by Varsha Ravi
He glared over at him, but nodded in acquiescence. “I should go.” He paused beside Suri, head tilted so Lucius could not see his expression. There was a hint of ferocity in it, beautiful and terrifying. When he spoke, it was soft enough that it was nearly inaudible, delivered in the careful, hushed cadence of a confession. “This is my favorite part.”
And then he was descending the steps, the crowd silent for him, only him. His bare feet touched the last step, stone against skin, and the hymn began again, each word filled with a swelling, intense ardor. He disappeared into a small door built into the base of the steps, the flames of the brazier blurring his shadow.
Suri followed Lucius down the steps, avoiding his gaze the entire way. They paused beside Isa and Mohini, but the boy nudged them slightly, nodding toward the crowd above. Suri raised her eyebrows at him. “I thought these were special seats.”
He grinned at her, obviously still amused by the conversation with Kiran. “It’s best not to be near the dance when it begins.” He jerked his head at the king and the captain, who were slowly moving up the stairs until they were halfway up. Even the priests were dissolving into the crowd above, flashes of white in the sea of red and black.
The hymn continued, the only sound in the otherwise quiet temple. Kita, the only remaining priestess beside the pool, finished scattering blossoms around the edge of it, and then lit a match. She chanted something, inaudible in the midst of the hymn, and tossed it into the oil.
Before, it was easy enough to ignore the oil, think of it only as a damp, sticky layer at the bottom of the pool. But now, as it grew into an orange-gold blaze, the heat palpable and searing even from so far away, it was so distinctly, wholly dangerous that for a moment, Suri was afraid. It felt like something that could burn; something that could kill.
The door at the edge of the steps opened, and the crowd fell silent—the hymn dissipated on the edge of a word, and there was that same kind of expectation, for something unfinished to become whole, as Kiran stepped toward the fire.
He had traded in the ceremonial, embroidered black wrap and red robes for something simpler—a maroon half-wrap that tied around both legs and left his torso bare. Ash and sandal paste streaked across his chest in looping, intricate symbols, trailing down his arms and up to the base of his collarbones.
Kiran paused beside the fire, hands palms up, his eyes fluttered closed. The hymn resumed, holding out that single, echoing note, and he walked into the flames.
For a moment, Suri did not breathe. The blaze grew with his presence, fear burning through her heart. No one could have survived that, she thought. But the fire was still burning; the people were still singing. And in the midst of the flames, a shadowed, indistinct figure spun and twirled, every step in sync with the melody that rose in the air.
It was just as it had been in the temple on the mountain—the beat of the dance intertwined with the melody, with the heartbeat of the people, and twisted into something strange and new and touched with divinity. And yet it was so much wilder, so much more beautiful for it. It held none of the softness, none of the sadness of the hymn on the mountain—this was something anarchic and deific.
Kiran was a whirl of movement in the flames, somehow both coarse and graceful. To think she had dared to think she knew him—to think she had thought it possible to wholly know someone made of holy fire, multifoliate and jagged-edged. And yet the dance, the foreign, flame-sweet air of it, only made her want him more.
A dry laugh drew her back into the present, and she glanced to the side. Lucius was watching the flames with a sharp, amused smile, the shadows of the fire flickering across his face and giving form to that oddly knowing expression.
“Usually,” he mused, “Kiran considers this little more than a formality. Yet, if I did not know any better, I would say he’s putting in an undue amount of effort tonight.”
Suri shifted uncomfortably. “He said this is his last night.”
Lucius’s expression sobered for a fraction of a second before he smiled, rueful. “Perhaps that is why. But I rather think he’s showing off.”
He winked at her, mouth still curved in mirth, before disappearing into the crowd. Mohini had left at some point prior, which surprised Suri even less than Lucius going to look for her. She turned back to the flames and caught Isa watching her. She pursed her lips. “What are you thinking?”
Isa held her gaze. For a while she didn’t speak, the hymn in the air substituting the need for speech, and Suri found herself glancing back to the flames.
