I was still turning over Amar’s words, trying to find some sliver of reason when the darkness rustled. Something tall and bestial rose on unsteady legs, unfolding itself from the shadows and pools of flame where a dead body had charred into something nearly unrecognizable. My heart thudded in my chest. What was that? I had nothing to defend myself. No weapon on hand except for the blunt end of my mother’s necklace and I knew that would do nothing.
A painfully thin horse emerged. It looked like it had one hoof on death’s doorstep. Although, given where I stood, maybe it did. Its bones jutted out of translucent skin and a dark bulge that could only be the animal’s heart quivered between spindly legs. The horse turned its skeletal face toward me, snorting to remove the gray wisps of hair from its face. A pearly sheen coated its milky eyes.
“What are you?” asked the horse. Her voice was rasping, shadowy, like corrugated steel dragged across marble. “You can see me, can’t you, false sadhvi? Oh, your fear is a thing so lovely. Like a salt wheel. I could lick it if you gave me the chance. I am all out of sustenance, as you can see.”
I’d never heard a voice so cold. My knees buckled. The horse jolted her head to the charring body beside her.
“He dreamed of barley his whole life and yet he worked in rice paddies. Strange are the ways of humans. But I am more interested in you. Not human. You don’t smell of sweat and reek of lust. But you are not Otherworldly either.”
The horse cocked her head to one side, a quizzical motion. And then she smiled, revealing bloodstained teeth. I suppressed a shudder. “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything like you. Such a delectable morsel. May I take a bite? Just one … or maybe two…”
“No,” I said firmly, digging my heels into the ground and crossing my arms.
“Oh, look at that,” said the horse. “Feisty too. I bet you taste like spice and cinnamon. I bet you taste like heartbreak. Young things always do.”
Something caught in my throat and the horse laughed and it was a terrible thing, like blood sluicing between broken teeth.
“Oh, I am good, I am good. I want to play again. May I guess again? You are heartbroken. You are broken, broken. Which is to say, you are like me. Where is your tail, false sadhvi? Where is your soul? Do you feed off of them too? Where are your hooves?”
The horse trotted forward, snuffling at me. I could smell rot and blood on her breath, and bit back the urge to gag.
“I’m not like you at all,” I said, stepping back. I hesitated, trying to look straight into the dead horse’s eyes. “I’m … I’m the Rani of Naraka. At least, I was.”
The horse stared. Blinked. And then laughed. She laughed so hard she fell to her side, snorting and neighing, casting up clouds of dust and ash so that I had to cover my mouth with my arm.
“I am!”
“And I am a beautiful stallion,” said the horse through laughs.
I wasn’t a liar. I remembered, like a soft breath against my neck, that real feeling of power. Like the world was something pulpy and easily pushed aside, something I could sift through … something I could change. And the more I heard the horse’s laughter, the more fury growled to life inside me.
“I am,” I shouted, this time with so much force that thunder clapped in the sky and lightning seamed across the gloaming earth like a broken eggshell veined with light.
The horse stopped laughing, jerking its head to the sky.
“Do it again,” she said.
But that flash of power was gone.
“I—I can’t,” I said lamely.
“What are you doing here then, oh great queen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you dressed like the living dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why—”
“I don’t know anything!” I shouted.
The horse considered me for a moment.
“What do you know?” I asked, sarcasm coloring my voice.
“I know emptiness,” said the horse. “I know the taste of blood against my teeth. I know what it is to fill your belly with iron. I know hunger. I know pain. I know memories that won’t stay. I know the ghost of life and the perfume of souls.”
Memories that won’t stay. I almost laughed. Perhaps this horse and I had plenty in common.
“I need to get to the Otherworld. I need to get back to Naraka. He needs me.”
“Who?”
“Am—” I stopped and swallowed his name. I wouldn’t say it again until I saw The Dharma Raja.
