The moment the girl with the shining plaits nodded, Nritti leaned forward, bending as though to kiss the girl on the brow … slowly, breath teased out of the girl. Nritti laughed and that’s when I heard it. The voice of the woman from my room. It had been her. Maybe my mind couldn’t believe it before, convinced that my instincts were a broken thing. But I was right. The proof of it filled my ears, fury snaking through me.
I jumped off Kamala, about to run forward and get the girl out of harm’s way, when I felt the drag of teeth at the nape of my neck pulling me back.
“Can’t you see what she’s doing to that girl? If she won’t hesitate to do it to a child, she certainly won’t blink twice to do the same thing to you!”
“Let me go!” I said, fighting against her, but her teeth had latched on to me and I had no choice but to watch, dangling from the incisors of a demon as the little girl’s eyes widened.
I thought Nritti meant to kill her. But life wasn’t what she was taking. It was youth. The more she inhaled, the less of the girl’s ethereal sparkle was left. Her skin paled. Hair grayed. Honey voice sharpened.
Nritti pulled away, dragging her arm across her mouth like she had just finished a meal.
“Thank you,” she said, and her voice was all sweetness.
Next, she approached a boy with nut-brown and golden skin who had stood transfixed the whole time, his eyes glassy with magic. She trailed her fingers against his jaw, first softly, then—her lips curled up in a weird smile—harder, until she was scrubbing away at the color of him. The boy winced, his skin flushing crimson with the promise of blood, when Nritti finally pulled away from him. Gone was the paleness of her skin. She was shining and auric, the image of the sun as seen through cut topaz. Glorious.
Nritti flexed her arms, examining the length of her tawny skin and polished hair. She hummed a trill and the things that had once flitted like innocent living haloes around her head took their real form—shrieking cormorants and blood-slicked beetles. Things meant to harm, to scissor, to pinch.
“Much better,” she said. She turned to the hounds. “Drag the rest down to the Otherworld. I want to look my best for my wedding.”
Wedding? My hands went cold.
Nritti snapped her fingers. “Summon him.”
The hounds nodded. They bayed as one, heads thrown back and throats bared to the night, howls cleaving the sky with thunderclaps and a violent wind.
The forest shadows crept forward like spilled ink and my pulse quickened. And then, in the clearing … there he was. Amar. His crown of blackbuck horns was gleaming, his arms clasped behind his back. In his hands swung a noose.
I dropped wordlessly from Kamala’s mouth, scuffed knees thudding softly in the dirt. I sat there, my legs curled beneath me, heedless of the bugs tracking their way across my thighs or the incessant nudging of Kamala’s nose against my back, trying to shove me into standing. I couldn’t move. Half-remembered memories transfixed me to the spot. I saw him through fractals, veil after veil of memory that was once mine.
The woman I was then and the person I was now may have shared a soul, but everything else between us was a mystery. I knew she had spent her life in the Otherworld. I knew she had ruled Naraka. I didn’t know whether she was a good ruler or a foolish one, but I knew that everything she saw of Amar fitted neatly in my heart, warm as a fire kernel and fierce with belonging, with rightness.
The only thing I didn’t know was why she—I—had left. I remembered the betrayal, but not the reason. I remembered the fury, but not the fire.
The longer I stared at Amar, the more images flashed behind my eyes—him gathering me in his arms, our eyes drunk on the sight of each other. The silk of skin against skin, the hum of a connection tethered at our marrow, hinging on breath patterns, voice inflection, intangibles of love. I tasted his lips against mine—fervent, firm—smoke and cinnamon and the panic of not catching yourself right before you fall.
Nritti strolled toward him, flashing her glamour of stolen beauty. Lightning splintered across the sky, throwing his face in relief, highlighting the sharp line of his lips and his narrowed eyes. Nritti tilted her head up expectantly, lips pursed and tugged into a shadow of a smile. She stared at him like he was a toy possessed, something that did her bidding.
And it seemed, for an instant, that she was right. My heart stopped.
Amar leaned over mechanically, lips pressing against hers in a kiss that was cold, unfeeling, but … a kiss all the same. Nritti smiled smugly and patted his cheek. I hardly heard what words she uttered. I had drawn my knees to my chest. Kamala had stopped nudging me.