“He can play in the fire all he wants,” she said drily, eyebrows faintly raised at how Suri had to wrench her gaze away from the pool below. “But you will still burn if you touch the flames.”
She opened her mouth to protest, and yet she found she could not. Isa had cut straight to the heart of the matter, as she was prone to doing, and now Suri was faced with a simple enough decision, one of self-preservation.
She closed her eyes; the fire turned the inside of her eyelids pink, that same furious, fervid ache from before burning through her. A small, hungry voice in the back of her mind spoke, one she had never paid attention to. It had starved and starved, and now it awoke, carving into her consciousness. Damn self-preservation.
The singing had long since become shouting, a blaze of noise to match a blaze of smoke and flame. And as it swelled into a crescendo, so did the fire, roaring in the airless night. And then it fell all at once, a dissonant, uneven exit that tumbled to a stop. The fire moved with it, disappearing into nothing—into smoke and prayers.
Kiran stood in the center of the pool, drenched from either sweat or oil or liquid flame, the ash and sandal paste on his chest blurred into an unreadable mess. He dipped his head forward in a shallow bow, then ducked into the door beside the steps without waiting for the roaring applause of the crowd to fade. It was the only time, Suri realized, they had given him anything but soft, awe-strained silence.
Kiran pressed a damp washcloth to his chest, willing his heart to calm as he scrubbed his skin. He could still hear the crowd’s shouts, the swell of the hymn echoing in his ears, could still see Suri on the edge of the steps. The memory of it was intoxicating.
Outside, the festival was only beginning—he could hear the distant melody of another hymn roll in beat with the steady thrum of the drums. But from this point on, he was effectively free. To return to his cottage or to return to the temple, or to wander through the city alone, savoring the emptiness of the shadows.
And yet when he exited the small, cramped room under the steps and rose unseen to the north corridor, he found his feet taking him somewhere else.
The north tower cut through the sky, a glittering, variegated gopuram of stone and paint that had always mesmerized him. The princess was standing beside it, fingers tracing the carving of Nila. He cleared his throat, and she startled, glancing back. Oddly, her expression tightened once she realized it was him, an unrecognizable glossy darkness coloring her gaze.
He paused by the tower. “Do you know the story?”
“Of Nila?” she asked absently, her eyes molten in the night. “I learned of it recently.”
“And what do you think?”
She looked up at him, her mouth set in a hard, youthful line. Her cheeks were suffused with crimson from the heat of the fires around them. “I think it is beautiful, and it is cruel. And I think…” she paused here, uncertainty straining her expression. “I think it is life, in a way. It holds the same tragic irony, the same broken idealism.”
Kiran shut his eyes, recalling the lilt of the fairy tale, black rivers and red skies. “I agree.”
She smiled, but it was mechanical, not quite there. That dark, tangled look had not left her, had only stretched into something far more abstruse.
He held out a hand to gesture toward her clothes, a silent question. Suri picked at the hem of her wrap self-consciously. It had been made into the style of Athrian nobility, sheer crimson fabric that wrapped around her torso tigh
tly, the edge of which dropped away and began to wrap again around her hips. It bunched there before draping loosely against her ankles. The edge of it was embroidered with small golden flames, mirroring the golden cuffs that circled both her biceps. Strands of her dark hair were twisted with amber thread and jewels, while the rest swept across her bare shoulders, unbound. She looked, he realized with a stomach-dropping sense of awe, like a queen.
“Does the fire hurt?” she asked suddenly, so softly it was impossible not to understand that she had held this question in her mind beforehand, that this was simply the act of letting it go.
He shook his head. There was still oil on his skin—he could still feel the fire, the warm glow of it around him and the smoke rising above. Yet it had never hurt, not once. She nodded once, as if processing this, and then asked, equally soft, “What does it feel like?”
Kiran struggled to put it into words. “A warm embrace, but never gentle. At first, it was overwhelming, but now… I cannot explain it, not wholly. It feels like a second home.”