“Handsome, handsome. Even I would die for him,” said the horse, smacking her lips. “I’ve seen him so many times. Times, times, times. Oh, and he is cruel. Oh, and his horns are wicked, piercing things; they like to slice through stars and falling birds. Does he taste like bone and kiss like—”
“Enough,” I hissed. “Or I’ll kill you where you stand.”
“With what? Your soft words? Your young hands?”
But the horse wouldn’t laugh and when she spoke, she looked up to the sky, waiting for a thunderclap, some signal that she was wrong.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” I asked.
“I believe in nothing,” said the horse. A touch of her mania was gone.
“If I knew anything before I became this, I have since forgotten. I have forgotten, even, what it is like to speak to another.”
The horse looked once more to the sky, and this time I did the same. Maybe it was the lights from all the palatial buildings of Bharata, but whatever remained of night had left the sky so thick with stars that they looked more like dollops of cream on a black platter.
Once, I would’ve hurled curses at the stars.
But the longer I looked, the less I hated them. The stars, filled with cold light and secrets, held no emotion in their fixed language of fate. Emotion belonged to life, a thing the stars could never experience. I, not the starlight, shaped my decisions. And it was me, not the evening sky, who shouldered the responsibility for decisions gone wrong. My horoscope had already come to pass, leaving nothing before me but a future ripe with the unknown. The stars had already told me everything they knew. And even though it left me untethered from any cosmic map I had once known … I felt freed.
Once, I had shaped the fates of others, even though I couldn’t remember how. I didn’t even know if I could ever do it again. I didn’t know whether the life that I had left behind was something forever out of reach, a relic of a former reincarnation, or something that was mine to claim. But I had no one to tell me otherwise. And I wouldn’t cast away the possibility that maybe it could be reclaimed. I wouldn’t allow myself to be lesser. To fall into the lulls of Nritti’s whispers that I was nothing and no one.
“What exactly are you?” I asked the horse.
“I am a shadow. I am a pishacha.”
I shuddered. I knew that name from the folktales. A flesh-eating demon. A haunt of cremation grounds.
“But you know where the Dharma Raja goes?”
“Oh yes, maybe-queen-maybe-liar. I know. I know. I smell him.”
“I need to get to the Otherworld, where the Night Bazaar is,” I said, thinking of the bright orchard where he had led me. The nexus between the human world and Naraka. It may be the only place where I could find him and set things right.
The horse laughed. “And you expect me to take you?”
“What can I give you? What do you want?”
The horse’s eyes narrowed. “I’d like to take a bite out of you. Maybe two, if you’d let me.”
Cold frissons flared along my spine. “But I’m the Rani of Naraka. You wouldn’t want to do that.”
“You don’t sound so convinced,” said the horse in a singsong voice. She sounded delighted.
“But if I am, I mean, I am,” I stressed, scolding myself, “then you would want someone else’s blood. Not mine. That might get you in more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Oh, but you smell so good … and what are repercussions and consequences to something
not even alive? Not even dead? A half-being … like you.”
I stared at it. “Maybe … when I prove myself to you, about who I am. Maybe I can get you a new soul.”
“To eat?”
“No, to inhabit. A soul that’s yours.”
The horse whinnied and hissed, red steam billowing from her nose and splattering like blood spray on her muzzle.
“Fine words, fine words. False words, false words.”
“If I’m wrong”—I closed my eyes, praying that I wasn’t—“then I’ll let you take a bite—”
“Or two,” interrupted the horse.
“—or two, of me.”
The horse stared at me.
“Well?” I prompted.
“What assurance do I have? Give me something.”
“What do you want?”
The horse flicked her eyes over me. “Your hair. It is matted, but it is lovely. It looks like coal and soft earth, and I would have it.”
I was already in rags. Already caked in someone else’s death. Even if it was a small thing, I hesitated a little. This was the same hair that Amar had cut a length of and wrapped a bracelet from its strands, slid it onto his wrist and proclaimed it the finest piece of jewelry he had known. But there was no time for vanity.
