl of her ear and she shivered once, despite herself. “Okay, left jab.”
She blew out a long breath, but reluctantly threw her arm out in a punch. He inclined his head in disagreement, stepping to the side and repeating the punch. The movement was fluid, cutting.
Suri mimicked it, or tried to. “Like that?”
“Nearly,” he said, guiding her arm. His touch was careful, gentle; fine-tuned control over raw fire. “Like this.”
She swallowed hard—it wasn’t as if he was doing this on purpose, as if he was aware she was finding this difficult to bear—and then threw out another punch, the way he had. He rocked back on his heels, offering a bright grin. “Exactly like that.”
He led her through the rest until she could mimic him to a reasonable extent. Then he gathered everyone back up, all in varying states of fatigue.
“Who wants to go first?” Kiran asked, leaning back against the edge of the ring again. His skin was pale, flushed by ichor. “Only one of you needs to make it to thirty seconds. No team-ups, though.”
Miya raised her hand tentatively and stepped forward, yielding a grin. Ellis searched up bell noises on the internet. He tapped at his phone and it obliged, letting out a bright screech.
Initially, it looked like she might actually make it—instead of fully pinning Miya like he had with Aza, Kiran stuck mainly to defensive maneuvers, with a few gentle punches. Still, she threw a bad punch at the twenty-second mark, and he sidestepped her and held his hand out in a semblance of a punch, a warning. More a suggestion of what he would have done than the movement itself. Miya groaned good-naturedly, returning to the line.
After a quicker pair of defeats with Dai and Ellis, he turned to Suri. She put her hands up. “No.”
“Suri,” he sing-songed, drawing out her name in his odd accent. “Why not?’
“Because,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to humiliate myself.”
“Your friends already have.” Aza shoved Kiran, and he moved with it, laughing. He turned his attention back to her, holding his hands out, palms up. “I don’t bite.”
She seriously doubted that. “You look like you do.”
“You would know,” Miya called, wiggling her eyebrows. Kiran cocked his head, blissfully ignorant, and she shook her head in dismissal.
“Later,” she said, waving a hand. “I need more practice. You can teach me more at home.”
He frowned at her, but turned back to Aza with a mischievous smile. “Time for that rematch, then.”
Lo and behold, Aza lost at a little over thirty-two seconds. More than a little bit of the time was spent in syrup-slow defensive maneuvers that Kiran didn’t actually need to affect in order to win. But they were all tired, so they sat on the edge of the ring and unwrapped the tape from their fingers as Dai moaned about never repeating this experience again, ever.
They trekked across the city to get shitty burgers in the near-winter cold, grins white with what could’ve been snow, on a different day. After they returned, and Suri followed Kiran out onto the balcony, scented with earth and something sharper than smoke.
“Tell me the story,” she said, before he could say anything. There was a strange twist to his features just then, and she was less afraid of what he would do and
more afraid of how she would react to it.
He considered her words, bracing himself on the wrought-iron railing. Night-borne, blood-riven. She didn’t think she could know somebody like him, not wholly, but for the first time, she allowed herself the desire of wanting to. Eventually, he crossed the distance and brought her hands up in the fighting stance, spacing her legs.
“After you practice,” he said quietly, close enough that the winter chill was nonexistent.
She shivered from something entirely different, cutting a glare at him. “There was a time when I thought you were kind.”
He shook his head, lips wrung out from laughter. “Do you want to know a secret? I try, sometimes. For you. I don’t think I’m good at it.”
“Then practice,” she said, offering a lopsided grin.
“Will you teach me?” he asked.
Without dropping the stance, she twisted to look at him. She remembered his words, quiet and earnest. She was not as good at that as him, but she tried. “If you’ll have me.”
His hands dropped from her shoulders. “I will.”
15
Enesmat
Kiran was burning. It was an odd feeling, more so because he knew what flames felt like when they wrapped around someone—had grown up gorged on the feeling—and knew instinctively that what he was feeling right now was something fundamentally different. It ripped him apart, tore skin from flesh from bone and seared his blood, turning it to something corrosive and alive. It was different, because he could not see it.
Curled on the floor of the temple, he struggled to raise his hand, stared at it through slit eyes. His skin was untouched by fire—and then he blinked, once, twice, saw it wreathed in blood and wreathed in flames, and then simply his bare skin again.
He knew, logically, that these were just visions—illusions pressed on top of one other so that they tangled into something new and frightening. The fire, too, was not real—at least, real as others would define it. It was not a fire of flint and air; it was one of blood, and it had ignited the moment he had opened his eyes in the flames of his birth, and it would never cease, never die—not until he did.
Kiran was distantly aware of his own screaming. It was a shrill sound, ragged from exhaustion. But he could not truly feel it—not his raw throat, nor the tears wetting his cheeks. He was lying on the floor of the temple, knees shunted to the side and hands curled uselessly against the stone. But there was another version of him that lay aside, a version that wasn’t dead because it had never truly been alive, and this dulled, incorporeal Kiran was on fire.
A figure knelt beside him. He felt a watery kind of surprise, as if he were at the bottom of a deep, dark lake and the emotion lay untouched at the surface. He had endured these alone for longer than he could remember—there had been a time, years, nearly decades, ago, when someone had sat beside him. But he could not remember their name, could not remember their face. The longer he thought of it, the less real the memory seemed to be, fading and fading even as he stretched his hands forward to hold it tight.
There was a light pressure on his hands, a touch that broke through the pain of the fever momentarily. For a second, he felt his own body, felt the stone beneath him.
Visions addled him, pulling reality out of focus. Ghosts crowded upon the figure in front of him, tilting them into those he had lost. He murmured their names in a nonsensical string, a prayer he knew would go unanswered. The figure shifted beside him, said something blurry and far away—too far away for him to touch.
