A Crown of Wishes

by Roshani Chokshi

  “If you want us to believe you, let us speak to your mate.”

  Shame shot through me. What kind of person was I that I hadn’t even thought to ask Kauveri’s sister directly? My mind had instantly gone to punishment.

  The Serpent King tilted his head. “We used to honor such requests. And do you know what we have received every time? Scorn. Ridicule. We refuse to be subjected to the doubts of others. My mate is the river Kapila,” he said proudly. “She is stronger than every current and more powerful than the sea at its most ferocious. And yet she would have to listen—once more—to a hundred questions probing whether she was enchanted, stupefied, kidnapped and dragged down to the lair of a snake. I will not demean her so. And I will not let you demean her.”

  Vikram’s hand ran down my spine. His eyes flashed in warning.

  “Here’s another story,” hissed the Serpent King. By now, we were flush against the wall. “Once there was a demon king who stole away the beautiful river goddess and kept her as his prisoner until she was so weakened that she agreed to become his wife. That demon king would have had to break the ferocity of a river and all of her powers. And whatever pair of mortals decided to fight him would have to get through that. So which tale do you choose to believe? Don’t think I don’t know what you want. I could hear your thoughts screaming and calling for my venom the moment your feet hit the staircase.”

  “If you know that we’re here for your venom then you know why we need it,” said Vikram calmly. “We don’t have a choice.”

  “Oh, but you do,” said the Serpent King. “Choose which story to believe. A man in love or a man in lust? The wronged or the wrongful? You have the choice to believe my innocence and I will let you leave in peace. I will tell the Lord of Treasures what you have done and I will personally procure you an exit. Or you can choose to believe in the harm I caused. You can fight me for my venom, and if you win, I will give it to you. I, too, follow the rules of the Tournament. So what will it be? Once you choose, it cannot be undone. No matter how much all of our hearts may break beneath your choice.”

  The Serpent King moved backward, as if he were giving us privacy. But it made no difference, since he could read our minds anyway. The more I thought about Kauveri, the more I believed that he had done wrong. Why else would Kauveri want his venom? Even Aasha had seemed disgusted with him. More than that, this might be our only chance to secure an exit out of Alaka. Without this venom, it wouldn’t even matter if we won the Tournament, because we didn’t know which of us would be allowed to leave Alaka. My mind was decided. The Serpent King eyed me coldly, and then his gaze turned to Vikram. Vikram looked less decided, but his hand never once moved from the small of my back.

  “I see,” said the Serpent King. His voice was silky menace. “You wish to ask my wife for the truth behind our story? Then do so. As you chose which story of me to believe, choose her. But choose wrong, and your lives are forfeit.”

  I didn’t understand what he meant until he moved to one side of the room. He flicked his tail against the glass floor, shattering it. Mist rose from the spider-thin cracks, pushing apart the fissures to make way for the seven women who rose out of the water. They were almost identical, but their manner of dress and jewelries varied. The Kapila River looked much like her sister, Kauveri. But there was a softness to her jaw compared to Kauveri’s sharp edges. And where Kauveri’s eyes had changed between the icy quartz of a river at dawn to the brackish brown of a river at dusk, Kapila’s eyes remained a warm and constant blue.

  “You have until the floor breaks,” said the Serpent King, smiling. “Oh, and I would move quickly. Because the water beneath is poisonous.”

  I yanked Vikram away from a fissure that had begun to spider near his foot. Little cracks spread slowly from the holes in the floor where the seven women had sprung out of the water. I steadied my breath even as my palms began to sweat. Tread carefully. Choose carefully. That was all I could do.

  “Did you believe him?” I asked under my breath.

  “I don’t know what to believe,” said Vikram, scanning the line of seven women. “But if it was a chance to make sure that both of us would get out of here alive, I wasn’t going to waste it.”

  The Serpent King watched us from his corner. The seven women stood in front of us, their faces nearly impassive. Vikram stepped carefully to the first of the seven women and I walked by his side.

  “This one has longer hair?” he said.

