Rising Like a Storm

by Tanaz Bhathena

  “You will do no such thing.”

  My voice is both mine and not—the shape of it both familiar and strange in my mouth, emerging like a prayer, a song. It reaches the approaching army, making them stumble and pause a few feet away from us.

  I step before Shayla, right in front of the maha-atashban, speaking in the same voice:

  “Raja Amar will not give up a throne that is rightfully his. There will be no more bloodshed.”

  It’s so simple, I realize. Maybe it always had been this way.

  Inside me, magic snarls, rages. And bruised and blistered as I am, I no longer fear it.

  Something flickers in the depths of Shayla’s eyes.

  “You’re as mad as people say I am, girl,” she tells me. “Too bad we’ve never been on the same side.”

  “Ambar Sikandar, we don’t have to do this,” a voice says urgently. Major Emil. “The devastation this will cause will be extreme. Raja Amar already said he will give up his throne!”

  Shayla stiffens. Her hand gripping the sidebar of the maha-atashban trembles, slips to the side.

  “Raja Amar?” she asks quietly.

  A moment later, Major Emil drops to the ground, mouth open in surprise, the hilt of a small dagger poking from his throat.

  When Shayla turns back to face me, I know that it no longer matters what Amar has promised her. She knows, deep inside, that even if she has Ambar’s throne, she will never have its people.

  “Maha-atashban at ready.”

  Shayla’s voice trembles. But her hands positioning the giant weapon are sure. Dead steady. Terror blanches the faces of the Sky Warriors behind her. Yet, ultimately, they do not protest or argue with their queen. Their glowing hands join Shayla’s, magic pulsing down the maha-atashban’s thick gold barrel, blooming red at the tip of its black arrow. Hot swathes of air unfurl from the weapon, its acrid smell pricking the back of my throat.

  “Fire!” Shayla commands.

  Her face is the last thing I see before raising my daggers, drawing on every image and memory that ever made me feel safe:

  My father reading a story to me from a scroll.

  My mother catching me as I fall from a tree.

  Amira and Kali, garbed like holy women, swaying in a pretend trance.

  Juhi brandishing her split-whip like blue flame.

  Cavas’s brown eyes on a foggy pink rooftop.

  Protect, I think, before the pain hits.

  Before the blisters on my skin burst and bleed, my starry birthmark tearing open, releasing a colossal shield that’s all sparks at first and then all shadow, gathering the maha-atashban’s sunbright flame within its enormous black wings. This is magic unlike anything I’ve felt before, both light and dark, a power that I find myself reveling in, even as it promises to peel away my skin, my flesh, the last bits of my soul.

  Consume me, the maha-atashban’s magic says. Free yourself.

  I embrace it, this magic that burns like fire, that fills my insides like a starry sky on a two-moon night. Then, with a final prayer to a goddess above, I throw my arms wide, my shadowy wings expelling the light from my body, sending the maha-atashban’s spell back where it came from.

  * * *

  The world does not turn black in death.

  It is bright and jarringly alive, its very light making my insides ache. Why am I here? I wonder, annoyed.

  Here, weightless and afloat, among these heaving, keening, human bodies, their cries piercing me with inexplicable agony.

  I fly over them, this army coated thick with ash, over a melted black maha-atashban, charred bodies clinging to the barrel. Farther ahead, splintered neem and palm trees line a curving road leading to a broken gate, a walled city thick with smoke and wails, and beyond that, a smoldering pink palace, its many windows punctured, some still exploding into fragments, the sound of the cracking glass accompanying the dirgelike atmosphere below.

  I must go, I think. I must leave this place.

  But, no matter how hard I try, something continues holding me back, nipping at my ankles like a dog, tugging my knees like a relentless, willful child.

  It’s an old memory, I realize. One of my own.

  A recollection of slipping and falling to the ground, followed by a shadowy boy’s unfettered laugh. Try as I might, I can’t see the boy’s face.

  Curious, despite myself, I pause, taking hold of the hand he offers, allowing the memory to draw me once more to the living world. Past the damaged palace, the wailing city, and the broken trees. Past the ash-covered soldiers, the molten black mass of metal, and corpses.

