by Varsha Ravi
Further down the river, someone knelt by the water. Their hands were bloody, but the figure of their body was shadowed, blurred by the dream. Suri rose without conscious thought, following the line of the ink-black water until she stood by them. Once again, she was struck by that suffocating sense of recognition—the feeling that she knew this person, but could not form their identity in words.
The figure swayed back and forth by the water, leaning into the river to dip their hands in and pulling back without rhythm. When they spoke, it was not the voice of a single person, but the voice of hundreds condensed into a quiet thrum. “I really wish I hadn’t had to kill him. He was so kind.”
Suri’s heart had gone fully silent in her chest. There was no sound in this silent, dead world, apart from the splash of blood against water—against tears. “So you admit you killed him.”
The figure laughed, tilting their head back in an odd, youthful gesture. The moonlight shone on their face but did not illuminate it—simply suggested the existence of facial features, the notion of cruelty in that thin, sharp mouth. “I have never hid it, my lady. It was only that you searched in the wrong places, looking for… what? Resentment? Malice? Tarak was not a hated man. He was simply an avenue to someone who was.”
That, at least, did not surprise her. Suri had long suspected that the motive of the murder had not been to destabilize the guard—it had been to destabilize Viro. It was only that she could not understand who would know enough of them to cut so deep so swiftly. It spoke of a thorough understanding of the palace, an unfathomable capacity for cruelty.
“Why Viro?” she asked. “Why war?”
The figure glanced up at her, still wreathed in shadow. They pulled their hands from the water, wringing them meaninglessly—they still dripped with blood. After they were satisfied, they leaned back, sitting cross-legged on the dry grass.
“Why war?” they echoed. They held her gaze, the planes of their features resolving from shadow into skin and bone. There was a ghost of a grin on the figure’s face, something ferocious and ruthless. “Why not?”
It was the knife—sweet, cold metal pressing against the skin at the hollow of her throat—that awoke her, strangely enough.
Suri inhaled sharply, so loudly the knife bit into her flesh, a silent warning. She could sense the blood on her throat—the warmth of it, the thickness of it, the nauseating smell of metal and death. It took all she had not to retch then and there. Then again, she had little chance to.
Mohini angled the knife downward, an iron-tipped promise. Her expression was unreadable in the faint shards of moonlight that filtered through the windows.
“I really hoped it would not have to end like this,” she said softly, but her gaze was hard. This close, she smelled of blood and roses.
“No,” Suri whispered. “This is what you desired all along, is it not?”
Her smile was equal parts rueful and merciless. Suri nearly could not recognize her as the sweet, demure maid that had served her for the past few months. And yet, there had always been this edge to her, an unknowable bitterness. Too late, she saw it. Too late, she understood.
She swallowed hard, which was difficult enough with the knife against her throat. But this game of bravado, of survival—Suri knew it well. She had grown up dancing through it, knocking over pawns and steering kings of stone and queens of marble. Carefully, she asked, “Why? Why do you want war with Naja? You’re Athrian.”
“’You’re Athrian’, she says,” Mohini repeated, mocking. “I am not doing this for Naja, my lady. I lost all of my family in the war, did you know? A clean massacre. They lay under unmarked graves even now, lost to time. No one will ever remember their names. And after? I was thrown into servitude like a dog, sent to pamper and care for the remnants of a family that failed to protect my own.”
“Then why do you want another war?” she managed, slowly wriggling her hand out from under the blankets. When she had first arrived, she had slipped a dagger into the rip in the mattress. Hopefully, Mohini had never noticed—had never thought to disarm her. “Athri has been at peace for nine years.”
The young woman sneered at her, the expression unfamiliar and biting on her face. “At peace? As long as Athri is alive, as long as it holds land for your family to conquer, we will never be at peace. The war will never end.” She shifted in position inadvertently, placing weight on Suri’s wrist. Inches away, the dagger waited. “And truly, I do not care for Athrian victory or Najan victory. I care only that your people fight—that you die. That king of mine, the nakshi—I trust that he will do his level best to destroy all of you. He has that anger hidden within him. But I knew he would not act on it without the proper circumstances.”