Her mouth twitched as if she meant to ask something further, but finally she simply exhaled. Turning from the tower, she looked out toward the city, alive with revelry. The wood ash on her cheek glittered in the moonlight, smeared from where he had held her.
He reached out a hand, and there was something distant about the movement as he it, as if he were watching it all from a different room, from a different world. Suri did not move even as he cupped her cheek, did not look away even as he laid the pad of his thumb against her cheekbone and smudged the silver ash that streaked across it.
And yet there was a silent question in her gaze, and it scraped across him, seared what remained of his rational thinking. This is the worst mistake you have ever made, he thought. And then he leaned forward and kissed her.
She made a small, unintelligible noise, not of surprise but of something harder, sharper, and his chest ached with desire. But he forced himself to pull away. Absently, he realized he still held her wrist loosely in his hand. He dropped it, chagrined, and rocked back on his heels.
Without looking at her, he said, “I-I apologize. For overstepping the boundaries, and—”
Suri cut in, her voice a low rasp. “What are you apologizing for?”
He glanced up. She was looking up at him oddly, eyes glazed and dark. Her lips spread in a wild, fierce smile, star-bright against the darkness behind them.
Something cracked and shattered in the heat of his heart, glass abandoned to night-black flame. And then they were kissing again, but it was impossible to know who had moved first—Suri’s hands were cupping his face, harshly holding him in place, and he was leaning down into her mouth. There was nowhere to put his hands, so he let them trail everywhere, following the curve of her neck down the golden bands around her arms. He rested them there, ghosting over her elbows simply to hold her against him.
They broke apart after some indeterminable amount of time had passed. In the distance, the shouts of the festival continued. They both glanced toward the entrance to the north corridor, and then back at each other, and Kiran knew they were thinking the same thing—someone, anyone, could find them here. It was too much to risk. And yet to leave together was another step into the unknown, into the searing, desire-sharp darkness of what lay between them.
Kiran held out his hand and Suri took it, and they left the temple behind.
Kiran was made of fire tonight, Suri mused as he led her up the mountain, shadowed and incense-sweet in the late night. Then again, so was she. That first touch had set them both aflame, their hearts shot through with kerosene. But she knew it had started long before this; with blossoms and with crimson dawns and with secrets they had held like promises—with gentle hands and trembling breaths.
They ascended the steps of the temple. The blood-borne fire was still burning somehow, curled into the carved symbol like it had found a home. Avya watched them from the decorated statuette, the moonlight cutting across the ash on the stone.
And yet Kiran did not care. There was a reckless, lovely warmth to him as he guided her around the fallen, strewn blossoms, bare feet against fire-warmed stone. She tripped over a crack and fell forward, but his arms caught her, bracing her shoulders against him. He helped her up, a bright laugh in his eyes, in his smile, and Suri could not stop thinking of that smile—of the streaks of oil and soot that littered his body, and the fragrant, heady scent of turmeric and wood ash that enveloped her when she leaned too close. He was a fire, she knew, and it didn’t matter that fire was meant to burn—it didn’t matter that the flames were coarse and imprecise and destructive, because she would step into them every time. As long as it was him, she would let them burn her.
She let him move her around the petals and lean her against the column of the temple. It still smelled of smoke, of wax; this was something sacrosanct carved out of the stone of the mountain, and all the glory and all the gold of the service paled in comparison to the simple, reverent silence of the temple as Kiran leaned forward and pressed a soft, chaste kiss to her lips.
Suri made a noise in the back of her throat and pulled him closer, and he smiled against her, lips faintly parted as she buried her hands in his curls and steadied herself.
She wanted to stay here forever—she wanted to hold him forever, hands twisted tight and hearts pressed close, like a dream breathed into trembling, delicate life. Yet she knew, logically, that they could not—that this was something born to fall, born to burn.