  I hover several feet above a crater in the ground, next to the maha-atashban. Tethered to the spot, I watch, fascinated by the hysteria of the bearded man and the three women kneeling by the hollow’s rim—and more so by the strangely familiar girl lying inside, her face, wide arms, and matted hair smeared gray with ash, her bloody fingers curled around the hilts of two broken seaglass daggers.

  52

  CAVAS

  Latif, Ma, and I have reached the threshold of the safe house when the explosion happens, tremors briefly shaking the ground, pain stabbing the inside of my skull.

  “Cavas?” I can barely make out the scared voice calling my name. Ramnik. “Cavas, what’s happening? Why did the earth move?”

  Gul? I reach out to her despite my dizziness. Gul, can you hear me?

  There is no answer. Nothing except a hollow where Gul’s magic is supposed to be.

  “Watch them,” I gasp out as Ramnik and his wife stare at Queen Amba and Rajkumari Malti’s prone bodies. “I have to get back!”

  I have to get back. I have to get back.

  Blood pumps through my veins, my numbed limbs prickling back to life, as I race through Ambarvadi’s winding streets, which are slowly filling with people again.

  “Cavas ji!” someone shouts, recognizing me. “What happened? Where is Raja Amar? Where is—”

  “Move out of his way unless you want me to chop you up and cook you into a sabzi!” Latif roars, his voice so terrifying that the vegetable seller who asked the question falls back against his own overturned cart.

  “Gul!” I shout, a stitch burning my side. “Gul!”

  A black horse rears in front of me, blocking my path.

  “G-Govind?” I stutter, stunned by the palace stable master’s appearance. “W-what are you d-doing—is that General Tahmasp’s old horse?!”

  “Yukta Didi and I have been working to keep the rani and rajkumari safe for a long time. I followed you here from the battlefield. Hurry, boy! Hop on!”

  The last time I’d ridden double at a gallop, it was with Gul on Agni, who could barely support our combined weight. But Raat is a warhorse, trained to carry more than a thin, middle-aged man and a teenage boy. He covers ground in a way I couldn’t on my own, carving a path through air thick with flakes of ash, through the sea of infantry on the battlefield, and to a smoking gash in the ground, around which several burned bodies now lie scattered, a thick, meaty smell rising from them.

  Choking on the stench, I slide off Raat and instinctively stumble toward the crater in front of a still-smoking maha-atashban, to the supine girl who lies within, drawn to the familiar haze of magic that still surrounds her. The three women and man who surround her look up at me now, tears streaking their ash-covered faces. Amira. Kali. Sami. Amar.

  “She’s … she’s…” Kali tries to speak, unable to finish her sentence.

  “She deflected the maha-atashban’s spell,” Amar says tightly. “She saved everyone.”

  I glance at the wrecked weapon, struggle to breathe against its gag-inducing smell. Corpses surround it as well, the one at the front still wearing a dented crown and black armor.

  Ash forms a layer over Gul’s face and eyelashes, dark blood running a trail over her torso. If I ignore that, and the bruises she received in yesterday’s battle, I can almost pretend she’s sleeping. Yet, when I hold a hand to her nose and graying mouth, I feel no breath. No whiff of anythi
ng remotely synonymous with life.

  My knees meet the ground, dull pain rising up the bone.

  “I’m sorry,” I think I hear Amar say from a distance.

  I say nothing. I don’t even cry. I reach out to stroke Gul’s right arm, careful to avoid fresh bruises, pausing at the gaping wound across the astral birthmark that started it all.

  “Cavas,” Amira says quietly. “Maybe you should—”

  “No.” My voice comes from somewhere deep and painful. A sound that makes them step back. “I won’t leave her.”

  I will never leave her.

  A faint pulse skitters under my fingertips. So light that I’m afraid to voice its presence.

  Help me, moon goddesses. Help me, Sant Javer.

  Their forms appear before my eyes as if summoned, though in this moment, they’re gray and strangely spectral. Instinctively, I know that I’m the only one who can see and hear them.

