The Library of Fates

by Aditi Khorana

  “I’ll be right back, master,” said the guard to Sikander before he ran back down the stairs. By the time we were seated around the table, an entire staff of men had appeared, bottles of wine in their hands, plates of cheeses and breads and olives and sweets.

  I looked out into the distance at a view of the ocean. In fact, there was nothing but ocean with a few dots of light scattered across it.

  “Ships sailing away from Macedon. Sailors leaving behind their lovers and all that,” Sikander said.

  “It’s . . . beautiful,” Chandradev said.

  “I think so. I think you ought to trust me more often,” he said, grinning, placing his hand on Thea’s shoulder. Once again, she pulled away and turned to Chandradev.

  “You know . . . I’ve always wanted to travel to Shalingar,” she said.

  “Perhaps I’ll take you there one day,” Sikander said to her. “Maybe for our honeymoon,” he added causally as he poured each of us a glass of wine.

  I began to laugh. “Your honeymoon?”

  I looked around the table, waiting for the others to join me in laughter, but no one did.

  “Yes, of course,” Sikander said with a hint of annoyance in his voice. This time, he placed a possessive hand on Thea’s elbow. “She hates talking about it. And half the time she hates me,” he snickered, but there was a hint of nervousness in his laugh. “But one day”—he turned to Thea—“you’re just going to have to accept it.”

  “Accept what?” I asked, my heart racing.

  “That we’ve been betrothed to be married since we were children,” he said. “I told you . . . just one large, bickering, warring, loving family.”

  I looked from Thea to Chandradev. They both reached for their glasses of wine, avoiding each other’s eyes.

  Thea downed her entire glass, and Sikander refilled it, spilling wine all over the table.

  “Sorry,” he said without looking at her. “My mistake.”

  Thirty-Four

  I WAS STILL IN SHOCK by the time we arrived back at the dormitory, Thala and I sneaking into the stately stone building in the dark with the others. We silently followed Sikander and Chandradev to their room, exhausted from the night. Only I was more than exhausted. I was confused and unnerved by what I had learned.

  So Thea had followed her heart, and in the process, Sikander had gone mad. My parents had separated, I had been left motherless my whole life, and my father had been assassinated. But that wasn’t even all of it. Sikander’s rage had caused him to destroy so many lives—Thala’s, the soldiers we had encountered in the desert, the citizens of all the empires he had overthrown, even his own subjects.

  Here and now, he was simply an entitled party boy: well-connected, wealthy, and profligate, but ultimately harmless. But I understood that losing Thea must have turned him into a crazed despot.

  In the chariot on the way back, I had been quiet, pondering what I was here for, and yet, every time I turned and caught my father’s profile or my mother animatedly told me something about herself, I felt overwhelmed with a kind of gratitude I never expected to feel. I was content, happy. Sitting between my mother and my father, I felt at home, loved, almost moved to tears. I had found it—the simplicity of being with my parents and enjoying their company, the feeling of family. The strange thing was that when I saw the way that Sikander interacted with them, I realized that he had once been a part of their family too, that he considered them his own.

  I knew that I couldn’t kill him.

  But I didn’t know what else to do.

  ¤

  “We’ll see you in the morning.” Sikander yawned as he and Chandradev headed into their room. Thea hugged us before she took off.

  “I’m so glad you’re both here.” She smiled. I watched her walk away, realizing that it was just Thala and me again.

  We walked to the end of the hallway together and turned a corner, finding an empty spare room with two beds, two desks, and two chairs. A bare window overlooked the campus.

  Thala collapsed on the bed. “At least we have a place to stay the night.”

  But I was furious at her. “When were you going to tell me?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You know everything, Thala. How did you not know that Thea and Sikander were betrothed?”

  “Does it make a difference?” She sat up to face me. “You still have to kill him, Amrita.”

  “You told me he loved Thea! Not that they were betrothed!”

  “He does love her.” I continued to glare at her, and finally she sighed. “Amrita, I can’t see the future anymore. Or I should say, I can’t see it from here. I didn’t know about their betrothal. I can’t see what happens to Sikander. That’s why I said what I did when he asked me about the future. Coming back here . . . it’s done something strange to my abilities.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re actively rewriting the future now because we’re rewriting the past. I don’t know what the consequences might be. I can see hundreds of different possibilities.”

  “Does that mean you’re having second thoughts? About killing Sikander?” There was a hint of hopefulness in my voice.

  “I don’t know what it means. All I know for certain is that if Thea and Chandradev marry, Sikander goes mad. He kills his father, overtakes the throne, starts invading every territory from the north to the south.”

  I sat down on the window ledge. “And what if they don’t marry?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if she ends up marrying Sikander, just as she’s supposed to do?”

  Thala fidgeted in her chair. “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Maybe I just need to sleep. But I don’t have any answers for you anymore. I can’t help you with this, Amrita. I’m sorry.”

