But Papa had barely eaten a thing. So had I. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Sikander had said about my mother, and I didn’t doubt that it had thrown my father off too. He wasn’t his usual self. He was distant, irritable in a way I had never seen him before.
I could barely concentrate on the conversation transpiring before me. Why hadn’t my father mentioned anything about my mother in all these years? Why had he always cut me off or changed the subject when I attempted to inquire about her? What was he keeping from me? And to what end?
I looked across the table at Arjun, who smiled at me before he glanced at my ring. Just looking at him flooded my heart with affection. I caught myself staring as the lanterns lit up the golden planes of his face, the angle of his cheekbones, and forced myself to look away.
“I’m going to get right to the point, Chandradev,” Sikander said. “It’s taken me fifteen years to establish trade between the east and the west.”
“And it’s been very good . . . for Macedon.”
“Not just Macedon, Chandradev. The Silk Road has been good for everyone.”
The Silk Road: When I first heard of it as a child, I imagined a path made of reams and reams of gold silk. I imagined traders, monks, entire clans of Bedouins traveling along it, barefoot so as not to mar the pristine fabric under their feet. It took me years to understand that the Silk Road of my imaginings was nothing like the real thing, even if I had never seen the real thing with my own eyes.
“And I know just the thing that you can bring to the table, so to speak.”
“Enlighten me, Sikander,” my father said, narrowing his eyes.
“Chamak.”
Across the dining hall, there was silence. Bandaka put down his spoon. Shree raised her eyes. Arjun and I glanced at each other. For a moment, all that could be heard was the startled chirp of insects.
My father leaned back in his chair, his face drawn, his jaw tensed. “That’s a complicated request, Sikander.”
“It’s not a request, Chandradev,” Sikander responded crisply. Again, silence. This time Sikander shattered it with a sharp laugh that startled me. “That’s why I’m here. To say hello to an old friend, to discuss our trade relationship. And, of course, to meet your beautiful daughter,” he said, turning to smile at me with his golden teeth.
I shrank in my chair, forcing a small smile in his direction, but his gaze was so intense that I had to break it. I imagined what it would be like to be married to him. The image of him kissing me with that mouth filled with gold teeth startled me and made me want to retch.
“You don’t know this about my kingdom, Sikander, but I don’t have any control over chamak. It’s not a regulated substance. It’s a drug—”
“A drug that isn’t available anywhere else in the world!”
“A drug that’s mined and guarded by an ancient tribe that lives in an undisclosed location and communicates with the rest of society only on their own terms, through their own intermediaries—”
“But they communicate with you, Chandradev,” Sikander said quietly.
“Through messengers whom they select and deploy, but never directly.”
“Then bring the Sybillines here. Make introductions. I’ll talk to them.”
Bandaka shook his head, interjecting, “They would never agree. They don’t leave the caves. And, with all due respect, Your Majesty, one can’t just think about a boost to our own economy and irresponsibly send caravans full of chamak to other lands. We have to consider the consequences.”
“What consequences? You already trade small amounts of it with neighboring kingdoms,” Sikander said.
Shree stepped in, authority in her voice. “With neighboring kingdoms, yes. And small amounts—that’s the key. But we have to limit its trade. Chamak can be good or bad, but ultimately, the Sybillines are the custodians of it—they’ve studied its uses for thousands of years, and we have to acknowledge its power. If it were to get in the wrong hands—” She hesitated and looked away.
“One could easily go to the mountains, mine the stuff with or without the Sybillines,” Sikander said with exasperation in his voice.
“It’s not that simple,” Bandaka responded. “Chamak responds to the Sybillines—it’s a living substance. It loses its power if it’s mined by someone else.”
Sikander placed his palm on the table before him. “Then we force the Sybillines to mine it for us.”
My father interjected. “They would likely rather give their lives than live as slaves. They live within a compound of caves that’s impossible to find. People have tried to find them and died trying. And they are a fiercely ethical people. Sikander, you don’t understand—the Sybillines communicate only with those they want to communicate with—”
But Sikander dismissed my father. “Anything is possible if there’s a will. There must be a few we can persuade.”
“No one has even seen a Sybilline in centuries, Sikander!”
Sikander sighed, exasperation registering on his face. He looked at my father like he was reasoning with a belligerent child, one who didn’t know what was good for him. “You knew me all those years ago. Did you ever think I’d become emperor of the greatest kingdom there ever was? Did you ever think I’d become Sikander the Great?”
My father was silent.
“I learned quite a bit from you back then, Chandradev. Maybe now it’s your turn to learn something from me. You’re a maharaja of a kingdom. And you’re being pushed around by a gang of chamak farmers and Earth-lovers who live in caves?”
“Chamak is a temperamental substance, Sikander.” My father raised his voice. “It has the wiles of an infant. It can be tended to only by the Sybillines, or it’s just a powder.”
“Silver dust,” Shree added.