  “She’s alive, child,” Sant Javer says. “But only barely.”

  “Saving her could cost you more than before,” Sunheri warns. “You must pour your magic—all your magic—into her. You will never be able to see living specters or your mother again.”

  I close my eyes for a brief moment. I think of my mother’s portrait in our old house: her sad green eyes, her brown skin, her long black hair painted so lovingly by my father. The memory will fade with time, I know. So will Ma in her spectral form. But my love for Ma never will.

  “I will do anything,” I say.

  There’s a long pause before a gray hand reaches out to touch mine. It’s only by the starry brightness of her eyes that I recognize her as Neel. The goddess of the blue moon smiles at me and says: “Go on, child. Follow your heart.”

  And so I do, once again, exactly the way I did during the eclipse. I reach out, mind, body, and soul, looking once more for the beating pulse of Gul’s heart in a web of silver light—so small this time that I nearly miss it. Blood pounds in my ears, drowning out all other sound. My heart throbs, harder than I’ve felt it before—so hard that I feel it’s going to burst out of my chest. My body, however, remains calm, my eyes wide open, the sun—no, a star—filling my ribs with endless white light. A heart flutters against my palm, its beats scattered at first—like hesitant fingers on a drum—before growing steadier, stronger.

  It throbs in my ears, a pulse that syncs with my own as the world around me goes black.

  And burns bright.

  53

  CAVAS

  A year later, they begin rewriting our history, calling our final battle with the Scorpion the War of the Maidaan. They describe the battle at first—from King Amar’s duel with the usurper queen to the Scorpion’s final demise, some scribes going into great detail about how the deflected spell melted her flesh and decimated her bones to ash.

  Stories are also told about how I collapsed after pouring my magic into Gul, how she woke, coughing and gasping my name.

  More pages, however, are devoted to what takes place the week after the battle—the week of King Amar’s coronation in Ambarvadi. The ceremony is attended by the queens of Samudra and Jwala, the Pashu queen of Aman, and the king of the Brimlands, who openly sobs on seeing his daughters, queens Janavi and Farishta safe and restored to their original positions in Rani Mahal.

  Murals are painted around the Walled City, detailing Amar’s crowning in Ambarvadi’s square, amid cheering crowds, unseparated by magical blood for the first time in decades.

  The half magi versions also include living specters hovering above, most clearly, a bearded man in a turban floating over the new king. When I miss him, I sometimes look at that mural again, recalling the rapture on Latif’s gray face as his body faded into nothing.

  A greater miracle, one that people will talk about long into the future, happens a little over a year into King Amar’s reign. During the Month of Tears, the river Aloksha began flowing again—thanks to an arch having formed magically in Prithvi’s stone wall. The diplomatic feat will be attributed to the king’s first ministers, Maya and Parvez, and to the queens Amba, Janavi, and Farishta, along with a council of magus and non-magus ministers.

  Three years after Amar takes the throne, I walk into the walled yard of my little house, next to a cold presence I’ve not been able to see ever since I gave up my magic to save Gul. It had taken a long time for my mother to grow convinced that I would now be safe here in Ambar—“It’s in a mother’s nature to worry,” she said simply, without further explanation. Perhaps it was selfish of me—I know my mother’s soul needed to be at peace—but I was glad to have her stick around for a little longer.

  Yet, over the past few months, as Amar grew stronger as a monarch, Ma’s presence grew less solid. She is no longer able to touch me the way she used to. Today the only way I can sense her is by the faint chill in the breeze and the sound of her voice.

  “I will always love you,” my mother tells me, her words a balm over my aching heart. “Whether I’m here or not.”

  Gul and I plant rosebushes in her father’s memory and tulsi to mark the spot where Ma fades: a sprig of pale green that takes root in the soil, eventually blooming into a dense bush sprayed intermittently with tiny purple flowers.

  A GIRL AND A DOG

  The village of Dukal 4th day of the Month of Moons Year 12 of King Amar’s reign

  54

  GUL

  “Sitara!” I shout. “Arri O Sitara! Uff, where is that girl?”