“You have been manipulating him this entire time.” Suri felt ill. “And—Lucius?”
Her expression hardened, slightly. “He was endearing, I will give him that. So willing to let me look at the missives to be sent and written, so willing to let me participate. I convinced him to leave the city earlier tonight, under the guise of a present. Hopefully, he will find someone kinder to love.”
Unfathomable cruelty, she had thought. And yet, this was somehow harder to bear. It was the blade-sharp rancor of someone who had nothing left to lose.
There was a hint of a cruel pride in her smile. “I saw you fail to do your duties, as well. The unsent letters in your dresser. Your moonlight romance with the god-spawn. It was almost amusing to watch you fall further and further from a possible threat.” She shifted the knife against her throat, observing the trickle of blood. Fortunately, it freed her grasp from Suri’s wrist. “That is why I find this so sad, I think. Part of me wonders whether I cannot simply let you run away and savor your newfound freedom for a few days. You will die either way.”
Suri leveled a steady gaze at her, even though her heart was battering against her ribcage. “Then let me. Your plan will succeed with or without my interference. You know it is so—otherwise you wouldn’t have come here.”
Mohini smiled humorlessly. “It is too late for you to run now, my lady. I have already left the letter—by morning, the nakshi will be asking for your head, and the thyvaayan’s.” Her eyes twinkled cruelly. “I do have a sense of compassion, after all. If you two are fated to die, is it not fitting that you die side by side?”
Suri had worked to control her fear response to the blood—slowed and steadied her breathing, rationalized the situation, broken it down into its component parts. And yet, at those words, mindless terror washed over her. She implicated him in Tarak’s death, somehow. In the betrayal. Despite her best efforts, her voice wavered. “Viro would not believe it. Viro would never believe Kiran helped kill Tarak.”
“Are you confident, my lady?” she leered, a jagged grin stretching across her face. “Would you bet your life on it? Would you bet his?”
Could she?
Before she could respond, Mohini drew back. The eerie, uneven light of the moon and the darkness of the room rendered the girl a dangerous ghost, one of wrath or war. She ran her finger along the length of the blade, inspecting the blood on the pad of her index finger before slowly moving off the bed.
“That was an admirable attempt,” she said, nodding at the mattress. “To get the knife while restrained.” Her smile turned cold, derisive. “We are more alike than you think, my lady. It is just that I have always enjoyed my work, and you have always seen yours as a curse, a prison instead of a birthright. Though I suppose the details are meaningless now. Enjoy your last night alive.”
The door clicked shut behind her. Suri touched her throat with one hand, fingering the shallow cut. Her chest was tight, as if she were still trapped under the blade, suffocating.
She still had time—the sun had not risen. It was possible Viro hadn’t yet seen the letter. If she ran, perhaps they could make it.
She didn’t bother packing anything. There was nothing here of purpose, of consequence that mattered more than her own life. Her knives would have to stay behind�
�if he caught her with them, there would be no trial, no time for explanation. She would have to find new ones, carve them out of metal and bone.
Then she remembered the last letter in the drawer—which Mohini might well have used as proof for her betrayal. She lit the letter on fire, white ash dusting the floor and her wrists like snow and bone dust.
Suri left as quietly as she could, shutting the door gently behind her even though her hands were still trembling so hard she could not push the hair from her face. It hung around her face, obscuring her sight for brief moments as she ran down the west tower. The corridors were empty, but there was something twisted about the silence, something wrong. A cosmic joke, a tragedy on the brink of collapse.
Her footsteps were inaudible on the damp, packed earth of the north gardens. The air was filled with the scent of blossoms, but it was nauseating, sickly-sweet and spoiled. Above, the endless darkness of the sky had begun to lighten, the eternal night coming to a close.