“You’ll be a part of our trade route, part of the modern world! Imports pouring into your kingdom, visitors coming in from across the world. Why fight this, Chandradev?”
“No one in Shalingar suffers from poverty. Everyone is taken care of here.” And then my father added the part that we all instantly knew he shouldn’t have. “Not like in your kingdom,” he said.
I glanced at Arjun, who looked back at me, startled. I knew right then that my father needed saving in that moment, and instinct kicked in, the urge to protect him. But I can’t say my own curiosity didn’t play a part in what happened next.
“Your Majesty, I’d love to learn more about your time at the Military Academy,” I said. I was looking down, but the moment the words were out of my mouth, I knew I needed to go on. I looked up, my eyes meeting my father’s. “What were you like? What was my father like? And my mother . . .”
Sikander didn’t look at me. His eyes were on my father, who sat at the head of the table, glaring back at him.
“Your mother was a magnet, a star, the sun to all our moons,” Sikander said, skipping to the information he seemed to understand I most wanted to know. “Beautiful, courageous, brilliant, compelling. Good at so many things that sometimes I wondered if she could possibly even be human.” Sikander’s face softened for a moment before he continued, his next words directed solely at my father. “Brother. We have history. Do you remember that time we snuck off campus together and went into town, drank bottles and bottles of wine into the night, just the three of us?”
But my father said nothing. He simply pursed his lips together.
“She told us that story, that parable . . .”
My head whipped back in Sikander’s direction. The Parable of the Land of Trees.
“She was quite a storyteller.” I could tell he was drunk from the way he slurred his words. I didn’t care.
“What was she like?” I whispered, my eyes fixed on him. Everyone at the table hushed, hanging on Sikander’s every word.
He leaned back in his seat and looked at me, his eyes tracing my shoulders, my bare arms. I looke
d away, uncomfortable, slightly afraid.
“Quite like you, actually. Brilliant, witty, very protective of those she loved. She had a fighting spirit, coming from that family she was born into . . .”
“Her family?”
“Your father really hasn’t told you any of it, has he?” He grinned, glancing back toward my father, whose silence was beginning to infuriate me. I avoided looking at him across the table, even as I felt a pang of disloyalty.
“I don’t know anything about her,” I said. And as I said it, I knew that I had chosen a side, but hadn’t my father kept everything about my mother from me my whole life? Wasn’t he simply standing by as Sikander marched into Shalingar to make me his bride, technically against my will? I was owed something. An explanation. That was all I was asking for. It wasn’t very much, I realized, and this realization made me even angrier.
“Your mother came from the aristocracy of Macedon. They were very liberal in their politics. Troublemakers, intellectuals, revolutionaries. The kind that don’t fight. The kind that talk.” He shook his head and laughed. “They were very outspoken about their vehement dislike of my father’s rule. None of them survived, of course.”
My heart stopped. “What do you mean?”
“There was a raid on their home, sometime before your father left Macedon with you.” He turned to me, pressing his hands together in a strangely watered-down mea culpa. “My father didn’t like his critics very much. It had to be done. Her parents—your grandparents—were taken in for questioning. Her brother too. They died in prison, as far as I know. But your mother, she escaped.”
“Escaped?”
“They weren’t able to locate her. She’s still on the loose, as far as I know. In hiding, I suppose. So your father never told you that you have criminal blood in your veins, eh?” He laughed, looking back at my father. “I’m sure she wonders about you too.”
“You mean she’s—” Alive. My mother is alive.
But Sikander was lost in his own thoughts. “Every man at that school was in love with her, but she was quite taken with your father,” he said, pointing his spoon at my father. “It was back in the days that the Academy accepted women. Not anymore. I find them to be an unnecessary distraction.”
At that very moment, my father’s gaze caught mine from across the table. He looked from me to Sikander, and I could tell from the frozen expression on his face that he had completely lost control of the situation.
“We were such . . . idealists back then, weren’t we?” Sikander went on, lifting his knife and turning it in his fingers before he drove it into the spiced quail sitting on his plate. “But much has changed since then. We’ve changed. We live in modern times . . . I wish I had your idealism, Chandradev, but I live in the real world. Not in a land of magical talking trees.”
We were all silent, stunned. I glanced at Arjun, who furrowed his brow at me. Sikander looked around the room at his advisors, then at my father’s.
He choked out his words in anger, emphasizing each one. “Fairy tales mean nothing to me. Stories have never saved anyone. Time moves forward, and you have to decide: Do you want it to move on without you? Think of the future of your kingdom. Think of Amrita’s future,” he said, and he pointed his hand at me, a gesture that made me shrink in my chair. “Right now, you have a choice. What happened to this Land of Trees of yours—that’s just the nature of the world. One can’t resist the world forever. And if you resist now, you won’t have the choice later.”