  “That doesn’t tell us if she’s his wife,” I said. To each woman, I leaned close to her and said, “I’m going to get the venom to Kauveri. Help me and I can help you escape him.”

  But that changed nothing.

  The first had a bright sparkling stone at the center of her forehead. The second wore a collar of scales. The third had a long emerald tail. The fourth wore a dress of silver river fish. The fifth crossed her arms. The sixth rested her hand on her hip. The seventh had fangs.

  We walked down the line, each step damning us a little further. The mist had begun to thicken the air. The women stood utterly still, but followed us with their eyes.

  Vikram tented his fingers. Sweat beaded on his forehead. “It’s all just a distraction.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

  “The clothes, arm positions, everything. It’s a trick. It doesn’t tell us anything about which one is his real wife.”

  I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes, as if that could somehow change the sight before me. I could almost imagine the Serpent King laughing in his corner.

  “They won’t respond to anything I say. I thought his real wife would have a reaction to him.”

  “You just gave me a brilliant idea,” he whispered. “Give me your knife.”

  I raised my eyebrow. “If any of us is going to be using a knife, it should be me.”

  “Your aim is a little too good,” he said. “Trust me.”

  I handed over the knife. The mist was rising fast. The floor creaked and splintered beneath us. Water lapped up the edges of the fragile sheet of glass we stood on, and the poisonous fumes stung the back of my throat. Our weight was too concentrated. All it would take was one good stomp to break the floor.

  “Spread your legs,” I shouted.

  “Rather forward of you—”

  “Distribute your weight or we’re going to die.”

  He spread his legs, stabilizing the wobbling piece of the glass floor. Holding the knife in one hand, he leaned down to whisper: “Watch their faces. Whoever is his true wife will have a reaction.”

  Vikram flung the dagger, aiming it at the space right above the Serpent King’s head. The moment he loosed it, the sixth woman in line let out a scream.

  “Her!” I pointed.

  A furious roar lit up the caverns, shaking the stalactites. Whether it was pain at being stabbed or frustration at being caught, I didn’t know. The mist was rising so fast that every surface turned slippery. Poison began to smoke and fume at the edges of my sandals, blackening them. My lungs burned and I choked back a cough.

  “Run!” I shouted.

  I leapt onto a slippery sheet of glass, barely keeping my balance as it careened violently to one side. I flung myself onto a new sheet, my body slamming into a piece that only just barely fit my frame. It spidered beneath me, threatening to crack. But I was quicker. I leapt from sheet to sheet, and was nearly at solid ground when I heard a shout behind me. I turned to see Vikram not far from me, his arms pinwheeling, feet shaky. He was going to fall. I didn’t think twice about saving him. I reached out to grab him, using all my weight to push him to the shore. He tumbled, hitting the wall. I jumped to join him, but the unraveling threads of my salwar kameez snagged on a jagged edge of glass, yanking my body sideways. I slipped. Vikram reached just in time to pull me onto the floor, but not before a wave of water sloshed up my leg. I screamed. Spots of pain lit up behind my eyes. Poison sank its teeth past the silk of my pants, painting excruciating tendrils of fire across my calf and
ankle.

  I slumped against Vikram. He wrapped his arm around my waist, hauling me toward the staircase. I blinked. Fighting to stand. To push myself up and forward, but I couldn’t. The Serpent King’s tail lashed out, but he did not block our path. The woman who was his true wife had appeared at his side, her face buried in his chest. I looked into her face, fighting down the tremors skittering up and down my body. Vikram propped me into a stand. He was murmuring something, but I couldn’t hear him. I only saw the Kapila River’s face: shuttered and heartbroken as she sobbed in the arms of the Serpent King.

  “What have you done?” she wept, staring at us. “Why couldn’t you just believe us?”

  We said nothing. What could we say? Vikram grimaced, turning from her. He half dragged, half carried me up the stairs. Pain seared my thoughts, but even through that haze I saw Kapila’s tear-streaked face and watched the Serpent King brush away strands of her hair.

  They loved each other.