“Come, come,” said Nritti to Amar, as if she were speaking to a child. She threw one last lovely glance at the children standing immovable and paralyzed behind her. “I thought they would be good witnesses.”
Amar’s brow quirked into a frown. “But why?” He surveyed them indifferently, his gaze occasionally flitting to the hellhounds at his side who looked at him with unconditional love. “Their time has not come. They have no place in my halls—”
“Our halls,” said Nritti. Around her there was only a haze of glamour and lust. “Don’t you remember when I found you? You were broken. And wasn’t I the one to save you? I pledged myself to you, so we could change the Otherworld forever … isn’t that what you want? Aren’t I what you want?”
Watching them was like slamming my arm repeatedly through a door of thorns, trying to get to the other side. Amar’s hand flew to his temple, his face crumpling with a sudden headache. Nritti watched impassively, a small wisp of light forming in her palm that she raised to her lips and blew … like a kiss.
The light sank into Amar’s skin and he drew his hand away, a dazed and remote expression slipping over his face.
“The pain doesn’t stop, does it?” asked Nritti. “It’s because you can’t rule over the dead by yourself. You need me. And what better way than to pair us together? What better way to relieve you of this tension than to will your power to me?”
Nritti stroked the noose in her hand as if it were a pet. Amar nodded, but the movement was wrong. Limp. His face was ashen. I wanted to rush to him, but I saw now that everything he had said in those last moments in Naraka were true. He was lost, and in need of saving. But I couldn’t subdue Nritti the way I was. Whatever latent power had once curled at my fingertips was gone.
“Come, come, my pet,” said Nritti, patting her leg like she was calling a dog to her.
Amar didn’t even notice; his gaze was far off, his arms like phantom limbs at his sides. The children clambered to her, gathering hold of anything they could—the ends of her hair, her dress, her fingers. She smiled thinly at all of them, shaking off their hands like they burned her and calling the hounds to howl once more at the sky.
“Take us back,” she commanded.
Lightning flashed once more through the sky. The noose glimmered in Nritti’s clenched hand, shining like an eel. Beside her, Amar was a specter of himself. Neither of them was looking at the other. Amar’s gaze was downcast, fixed on the sky. Nritti’s gaze was on the children. She was looking at them with a rapt desire.
In a flash they were gone. Nothing remained of where they stood except for a burnt ring in the ground. Within seconds, oily black mushrooms sprouted through the ground, unpeeling into blackened rings. Where the children stood, poisonous plants pushed themselves from the soil—violet petals of monkshood, horse-chestnut branches with pale blossoming heads, purple columbine and sorrowful betel palms.
My throat was thick with pain and I blinked wildly, trying to restrain the tears prickling behind my eyes. Anger had gouged a pit inside me. I tamped down my doubt. Whatever the reason behind why I left Naraka, Nritti and Amar together wasn’t it. I wouldn’t let my insecurities drape a noose around my mind. I was done with that.
Wordlessly, Kamala stepped forward, and she was thin, thin as false hope. But still, she swung her neck, bringing me to her until my tear-stained cheeks were dampening her bony neck.
“There, there,” she crooned, “would that I could eat anyone that made you unhappy.”
I laughed despite myself.
“Perhaps not so much a maybe-false-queen after all,” said Kamala.
I looked down at my skin, still sooty and tracked with brambles. I could feel my shorn hair move against the nape of my neck and my robes were as tattered as before.
“What makes you say that?”
“It is in your eyes,” said Kamala. “You do not look for yourself. You look for them. A true queen knows that doubt is as unwieldy and powerful as a forest fire. It is good, good, good. Good as mangoes during summer. Better than the flesh of new brides.” She smacked her lips. “If you do not doubt, you do not see.”
“I doubted too much,” I said, walking to the scorched earth where Nritti and Amar had disappeared. “I need to get to the Otherworld. You saw her, she was taking children from the human world, who had no business going to that blasted realm, let alone dying before their time.”
Kamala nodded. “Her hunger is worse than mine.”
At this, I looked sharply at her. “What is she hungry for?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe bones, like me. But I doubt it. It’s only those that deserve nothing that want everything.”