Four
SEVERAL SETS OF EYES turned to look at me as I burst through the door of the Map Chamber, holding back my tears. I hadn’t expected to see all of Papa’s advisors there with him: Shree, Bandaka, Ali. I glanced around the room. His entire council of advisors was meeting past midnight, the large wooden table before them covered with maps and scrolls of parchment filled with frenetic text. Papa’s security detail was there too, all of them still dressed in their khalats. They must have reconvened right after dinner.
An emergency meeting, I realized. I quickly wiped away my tears, embarassed. It was instinct by now. I remembered the words Mala had recited to me since I was little: Royalty does not make a scene. Royalty behaves with dignity, poise, decorum, grace, compassion. Royalty remembers responsibility, maintains their composure, knows they are constantly being watched. Royalty must be brave, strategic, loyal.
In bursting in on my father, or in betraying him by asking Sikander about my mother, I had displayed none of these characteristics. Yet I was simultaneously furious and confused. My father was the only one who could clarify everything for me, and he knew it.
Dinner had ended on a tense note, with Sikander curtly excusing himself to retire to the guest quarters and my father disappearing soon after. I sensed I would find him in here, where he was most at ease and entirely in control, but I wasn’t expecting him to be in the midst of an emergency congress.
“You’re all dismissed.” He turned to his advisors. “Turn in for the night. We’ll convene early tomorrow morning and start where we left off.”
Shree’s voice carried a hint of worry. “But, Your Majesty, we still haven’t come up with a solution—”
“And we will. Tomorrow.”
I watched guiltily as Papa’s advisors and security trailed out the door. And then there were just two of us, standing on either side of the Map Chamber. My father at the head of the heavy wooden table carved from a banyan tree that Arjun and I used to play under when we were children, and me by the door, waiting for him to explain.
We looked at each other across the dimly lit room, maps of Shalingar, of Lake Chanakya, of Persia, Macedon, the entire east, surrounding us. I had studied those maps so carefully, memorizing capitals, learning about topography, the economy, trade. I had painstakingly studied the customs and beliefs of all the lands south of the Jhelum River and many of the lands north of it too. I knew the history of every kingdom that surrounded us, including our own, but I didn’t know my own past. I didn’t know who I was. And I couldn’t help but conclude that it was my father’s fault.
But my father was quiet. He simply pressed his palms into the table before him and watched me silently, and I could tell he was trying to decide what to say.
“Sit down,” he said softly, and I came around the table as he pulled a chair out for me.
He poured a tumbler of water from an earthen carafe and placed it before me, squeezing my shoulder with his other hand. Then he sat down and looked out the window, taking a deep breath. My eyes followed his to the highest mountain in the distance. Mount Moutza. I remember Mala telling me its name. The Mountain of Miracles. It was on the way to the Janaka Caves, where the Sybillines supposedly lived.
Mala had told me a fable about the mountain when I was a child. It was the site where the Diviners, the first humans, met with and built an alliance with the vetalas, the cunning and beautiful ghouls that haunted people’s souls. No one had seen a vetala in hundreds of years, but it was believed that they once wandered the Earth as though it was theirs.
The Diviners, the vetalas, talking trees. Sikander was right—they were just stories, and stories couldn’t save people. Maybe those stories did more harm than good by giving us false hope. All they did was reinforce our faith that the world was once made up almost entirely of magic or miracles. But where was that magic now, when we needed it?
“That’s why you told me that story again and again and again,” I said to my father, seeing for the first time that he must have thought of her each time.
“It was . . . her favorite parable.”
There was an awkward tension between my father and me, and I realized how difficult it was for him, discussing my mother.
“You should have told me, at the very least, that she’s still alive!”
“There’s no way for us to confirm that. You saw the way Sikander is. It could all be manipulation in order to—”
“It was far more complicated than you know. And if I didn’t tell you, it was to protect you—”
“That’s rubbish!” I yelled again, stunned at the ferocity of my tone.
He nodded, as though he understood that my reaction was warranted. “I’ve tried, over the years . . . to tell you about her, and to find her. I know how difficult this is for you to understand, but Sikander is attempting to drive a wedge between us, and she—”
“You allowed that to happen, Papa.”
“I should have told you,” he quietly said. “Tell me what you want to know. Ask me whatever you’d like to ask,” he said. He waited me out patiently.
It was all I had ever wanted to hear. I held my breath, but my head was spinning. Now that the opportunity had presented itself, there was only one thing I wanted, no, needed to know.
“How do I find her?”
“That, I can’t tell you,” he said.
“But she’s in Macedon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why isn’t she . . . here? With us?” I asked, tears filling my eyes.
“We needed to keep you safe. We had a plan, but the day we were supposed to leave Macedon and come here, she disappeared.”
“I don’t understand. She was supposed to come here?”
My father nodded, slowly. “We had gone into hiding. There was a time when I even considered staying in Macedon, or going someplace else. Hiding our identities. I thought about giving Bandaka the throne. He was . . . is my best friend, just the way Arjun is yours. But in the end, we decided to come back to Shalingar. Only, she didn’t come with us.”
The Library of Fates Page 3