  ¤

  I couldn’t sleep, and after tossing and turning for a couple of hours, I got up, grabbing the dagger in my hand and sneaking off campus. I found a small park in the center of the city, placed my dagger in the grass, and looked up into the moon.

  Varun, I need your help.

  But there was only the night sky staring back at me. I closed my eyes, praying he’d answer, and soon heard the sweeping of wings. My heart swelled with anticipation.

  I opened my eyes to see that Saaras had landed before me. He flapped his wings until he transformed into Varun. My heart raced at the sight of him, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure what to say, my thoughts clouded by the thrill of seeing him again.

  “You’ve been watching me,” I finally said. I wasn’t sure how I knew this, but I did.

  He nodded his head, his mouth curling into that welcome smile that had by now become so familiar. “I sensed I’d find you here, in the past. I told you there was another way.” He sat down before me in the grass, and once again, we were face to face.

  This time, the desire within me spoke even louder than before. I wanted to touch his face again. I wanted his mouth against my own, his body against mine.

  And yet, I didn’t want to forget why I had called for him.

  “I can’t kill him,” I said. “I just can’t find it in myself.”

  Varun nodded his head, his warm eyes assessing me. “You should consider that a blessing.”

  “What do I do?” I looked back into those eyes, trying to find my center.

  “That I can’t tell you.”

  “I had a feeling you’d say that.”

  “And yet you still called for me . . . ,” he teased, reaching for my hand. “Sorry. It’s instinct,” he said. But I shook my head, squeezing his hand before he could retract it. “It’s been hundreds of years, and yet it’s still there. Some part of me can’t forget.”

  “I don’t remember the past, but right now, this thing between us . . .” It was impossible not to acknowledge, but difficult to articulate.

  H
e fought back a smile. “I know” was all he had to say.

  We both felt it—as though there were a magnet pulling my body to his, and the only thing resisting this pull was our own will in the face of a task at hand that was far too important.

  Varun continued to watch me, and I saw the way his eyes took me in. With a desire so strong that it took everything for him not to act on it.

  And yet, when he spoke, his tone was pensive. “Something has to be sacrificed in order for something to be gained.”

  For a moment, I thought he was talking about us, but I recovered quickly. “I’ll sacrifice whatever I need to . . . but what?”

  He didn’t have to answer. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I understood what Varun was saying. I thought back to the revelation I had before I tried to sleep.

  What would trigger the horrific events we had experienced in our lives, what would start a chain reaction that would lead to the suffering of so many people, the tiny flame that would eventually turn into the conflagration, was Chandradev’s growing love for Thea and Thea’s growing love for Chandradev. It was their relationship that needed to be stopped. And if they were never together, never a pair, if they never got married, then I would cease to exist.

  I inhaled quickly. “It’s me,” I realized. “I’m what must be sacrificed.”

  Varun nodded.

  “Thea is a . . . leader. She could be good for Macedon. Good for the world. And if she simply goes ahead and marries Sikander as she’s expected to . . .”

  “She becomes the queen of Macedon,” Varun confirmed, “And Chandradev returns to Shalingar at the end of school. Just as he’s supposed to.”

  “I can’t stop them from falling in love,” I said, thinking aloud.

  “It’s already beginning to happen.”

  “But I can stop them from being together.”

  “You have the power to.”

  “So . . . it’ll be like—”

  “Like you never existed.”

  I imagined myself nowhere, floating in a sea of black. I shuddered. “But where will I go? Will it be like dying?”

  Varun shook his head.

  “Will I go where the Sybillines went?”

  He shifted, lying down in the grass and gently pulling me down with him. We lay there for a moment in silence, looking up at the stars. I leaned into his arm, and he wrapped it around me.

  “No,” he finally said. “You’re not going where the Sybillines went.”

  When it was clear that he wouldn’t explain, I said quietly, “It’s the only way, isn’t it?”

  “There are many ways, but you have to ask yourself if this is the one that feels right.”

  I hesitated for a moment, taking it all in.

  “I want you to enjoy it,” he said. “Your time here on this Earth. You don’t want to end it by taking someone’s life.”

  “I don’t want that either. So my life really is about to end.” I let the thought sink in.

  “You don’t really know how it ends yet,” he said before he slowly disentangled his body from mine, propping himself up to look into my eyes.

  As he did, I sensed the end of our meeting, and once again I felt bereft, alone.

  “Find me again once you’ve carried out your task,” he said. His hand cupped my cheek, and I nodded, watching him transform back to Saaras before he took off.

  I sat in the grass for a long time by myself, realizing that there wasn’t just one death. There were hundreds, if not millions of deaths in a person’s life. They varied in degree; they took on different forms. But they were ultimately all variations of the same few things: saying goodbye, change, sacrifice.

  I realized something else as I sat there: There was a part of me that wanted to stay forever with Chandradev and Thea. I wanted to watch their affection and love for each other grow. I wanted to know my parents, every part of them. I wanted to feel like a normal person, but I knew I never would again.

  Maybe nobody ever really gets that chance.