Then they pulled their hands away slowly, letting his own drop to the stone. His chest tightened with some abstruse, unknowable ache, and he reached forward again. He could not think, could not form words—at least not in the language of mortals, the one he had learned and loved and had now lost to the flames. When he spoke, it was more out of instinct than anything else, a phrase he could form purely out of muscle memory.
The figure stilled above him, and after a moment dropped to their knees again. They said something in that strange, human language, and he nodded without understanding. There was a soft, amused sigh, and then—that familiar, slight pressure on his hands. It did not ease the pain of the fever, the burn of the flames, but it loosened the knot in his chest, brought him closer to himself.
Kiran held their hands tight, and then allowed himself the one bliss he had not indulged in since he was a child. He let go.
Kiran’s eyes fluttered closed, his body going limp on the floor of the temple. His hands still seared her own, but they had gone still, casting off the slight tremors of a few moments prior. Suri’s heart beat a terrible, ceaseless rhythm against her ribcage as she turned him to the sky and pressed a hand against his chest.
There was a soft rhythm—a faint heartbeat. She exhaled. So this was what a boy looked like wasting away from within, ruined by bladed flames. I am a dead man walking, Suri.
She gingerly brushed away his hair and held a hand against his forehead, wincing at the heat. He would not survive the night, not if she left him out here. She pulled off her own cloak and wrapped him in it, lifting him carefully in her arms as she left the temple.
Suri had only found him out of coincidence—she had left the palace to comb through the north gardens late at night, as if she would find the spy there, admiring the rose bushes innocently. As if this nightmare was something so easily unraveled.
She’d felt the screams before she’d heard them, a rolling, low sting that drew her away from the blossoms and up toward the temples. She had only begun to run after they had first begun to choke off from exhaustion and agony.
She examined him as she walked along the narrow ledge that separated the temple from his cottage. In sleep, he looked at peace, uncharacteristically youthful. But Suri still remembered how he had looked on the floor of the temple, with his eyes slit open. His pupils had disappeared, irises blown out and turned golden with fire. And then there had been the tears, burning down his cheeks and shedding a faint glow on his skin.
He had obviously been delirious with fever—none of what he had said made any intelligent sense. But she could not forget what he had said when she had pulled away, told him—uselessly—that she would return with help, with Tarak and the boy king and the high priestess and everyone else. He had made that choked, raw sound—a sound of prey, of children—and held her hands tight and pleaded, the words intoned as if part of a prayer, “Don’t leave me.”
And so she had stayed.
It had been as simple as that request, and yet Suri knew it was anything but. Even now, she was struck by how easily she had acquiesced—how little she cared about the danger he posed. In the temple, holding him could have killed her. Carrying him now could easily be lethal, and she wouldn’t know it. She suspected she wouldn’t care either way.
They passed the garden, glittering and dew-wet in the early morning. She shifted him in her arms as she reached around to unlatch the door. He was surprisingly light, more fire than flesh.
Inside was a cramped room, the lack of space exacerbated by the addition of extraneous decorations and knickknacks—a handful of engraved ceramic pieces on a windowsill, precariously tall stacks of books and scrolls listing dangerously to the side. A short, shoddily made table sat in the center of the room, bordered by a worn settee and a wicker chair. Blankets were sprawled on a wooden cot pushed against the far wall, and a sprig of lavender tied to the frame filled the air with a faded floral odor.
She laid him on the settee and pulled a thin throw over him. He curled into the fabric, lips moving uselessly though she could hear nothing of what he said. He was still burning up, his cheeks flushed with fever.
Suri dampened a towel, the cold water chilling her fingers. She folded it and pressed it against his forehead—he hissed at the contact, clenching his fingers at his sides, but still he stayed unconscious, lost in some odd, foreign world she could not pierce with human hands.
Even as she moved around the cottage, straightening up old, discarded belonging
s and lighting the candles he had placed on every window, she could not seem to understand that this was his home. It was easy to delude oneself into believing he had somehow been borne of the temple, had sprung from the brazier fully formed and shaped by the fire into something flame-sharp and nearly divine.
And yet he wasn’t—he had cried out in fear, in longing and in mourning, and he had a heart that beat and bled, and this soft, achingly warm place had raised and loved him. Mohini had said that he was not human, alien to everyone and everything mortal, and yet Suri could not believe that, not faced with this. She brushed her hand over the top of a sheaf of Eryan fairy tales and wondered whether he had the same dreams as Anyu, wondered whether he had stories of his own.
Rustling came from the settee. Kiran was struggling to support himself, pushing up against the arm of the sofa and slipping, too weak to hold the position for long. After a few fruitless attempts, he relented, letting his head tilt back against the wood. His chest heaved slowly, unfocused eyes trained upon the ceiling.
“You stayed,” he said, brows furrowed. As if he could not quite believe it. As if he still did not. He turned to look at her, the effort eliciting a faint grunt of exertion. His eyes were black again, the black of the night sky, of soot. “What happened?”
“I found you on the floor of the temple. You were—in pain, feverish.” She paused, unsure whether to add in what he had said. “You… lost consciousness, so I brought you here.”
He exhaled low and closed his eyes. The blanket was still tangled between his legs, the towel crooked on his forehead. He did not look like a prophet touched by the gods, like a messiah. He looked weary, lost. Without opening his eyes, he said, “Tell me of Idhrishti.”
Suri blinked. “What?”
“Idhrishti,” he said softly. “The Najan saint. I have heard retellings, but I want to hear it from you. Tell me his story.”
Suri tilted her head in a silent question, but he did not clarify the meaning of his request—the reason for it. Finally, she settled herself on the wicker chair and pulled her knees up. His fever had reduced, but it still burned so bright that sitting this close to him was difficult.