  “In the yard,” Cavas says, walking into the house, a coil of rope around his shoulder. “With a stray dog.”

  “What in Svapnalok—why didn’t you bring her in at once?” I demand.

  “It isn’t a shadowlynx, my chand. Also, she can be stubborn sometimes—like her mother,” my mate says with a cheeky grin, a gray eyebrow raised. His hair and mustache have gone gray as well—long before they would have otherwise—a side effect of pouring his magic into me twelve years ago.

  I toss my own silver braid behind me and roll my eyes, though secretly I want to smile. Accepting the kiss he presses to my lips, I step outside.

  Long-nosed and long-limbed, the dog licks my five-year-old’s round cheeks, wagging his tail while she scratches his ears. On instinct, my mind strains to form a connection with the animal—before remembering that I can’t anymore. Cavas gave up his magic to save my life, but he couldn’t save everything.

  Over a decade has passed since the War of the Maidaan, since Amar was crowned Ambarnaresh and formed a new democratic council with magi and non-magi members at its helm. People say the council is the first of its kind in the continent, though Amar brushes this off, saying that the Code of Asha had described the concept a long time ago.

  I’ll take his word for it. The way I’ve been forced to take Vaid Roshan’s word about not being able to do magic anymore, to always feel the side effects of that final shield spell—a sudden pain in the muscles, bouts of exhaustion that have me lying down for hours at a time, my scarred right arm aching, the pain so intense it continues to make me dizzy years later. On those days, Cavas sits by my side, and now my daughter does as well, stroking my hair and my face, telling me jokes that make me smile despite my pain.

  But today I can’t show that. Today, I must be a parent, and not simply a woman delighting in her child’s presence. Both dog and small human cower as I approach, as if they’re expecting me to shoot a spell at them.

  “What are you doing?” I ask my daughter in a stern voice. “Whose dog is this?”

  “He belongs to no one!” she declares, her voice loud, insistent. Cavas says she gets her stubborn streak from me, an assessment I agree with in the privacy of my mind.

  “Sitara.” My voice holds a warning. “Remember what Amira Masi told you about fibbing.”

  “I’m not fibbing, I swear!” Sitara widens her big brown eyes—an expression that melts the hardened Amira on occasion. “His name is Tarang! He told me!”

  “Is that so?” I ask, feeling amused despite myself. I’m going t
o have to have a talk with Kali and Sami later, I think. They have two young ones. They’ll know what to do.

  “Yes! He also said the shopkeeper in the bazaar throws stones at him,” she says seriously. “Many people do. That’s so mean, Ma!”

  I frown. Sitara hasn’t yet been to the market. There is no way she could have known this information. Unless …

  My skin prickles at the brightness in my daughter’s eyes. “Tarang told you this. How, exactly?” I ask.

  “I touched him and heard his voice in my head,” she says. “I didn’t know dogs had voices.”

  There’s a long silence. When Sitara was born, she had no glow to her. Nothing that would mark her with any kind of magic, whatsoever. Not that it mattered to either me or Cavas. We were only grateful she was born healthy and whole. Untouched by the scars that marked us both.

  “Ma?” My daughter bites her lip when I don’t respond. One small hand curls around the tiny star-shaped birthmark over her right elbow. “Is it bad that I touched Tarang? That I talked to him?”

  “No, Sitara.” I gather her chubby little body in my arms and hold her tight. “Nothing about you is bad. Especially not your magic.”

  Glossary

  Note: You will find many of the terms below common to our world and the former empire of Svapnalok. However, there are a few words that differ slightly in meaning and/or are used specifically in the context of Svapnalok. These have been marked with an asterisk (*) wherever possible.

  acharya: A scholar and religious leader

  almari: A cupboard

  *Ambarnaresh: A title for the king of Ambar

  *Ambar Sikandar: Ambar’s Victor; a royal title claimed by Queen Shayla

  *Anandpranam: The happiest of salutations

  andhiyara: Darkness

  angrakha: A long tunic that is tied at the left or right shoulder

  *atashban: A powerful magical weapon resembling a crossbow