Her bare feet bled on the uneven, jagged rocks that littered the path up the mountain. But she did not slow, did not acknowledge the pain. She could bandage those wounds later, when they were both alive and safe and away. She sprinted past the temple, the brazier unsettlingly empty, and toward the cottage.
The garden was in full bloom, luminous under the slowly fading moonlight. From here, Suri could see the darkness within the cottage—he was asleep for the first time in months. The irony of it burned all the way down. She banged on the door, erratic and desperate. When it finally swung open, her knuckles were an angry red, the skin splintered and peeling.
Kiran squinted at her, eyes sleep-narrowed and hazy. Dark curls swung into his face, fragmenting his gaze. “Suri?”
“We have to go,” she said. Her voice was nearly unrecognizable to her own ears, high and guttural and imperative. “Now.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I have to stay, for Viro, we talked about this—”
“Viro is going to kill us both,” she managed, the words falling out in a long, meaningless rush. “It’s—it’s Mohini, my maid, she killed Tarak, and now he’s going to kill us, and we have to leave now—”
Kiran reached over and put a hand over her heart, searing in the cold of night. His gaze was black as pitch, uselessly steady. “Calm down, Suri. Explain what happened.”
Suri pulled away with a strangled sound of frustration. “I cannot. We are on borrowed time, even now. I will explain everything later.” She wrapped her hands around his free wrist, and tugged him out, dragging him away from the cottage.
As they ran, Suri tried her best to condense her understanding of the events into a few jagged statements. Kiran sucked in a breath as they exited the thin, narrow path hugging the cliffs. The grass of the clearing surrounding the temple was soft beneath their feet, but Suri could not help but think of how it was damp with dew, just like the dry grass of that dreamland had been drenched, softened with blood. “The letter implicates me, as well. And now you are afraid he will believe it in his fury—that he will kill both of us. So we must escape.”
“Yes,” she said, breathless. “There is no time to explain the truth to him. The evidence lies in her favor.”
He looked unconvinced—perhaps a shard of him held out hope that Viro would not believe the letter, as Suri had. But she was long past hopes and wishes. If there was any chance Viro would believe them, it paled in comparison to the possibility that he would not think to.
Kiran gestured toward the entrance to the temple. “We must stop here for a moment. Avya has no other shrines for miles, not ones he will listen to. If I do not explain what has happened, he may fear the worst.”
Suri frowned, but followed him up the stone steps. Kiran lit a match and dropped it into the brazier, his movements quick and edged with a terror-soaked disbelief. The blood-red glow of the early morning, still too dark to shed much light on the temple beyond the suggestion of stone and fire, cast him in sharp, unfamiliar relief. As if he was nothing more than a limb of the god he served.
Cold wrapped around her, slow but sure.
Without looking up, he said, “Where do you suggest we go? I have rarely left the city, apart from brief diplomatic escorts. You know this world far better than I do.”
She didn’t answer, couldn’t. It was fitting that the night had begun with a knife pressed to her throat, that that was how it would end.
“I cannot understand why the princess’s suggestions would be of any use,” Viro said softly. He glanced down at her, one hand binding her arms together behind her back and the other digging a thin dagger into the hollow of her throat. His eyes were the color of dried blood. “As neither of you will be leaving the temple.”
Kiran’s hands flinched in the flames. He looked up, stricken. As if he had not quite believed it, not until this moment.
“At first,” Viro began, voice rough with cold, hard fury, “I could not believe it. And yet, the letter did not lie. The words made sense, in a harsh, mocking kind of way. Of course the princess would have orchestrated this—I always suspected, I think, but I never acted on it. Because Tarak trusted you. He thought you were worth it.” His eyes flashed with an oily, tempestuous malice, a weaponized volatility. And then he glanced up at Kiran and his expression twisted into something nearly pained. “And you. I cannot understand you. In a way, I never have. After all Tarak did for us—for you—you, what? Did the princess trick you into killing him? Or was that your decision entirely?”