“It’s not right.”
“What is right? What is wrong? Too complicated,” said Kamala with a huff. “Better to do as I do and not think about those things. Live eternal damnation with the utmost simplicity: Stay on your own cremation grounds and eat only the bones that you find yourself.”
“As ever, brilliant advice.”
“I try.”
“Is our questing done now?” asked Kamala, trotting up beside me. “Will you nurse your broken heart and moan over it forever? May I now take a bite of that lush-lush arm?”
I snapped my arm back. “No.”
“Good,” said Kamala. “Because I hate the taste of cowardice.”
“There’s no way we can get back to the Otherworld.”
Kamala cocked her head. “Yes, we can.”
“What, do you have a bellyful of sapphires and a double-rainbow?”
“No. But you have something that will make the world open,” said Kamala. “A sacrifice.”
That other way.
“I have nothing to give.”
“Everyone always has something to give. Always. It does not matter whether it’s worth something to anyone but you; all that matters is that it is cherished.”
Her gaze leapt to my pocket, where the last memory lay buried in the cold onyx stone. The last full memory I had. I held it close to me. Aside from the bracelet of my own hair, this was all I had left of Naraka. It had guided me to the Chakara Forest, left me with a single burning hope that I wasn’t foolish for coming here, that I had some place in all of this. This was the last claim I had to a life I could only remember in wisps. A life that, while I acknowledged, I couldn’t reconcile.
“Why couldn’t we do this earlier?”
Kamala looked at me shrewdly, one eye dark as dried blood.
“Could you have done this earlier?”
I knew what she meant. Before seeing Bharata and Gauri, I had been lugging along the ghosts of my past. But not anymore. Still, something stung me, like tiny insect bites of regret.
“What is the matter?” asked Kamala.
I pulled the stone from the makeshift pocket in my robes. “I feel like I’m losing a piece of myself.”
“Oh, nonsense.”
I glared at her. “You don’t know what happened back there. You don’t know what it’s like to feel like for a moment you were entirely whole. Like you finally knew yourself and then to have that ripped from you.”
Kamala regarded me for a moment. “Yes, actually, I do. That is the whole purpose of a curse. To remind you that you are lacking, but never know what that hollow is.”
I stepped away from her, chastened. “I’m sorry.”
“Do not be. Do not be anything. Do not mourn a life you do not know. It is done, it has happened. It is a riven bone, without meat or memory.”
“But it was me, Kamala.”
“You have more than one self.”
“But—”
“But nothing. It is foolish to cling to ghosts or spent bones. It is better to forge ahead. It is better to leave what you do not know and make yourself anew. I have slung the ghosts of memories across my back for years and it has done me no good and earned me no victuals.”
I nodded. She was right. Souls had no shackles. They knew no nationality and swore no allegiances. Whoever I was, whoever I could be … that was a choice. And I had made mine.
“How do I give it away?”
“Consign it to the earth with blood,” said Kamala, before tossing her head at the scorched earth. “Bury it in the ground.”
Despite the curiosity burning inside me to know that last memory, I forced it away. It was part of me, but separate, and I wouldn’t let it define me. I used the sharp edge of the stone to prick the pad of my finger.
“Oooh,” crooned Kamala. “How about a lick, then?”
Ignoring her, I smeared blood across the stone and dropped it to the ground. It landed with a silent thud against the dirt. I knelt toward the stone, bringing the memory close to my eye. I let myself sink into it just barely, teasing only the slightest detail of the memory before I forced myself to drop it.
I blinked back the barest of images—a samite curtain, an upturned hand. I held the emotion coiled inside me, the knowledge that the memory was potent. Beloved. My voice trembled:
“This is what sacrifice I offer you for passage to the Otherworld. Take a memory that I lay claim to only in name, but not in spirit. I will be less whole without it. But let the weight of it, its promise of love and tears, of something lost and beautiful, serve as fair barter.”
I kicked a small hole into the ground and buried the memory there. Earth ate the offering, flashing pale threads of tubers like gnashing teeth until the stone had disappeared. Above, thunder groaned in the bellies of the sky. Kamala and I both started, shocked by the sound. Thunder never used to bother me, but this was a horrible, wrenching sound—like the sky screaming.