  The sickly pangs of victory shot through me. Or maybe it was the poison working through my leg. I couldn’t feel it anymore. We had won this. We had an exit. And if freedom came with the price of guilt, maybe I was already so glutted on the emotion that the taste wouldn’t register. I blinked, and Kapila’s anguish burned in my vision.

  I was wrong.

  Guilt accretes. It builds and builds, whittling stairways and spires in the heart until a person can carry a city of hopelessness inside them. My guilt was building a universe.

  Vikram was whispering. But his voice was coming from a thousand directions. When I stumbled, he picked me up. I didn’t stop him.

  At the top of the stairs, the Serpent King held out a blue vial.

  “Now you know the truth,” he said hoarsely. “But know this. Kauveri can banish or imprison me, but it will change nothing. You can tell her that if she cares so much for her sister she will not enjoy watching her waste away before her eyes.”

  My vision refused to focus. I set my jaw, my thoughts straining. I came to Alaka to free myself from guilt, not discover more. I would tell Kauveri what I’d seen even as I bartered our way out of here. I would make amends.

  “Gauri?” called Vikram. His voice sounded faraway. “Gauri!”

  I tried to focus on him, to push words from my mouth. But the pain had begun to eat into my bones. Darkness edged in from the corners of my vision right before it swallowed me whole.

  27

  A BROKEN SONG

  VIKRAM

  He had to believe that everything happened for a reason. In the ashram, he had pushed himself to run as fast as he could. The pupils joked that he had tucked a fistful of lightning into his sandals to aid him. Back then, Vikram thought he’d forced himself to run as fast as he could just to prove that he could. He was wrong.

  It had all been practice for this moment.

  Gauri’s head bumped against his chest as he ran. She felt too light in his arms, as if the essence of her had already begun to slip and unspool. Her lips turned blue, and Vikram’s heart slammed. Not again, he thought. Demanded. Prayed. Not again.

  In his hand, the blue vial of the Serpent King’s poison might as well have been a handful of blue flowers. Gauri’s pale lips reminded him of another. Vikram blinked, and felt as if he were seven years old once more, toeing the edge of a rockslide. His mother crumpled in a heap at the bottom of the rocks. For an entire day and night, he had ordered her to wake up. After that, he had hugged his knees to his chest, unable to speak because every word sharpened to a scream in his throat. He remembered the fan of his mother’s hair beneath a boulder. White, writhing insects moving over her cut arms. Her neck bent strange, face angled to the light as if she were simply enjoying the sunshine. Only this time her lips were torn and blue.

  Vikram hated fear. He hated how it fed on him and stripped away his comfortable blindness. Fear forced him to hold up the contents of his heart to the light. Once, he stood over a rockslide and beheld that fear: He would be untethered. Back then, his mother’s love was a thread of unbroken light, a seam he coud follow through every moment of his life until he suddenly couldn’t, leaving him to push through the dark, make out the shapes of his future in utter blindness. Now, when he clutched an unresponsive Gauri to his chest, fear forced him to see her. Only her. It felt silly to say that he couldn’t bear to lose her. He never had her. She was not a thing to be possessed. But her entrance in his life had conjured light. And losing the light of her would plunge him into a darkness he’d never find his way out of.

  Gauri was pale, damp with feverish sweat. Once the poisoned water had reached her bare skin, it had refused to leave. Heatless blue flames twisted and licked their way up her ankle, threatening to burn her alive without a single plume of smoke. Vikram’s legs burned.

  As far as he knew, there were no healers in Alaka. Even if there were, this wound belonged to poisoned magic. There was only one group of people he knew that spent their lives steeped in poison. But would they help them? He considered bringing her straight to the vishakanyas’ tent, but it would be too easy for them to see her as wounded prey.

  Instead, Vikram ran up the stairs to the chamber, out of breath and heart pounding. He placed Gauri on the bed. Her lips looked even bluer. Sweat matted her hair. He brushed the strands out of her eyes, pulling a blanket over her body. Then he sprinted out of the room and straight to the tent.