I knelt to the ground, knees sinking into the soft ash, and bowed my head forward, never once letting my eyes move from the horse’s. She could kill me in a second if she wanted.
“And you?” I asked. “What will you give me in return?”
The horse blinked. “My name.”
“What good is that?”
“It is all I have,” said the horse, bowing her head. A flicker of pity went through me. “It is all I remember.”
“Then it will suffice.”
I closed my eyes, tilting my head down. The horse moved softly over the ash, hesitant. I heard her jaws creak open, smelled the rank thickness of rot and sour breath. A soft tear, a strange—but not ungentle—pull, and a single word murmured in the thicket of my scalp:
“Kamala,” said the horse over a mouthful of hair.
I pulled away, wincing as some of my hair tore through her clamped teeth. What was left fell wetly against my neck. I shivered. I thought I would be furious, disgusted with myself, but when I stood, I felt nothing but calm. I felt light. I shook my head, nearly smiling at the now-torn strands about me. Kamala had taken more than just hair. She had taken some weight and burden from me.
She regarded me with mild eyes. No longer quite as bloodshot. Perhaps just a deep garnet.
“How do we get to the Otherworld?”
“Climb atop my back, maybe-queen-false-sadhvi.”
I balked. Kamala barely looked fit to walk on her own, let alone bear the weight of another person. Her bones jutted out, catching the light. Ghostly reins sprang up around her body, fashioning into a saddle the color of marble.
I flashed a weary smile before hoisting myself up.
Kamala reared onto her hind legs and broke into a run. My hair, still damp from Kamala’s mouth, whipped about my face. I flattened against her back and tried to glimpse our surroundings, but all I saw was a blur of valleys that looked more dead than alive. A strange smell filled my senses, of sulfur and water.
“Where are we going?” I managed to choke out.
“You want to cross into the land of the Otherworld, but it is a guarded thing, full of anger,” responded Kamala. “To do anything, you must receive the permission of its guardian. We must get to the ocean.”
Ocean? My eyes widened.
Lashing wind burned my eyes. Eventually, we began to climb over a gray valley before arriving at the rim of a great ocean. My legs ached as I dismounted and my lungs filled with the briny air of the sea. Tall waves rolled toward us like watery giants, white crests like crowns. A split sky stretched over the ocean—half-night, half-day.
Kamala nudged a conch shell toward me. “Make no sound, merely hold it to your lips.”
I did as I was told and the crashing waves froze.
20
THE CLOUD BRIDGE
Something dark appeared beneath the surface of the waves. The waves crashed over the spot repeatedly, unearthing two pale mounds in the water.
“What is that?” I asked, trying to keep my voice still.
Hadn’t I had enough of monsters? I was already standing next to a flesh-eating demon.
“Airavata,” said Kamala. “Tricky elephant. He likes to knit.”
“What does he knit?”
“Clouds.”
“Oh.”
Kamala ignored me and stared with her milky eyes at the white piles in the sea. I followed her gaze, my mouth nearly dropping open. What I had thought were small hillocks of stone were Airavata’s gigantic white ears. He rose out of the waves, water trailing through his wrinkled trunk and pooling along the dents of his back. I had never seen an elephant like Airavata. Across his tusks lay a thin cloud and in his trunk he carried an ivory comb. As Airavata combed the cloud, out drifted dark puffs of air that glinted with lightning. His eyes were filled with warmth and he flapped his ears in greeting. Artfully looping his trunk around the cloud, he unhooked it from his tusks and placed the comb and cloud onto his back.
“And what is this?” asked Airavata, leaning forward. His voice was rich and deep, streaked with friendliness and a wizened timber. “A demon near my waters and someone who smells of secrets.”
Kamala turned to me, whispering, “Which one am I?”
“The person full of secrets,” I muttered.
Kamala whinnied. “Oh, I hope you are a queen. You are funny. Funny, funny. What does funny taste like?” She paused. “Maybe I hope you are not a queen. I would like to taste funny.”