Kamala inhaled sharply. “Look!”
I turned.
The memory was gone. The hole I had made for it had fallen in on itself; moon-bright roots clung to the sides, forming a tunnel veined with quartz.
“Is that how—” Kamala began.
“Yes,” I said, pushing her back, “get in, get in!”
“I don’t like being underground.”
“Not the time!” I said. I squatted to the ground, kicking my legs into the hole, and suppressed a shiver. It was cold and damp. But not like dirt. Like sweat-covered skin cooling in the wind. “Ready?”
“Absolutely not—”
I grabbed hold of her reins. “Not looking for an answer.”
And then we slid forth.
25
IMPOSSIBLE HUNGER
Roots tore through my hair. Lodes of quartz banded around the tunnel, but the light was stingy and pale, and refused to illuminate what lay ahead. I threw my hands out against the dark. My insides slammed together and left me weightless. Dark fell in such cold, thick veils that for a moment, I didn’t know whether my eyes were open.
I blinked, squeezing my eyes shut before opening them just in time to see the earth leaping out to meet us. My shoulder knifed into the ground. Light spiraled across my vision and pain needled into my joints.
Kamala tumbled beside me. The moment she found her bearings, she cast a withering glance my way.
“I do not like you.”
I winked at her.
She bared her teeth at me.
Around us, the Night Bazaar was more than just unrecognizable—it was gone. Where the sky had once been divided by perpetual day and night, it now appeared uniformly black. Haphazardly strewn gems poked out of the ground, casting a cold light that joined the glow of bone-white corpses hang
ing from trees in a shadowy orchard. The vendor stalls were gone. Snapped wheels, chipped signs and shattered jars littered the outskirts of a large clearing in the middle of the bazaar. Except for some shriveled trees, it was deserted. Everything had a haunted look. Scorch marks covered the dais where the gandharva musicians had once played beautiful music.
And in the orchard where Amar had handed me a fey fruit, nothing remained but charred stumps. Beside me, Kamala suppressed a shiver before glancing around. Sounds fluttered from a haze-riddled section of the Night Bazaar. The noise was at once soft and deafening, like a frenzied heartbeat or a scream unleashed underwater.
“He is here.”
I didn’t need to ask who.
I pulled my robes tightly across me. Heat slapped the air, but the atmosphere held not warmth, but fury. The ground changed beneath us. Where it had been coarse and ashy, now it was smooth and cool. I glanced down and my stomach flipped. We were walking on sanded bones. Their slender, asymmetrical shapes were fitted together like slats of wood. Strange crenulations like teeth marks dented the bone floor and I looked away sharply. By now, my sandals were hardly more than thread and I could feel each bone’s smooth ridges curl beneath my feet.
The sounds around the corner were deafening and chaotic, not at all like the alluring music the gandharvas played. Even the air felt foreign. Where the Night Bazaar once smelled of secrets and the promise of adventure, the smell of the Netherworld had a cloying unpleasantness ripe with the stench of fermenting fruit and sulfur.
“What happened to everyone else?” I asked.
Kamala shuddered, her withers rippling with goose bumps. “They have fled.”
“Where did they go?”
“In the trees, in the rivers, in the glens,” murmured Kamala, swaying her head from side to side. “In all the hidey-holes left in the world.”
I remembered the first time I came to the Night Bazaar, how the crowds parted like water before Amar and me, how their gaze was frantic, but always reverent. He had kept them safe. Whatever had happened, they must not have thought he could keep them safe anymore. I couldn’t blame them. The Night Bazaar was in disarray. Lightning hung from the torn seams of the sky, flickering weakly in the air. The shadowy dome above held no signs of the sun, moon or stars. Here, there were chalky square outlines in the floor where towering rakshas wrestled and sparred. In a darkened corner, a horde of footless bhuts swayed in a terrifying dance to the rhythm of their own screams. On the outskirts stretched an expanse of black water. Something skimmed the waves; great fins and a jaw jutted outward—poised for biting and crowded with teeth. A timingala. Its eyes never blinked and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were fixed on me, shining with hunger.
The Star-Touched Queen Page 22