Kiran pulled away for just a moment, eyes dark and glittering with desire, and yet sad as well. As if he, too, knew the inherent tragedy of this—of all love. To hold someone so tight was to know you would one day let them go; to love was to thrust soft, unmarked hands into a fire and let them catch flame.
But they kissed again, and again, and again, and she let him lift the anger from her chest and kiss it too, nothing more than a soft press of lips and a hint of fondness, and when they were spent, lips numb and bruised, they leaned on each other, fingers intertwined, and held each other so tight she could feel his heartbeat. He walked her to the cottage and she shut the door behind her as he struck a match and lit every individual candle, casting the room in soft firelight.
Suri crossed the room, sat on the edge of the cot in the corner, and rubbed the edge of the single, threadbare blanket with her thumb. It smelled of lavender and incense. He finished lighting the candles and then took a seat beside her, crossing his feet so they faced each other—her leaning against the wall and him with hands braced on the frame behind him, head tilted back in strained thought.
She held out a hand, only half-aware of her own actions, and traced the now-faded lines of ash and santhanam on his chest, traced the edges and crooks of them. He held her gaze, an inexplicable, wordless fondness in it. She moved closer, raising her hand until she was tracing the lines of his face. She drew her finger across his lips, and he smiled against it.
Her chest ached with desire and pre-ordained loss. “Let me give you a secret: I do not want to marry your king.”
The smile went crooked, and he tilted his head, her finger falling from his lips. “Let me give you one: I do not want to die.”
She leaned forward, pressing her forehead to his in a strange, impulsive show of vulnerability. “What fools we are, then, to masquerade as those who we are not. Fools with eyes bound in silk and bark.”
“’Love is dangerous, blinding,’” he quoted, voice soft against her cheeks in an empty semblance of amusement. He pulled back slightly, just enough that she could see the gentleness, the raw warmth in his gaze. The clean lack of regret. “And yet, I see you so clearly.”
They fell asleep like that, trading soft, careless kisses in the dark until it stole them away. When Suri awoke, it was to the low groan of a shift of the bedframe. She rubbed at her eyes and turned, blearily, to find Kiran pulling himself off the cot. He looked down at her apologetically.
“The sun is coming up,” he explained, crouching down to brush
a strand of hair away from her forehead. “I did not want to wake you. But I know you must leave.”
The realization of what they had done—of how much she ached for it again, even now—cut through the haze of sleep. Suri pulled herself up, crossing her arms over her chest. In the night, the fabric of the wrap had come loose and half-unraveled, and now it lay over her, sheer and uneven, like a glorified blanket. When she spoke, her voice was a thin rasp. “Did we…”
He shook his head. There was a foreign touch of resentment to his voice, a sharp bitterness. “Neither of us could risk that, I know.” Kiran looked down at her, an uncertain, reticent gentleness guiding him to sit beside her ankles. He looked as if he meant to say something, as if he meant to hold her still and kiss her again, the way he had in the night. But the thin, watery sunlight that streamed in through the windows had torn them back into something with demarcations, each one deeper than the space between two words, between two hearts. In the morning, she could not know if this was something they were allowed; in the night, she had not cared.
She tore her gaze away, focusing on the cotton of the mattress. Quietly, she said, “Then, I will return to the palace.”
“How will you explain your absence?” he tilted his head, considering, and added, “On Avyakanth, the city is chaotic enough they may not have noticed it. But, in case your maids have.”
She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I can say I got lost in the city, and you brought me back to the temple because the streets around the palace were too crowded.”
It wasn’t a perfect excuse—even now, still faintly drowsy, she could pick it apart with a half-critical eye. It would barely hold up, but they would have no reason to push further. Isa, she knew, would have already suspected the truth of the matter.
Kiran nodded, looking away, before pushing off from the cot. He extended his hand and Suri took it, and in an odd, painful echo of the previous night, he walked her to the door. He leaned forward, and in a single, indulgent moment of tenderness, he readjusted the wrap, fingers warm against her skin as he tucked the fabric into itself.