  ¤

  When I returned to our room, Thala was up, reading a book, waiting for me.

  “I have to prevent my parents from ever being together,” I announced.

  She put her book down and took a deep breath. I braced myself for an argument. “I know what I came here to do, but I’m sorry, I can’t,” I told her. “It’s not who I am.”

  “I know,” she said.

  I was taken aback. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Can you see anything?”

  Thala closed her eyes, and I realized how much I’d come to rely on her extraordinary gift.

  When she opened them, they were gray. “All I can see is that it won’t last between Thea and Sikander. That they don’t have to be together forever in order to change Sikander’s fate. Just long enough that Chandradev can return to Shalingar.”

  I walked to the window, and Thala followed me.

  In less than an hour, a new day would break over Macedon.

  But right now, the moon was still full, and the campus was drenched in a radiant silver light.

  “Where will I go, Thala? If I’m never born in this new version of time, where do I go?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and we were both silent for a moment. We hadn’t slept in ages, and we were weary and still looking for answers to questions that baffled us.

  And then, I heard a voice.

  “Who are you?” it said.

  We both turned at once. Thea was standing by the door, her hand against the doorframe, fear and confusion in her eyes.

  Thirty-Five

  “I . . . DON’T KNOW if you’d believe me,” I told her.

  “Try me,” Thea said, sitting down on the bed across from us.

  Thala glanced at me before she got up. “I’ll leave you two for now,” she said before she walked out of the room.

  “I don’t know how to put this,” I said to Thea, “but I come from the future.” I looked at her to see if she would simply laugh at me, but she didn’t.

  “I never knew my mother,” I started.

  She was watching me carefully, waiting for me to go on, and so I continued. I told her about my childhood, about my father, about Shalingar. I told her about the betrothal to Sikander, about Arjun, about the attack on Shalingar Palace. I told her about meeting Thala and going on a journey. I told her about the temple at Mount Moutza and the desert and the Janaka Caves and Varun.

  As I did, and as she listened, it was the strangest thing: I could feel myself disappearing. Maybe it was that I already sensed things wouldn’t be the same after I told her everything, but it was more real than that. I was asking her to do something that would erase me from the universe, negate me from the record of time, and I was hoping with everything inside of me that she would concede.

  Finally, I finished my story.

  “I’m the child that you and Chandradev will—would have had one day. Except, in that version of the story, Chandradev leaves Macedon . . . without you. And he raises me alone before he’s killed by Sikander’s men. I never get to be with or even meet my mother. We were separated amid this . . . tragic turn of events.”

  I looked up at her, still trying to make sense of it: the fact that we were sitting face to face in a dormitory, me from the future, her from this present. A mother and a daughter meeting across time.

  “You’re saying I have to marry Sikander? Otherwise, he turns into some . . . despotic ruler?” she quietly asked. At first I thought she was mocking me, but when I saw the look on Thea’s face, I could tell that she believed me.

  “You don’t have to do anything. But I had to tell you what happens if you don’t marry him.”

  “And if I do stop speaking to Chandradev? Cut him out of my life?”

  I couldn’t predict the future like Thala, but I knew what would happen, how things woul
d unfold.

  Thea would stop spending time with Chandradev. It would be a decision she made with her will, rather than with her heart, and she would pay a price for it. She would distance herself from him, even as it pained her. She would spend weeks and months and years wondering what that other life—the one she desired—might have looked like.

  She would watch Chandradev return to Shalingar at the end of his four years at the Academy, and she would spend weeks lamenting his absence. She would marry a man she didn’t love, and she would harbor an intense pain and longing for the one she did.

  “I suppose, no matter what, I’ll be fine,” she said to me after a long silence.

  “You will?” I asked, surprised.

  She smiled. “I don’t know.” There were tears in her eyes. “The thing is . . . I know we’ve only just met . . . but somehow, the idea of being with Chandradev is already rooted in me.”

  I nodded, trying not to cry. “I know he feels the same way.”

  In preventing one particular form of disaster, the absence of that other reality, the one we knew and expected, the one that we felt was our own, was slowly becoming a gaping hole in each of our lives, searing us with its edges.

  “Will he be all right?” Thea asked. She was asking about my father.

  In some part of me, I knew the answer to this too: Chandradev would suffer, wondering what he had done wrong. He would hold tightly to a secret, buried in the deepest recesses of his heart: That he loved Thea. That he couldn’t have her.

  But perhaps that was always the case.

  “In the version of time that I came from, that I experienced, he spends years away from you, missing you anyway. It seems that loss, or at least the experience of being torn from each other, is a part of your lives no matter what you choose.”

  I remembered Thala’s words: Some things are fixed, some things are changeable. Maybe it was never Thea and Chandradev’s fate to spend a lifetime together, to raise a family together. Maybe fate is a puzzle that nobody truly understands, not even the vetalas.

  She nodded. “I know what you’re asking me to do. But it’s still difficult to swallow. That I have a choice, but I really don’t. That my actions have unintended consequences.”