  At high noon, the tent hummed with lazy stupor. Some patrons stumbled out of the exit, blinking at the sunshine. No guard patrolled the entrance since there was no line. Vikram took a deep breath. Maybe this was the most foolish thing he’d ever done. There was no guarantee that the poisonous courtesans wouldn’t harm him, especially since he brought himself willingly to their territory. Maybe he’d even die here and get poisoned himself, just as Gauri had. But he had to try.

  He marched inside and found several vishakanyas lounging inside the tent. Two patrons sat with their heads lolled back as they stared at their desires twisting above them. One of the courtesans, a stunning woman with golden hair and dark eyes, stood up. Her eyes raked over him, lingering at his ripped pants and the nasty gash on his arm where the shattered glass fragments had cut him. Her pupils darkened in lust. Or maybe hunger. Or quite possibly both.

  “I need to speak with one of your sisters immediately. Her name is Aasha. She knows me.”

  Her face changed. “Aasha? What do you want with her?”

  “My—” He stumbled over the right words. “—partner in the Tournament has been gravely injured. She’s going to die from poisoning if I don’t get help.”

  “And you think one of us will part with our arts to care for a human?” she sneered.

  More courtesans poured out from unseen parts of the tent until they had formed a small circle around him. At first they looked at him curiously, eyes widened in surprise. But slowly that surprised changed. Their pupils widened. Their lips parted. He was so anxious about getting back to Gauri that he hadn’t even considered how that fierce desire would make him that much more appealing to them. They sniffed the air, cocking their heads sharply to one side as if pondering the fastest way to scrabble at his desires.

  “Poison is not such a bad thing, princeling,” she crooned. “Why don’t you let her die? You can have all the glory for yourself. Maybe you can ask for the second wish that would have belonged to your partner? Perhaps you can ask to be immune to us.” She stepped forward, hands outstretched in invitation. “We make excellent company.”

  Her smile widened. Vikram had stepped back, rolling onto his toes and ready to run out of the tent, when Aasha broke through the crowd.

  “Aasha!” said the golden-haired vishakanya. She smiled. “This prince was just asking for your services.”

  “She’s dying,” he said hoarsely. “The poison from his waters has gotten to her. I need help.”

  Aasha’s sisters murmured into her ear, tugging on her arm. He felt the moment sharpening to a knife’s point. Everything balancing on her next words. She could do
om them. But he hoped instead, and his hope roared inside him.

  “Why don’t you tell him that he should let this girl go and cure his sorrow in our arms?”

  “Tell him the cure for the girl’s poison is farther inside the tent,” whispered another.

  “He came here willingly,” hissed a third. “So we may take him. The Lord of Treasures granted no protection to the humans if they came again.”

  Aasha bit her lip as she lifted her head. Vikram’s heart sank. Her face was a death sentence.

  “Where is she?” asked Aasha softly.

  The others stared at her. Some in confusion. Some in shock. Others in hurt. Aasha turned to the golden-haired one and some silent conversation passed between them.

  “I’ll take you to her.”

  Together, they left the vishakanyas’ tent behind. Only then did Vikram notice that Aasha was limping.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Oh. I … I fell.”

  He sensed she was lying, but he refused to press her.

  “Why did you stay there for so long?” asked Aasha.

  Vikram frowned. “We only left this morning.”

  “It is almost full moon,” she said, shocked. “The Jhulan Purnima is the day after tomorrow.”

  Vikram’s heart raced. Time ran differently in Alaka, but the Serpent King’s kingdom did not belong to Alaka. Whatever time they had spent there had cost them days. After tomorrow, the second trial would begin. If Gauri wasn’t ready to compete—or, worse, if she was unable to compete—all of this would have been for nothing. Helplessness gave way to a choked rage.

  As gingerly as he could, he rushed Aasha up the steps to the room. Gauri hadn’t moved from her position. But the flames had. They had spiraled from her ankle and now roped their way around the tops of her thighs. No heat burned from the flames, but the air crackled and snapped around Gauri’s body. As if it had claimed her and refused to let her go.

  Aasha leaned over her.

  “Strange,” she murmured.