“I am certain you do.” I smirked before turning to Airavata. “We seek passage to the Otherworld, to the Night Bazaar.”
“Strange place. Stranger still, with chaos alive and angry.”
I swallowed nervously, my thoughts jumping to Amar. Where was he? Was he safe?
“What do you mean?”
“It means that I am spinning storm clouds of late,” said Airavata slowly. He waved his trunk toward a dark cloud that darted around his legs.
“Will you let me pass? I have to get there.”
Airavata stared, before bowing his head. “No.”
“No?” I repeated dumbly. “You don’t understand, I need to be there. I need to speak with the Dharma Raja. I need to get back to—”
“It does not matter to me how or why you must get back. I am merely a spinner of clouds. Not a diviner. I cannot augur your heartbreak like entrails any more than I can speak the language of faraway stars.”
“Why won’t you let me in?”
Kamala turned sightless on me. I thought I saw hunger in her gaze. Not today, I murmured in my head. I will not be demon feed.
“I demand that you let me in,” I repeated.
Airavata only batted his ears. “You see, that is why. You can only enter the Otherworld by invitation, self-worth or sacrifice. Or by standing beneath a double-rainbow with a belly full of cold, cold sapphires. And I have not seen a double-rainbow in five hundred years. And I know you have no invitation, for your name is on no list. The way you seek before me now is the way of self-worth, and that you have not earned.”
“There are demons inside the Otherworld. Flesh-eating bhuts and wraiths the size of whole countries and you’re telling me that I have to prove myself to join them?”
“I never said it had to be good self-worth. You could slay a million children. Maybe then you could come. But in your current state, your soul cannot handle the Otherworld.”
“But I was let in before!” I protested, thinking back to my wedding day, and the hours spent with my arms around Amar’s waist while we walked through jungles, our bodies close. I thought of his promise, his palm welling with blood. His assurances. His kiss. “Why is now any different?”
“It is different because you are different.”
&n
bsp; “And when I ‘prove’ myself, I’ll somehow find my way back in?”
Airavata nodded.
“Isn’t there something I can give you?” I asked, furiously thinking back to the head of hair that Kamala had eaten off. “Something you want?”
Airavata bowed his head. “Poor thing. Poor being of secrets and nighttime. There is nothing you can give me that I would ever take willingly.”
“What do I need to do?”
“I do not know. I only know that I cannot let you in. There is something unfinished that you carry with you. Rid yourself of it and you may enter.”
The elephant regarded us patiently, not breaking the exchange. I sensed that he was hiding something, but he wouldn’t say. And I wasn’t going to press him. I could tell, from years spent battling Mother Dhina and Mother Shastri, when an argument or a rationalization was useless.
I opened my mouth to say something, but Kamala spoke first.
“Then give us a cloud bridge. To get back to the other side. There is more than one way into the Otherworld.”
“We’re just going to turn around?” I asked incredulously.
“If you know the area where the Dharma Raja will be, I can sniff out his location,” said Kamala.
“How?” I asked.
“When death is close I become alive…”
I stared at Kamala. I had already given her my hair and pledged her a bite of my skin. I knew she was bound to help me. But it never struck me that she might do so voluntarily.
“Why are you helping me?”
“Why do I do anything? Why do I hate beets or lust after the feeling of hair in my mouth instead of blood? Maybe I like the thought of being filled. Of being less empty,” said Kamala with another ghoulish grin. “Maybe I am bored and your company is a funny thing. Your energy is a strange one. You are a pillar of salt I want to lick and break, but save and love.”
Where would I even go? I couldn’t chase false horizons hoping it would somehow land me in front of him. There had to be a specific place, somewhere he’d be drawn despite himself. Amar’s words floated back to me:
I love you, jaani. My soul could never forget you. It would retrace every step until it found you.
The Star-Touched Queen Page 17