Kiran drew his hands out of the fire and held them up in a futile attempt at placating him. “Viro—”
“Do not call me that,” he snapped with a violent intensity. “I always thought you might abandon your post—your only true duty to this nation—given the opportunity. And look—look at how ready you are to turn your back on the people you claim to love. Is loyalty such a meaningless thing to gods? Is that why murder came so easily—why escape comes so easily to you?”
Kiran took a step forward toward where they stood at the top step of the temple. She nearly let out a bitter laugh at the whims of the gods—her knives were in her room, and if she moved to disarm him now, he would assume the worst. Viro’s dagger dug into Suri’s artery, and her chest wheezed in protest. “Run,” she whispered. “Kiran, run.”
He ignored her and took another step closer. “Viro, the letter was a lie, a diversion. Suri did not kill Tarak. I did not kill Tarak. You know this. Put down the knife.”
“I cannot,” he said softly. In the glow of the fire, the light of the slowly paling sky, he looked like a child—like a ghost. And yet there was a mad glint in his eyes, an anger that agony had fractured completely. As if he could split open, and all she would find was broken glass. “An example must be made. His death must be atoned for, Kiran. Even if it is by your blood.”
Viro twisted the knife—but not across her neck. Too quickly for her to track, too strong for her to block the attack, he slid the knife down the surface of her blouse and drove it between her ribs.
24
Lyne
“Ellis,” she repeated, the name gone stale in her mouth. “Take me through it one more time. Slowly.”
His eyes were wide, wild with panic. “I came home, and they said she was gone, and she hasn’t come back, and—”
Miya nudged a steaming cup of tea toward him. They’d all dropped everything and returned to help him out, and fortunately enough, timing had worked in their favor. Most of the vacations had been set to finish soon, so travel plans weren’t as much of an issue.
The boy, hunched over in his fatigue, stared at the mug listlessly, eyes tracking the swirling streams of mist. In all the time she’d known him, Suri had never seen him like this. Emptied out, brittle with terror. He didn’t take the tea, but after a few more moments of silence, he repeated what he knew of the situation.
Months ago, in early autumn, he’d had an inkling that something was wrong—his younger sister Annabel, barely fourteen at the time, had begun acting strangely. Not stran
gely enough for anyone else to notice—their brothers were out of the country, their parents were usually too busy to notice tiny shifts, and the others were too young to realize. They were the kind of changes that built up over time—staring open mouthed into a mirror for hours on end, overflowing the bathtub after forgetting to turn off the tap, waking early and sleeping late and losing chunks of time in the middle of the day with no explanation. At first, he’d waited patiently for her to explain—they had a relatively healthy relationship, and he had always thought she trusted him.
But she hadn’t. Not at first, not ever, and as the days passed, he wasn’t sure who to turn to. She had been losing more time, appearing at odd hours of the night for a change of clothes or a muffin. If he did press her for details, she’d always default to the excuse that she was staying at a friend’s house, but never let him know which friend.
It was her gaze that had scared him the most, he said, back in the early days. The way she’d stare straight through him, straight through the plaster of the walls. As if the world was a wasteland, miles upon miles of emptiness, and she was the only one privy to the truth.
But things had gotten better for a while, or at least he figured they had. In November and early December, she returned to the house for longer than brief stints. She ate food—occasionally, she would make conversation. And he had felt grateful for every bit of it, uncertain but optimistic, at the very least, that this meant whatever had happened earlier had been an accident. And that soon enough, she might explain the truth of it. Everything, he said, had been going perfectly fine. Until the day before winter break came, and he returned from university to find the house ransacked, her room a mess, and the family in disarray.
They had thought she’d run away. He’d known better.
“That was four days ago,” he finished, exhaling. “We’ve been out since then—at the police department, putting up posters, searching around the city. I only remembered—” he waved his hand in a dismissive, fatigued gesture— “To call you guys just recently. And before you say anything, I know. I know it’s unlikely we’ll find anything, and even less likely that we’ll find her. I just—it’s not like we can do nothing. It’s not like I can just pretend everything’s okay.”