A Crown of Wishes

by Roshani Chokshi

  Sharp gasps and murmurs crawled within reach of my hearing, but I shut out the sounds. The only thing I wanted to hear was Vikram’s voice. Aasha crouched to his side, her fingers hovering over his hair and the growing bloodstain across his back. Tears slid down her cheeks. But she wouldn’t touch him. Couldn’t. Around us, the people of Alaka moved closer. I whirled on them, my dagger raised.

  “Help him,” I hissed. Then louder:

  “Help him! What are you doing?”

  A thousand glittering eyes met mine. No one moved. This was not their game.

  The Nameless circled me.

  The first sneered. “We tried to appeal to your heart, but you have none.”

  The second laughed. “We tried to appeal to your mind, but you have none.”

  The third smiled. “So we will take what is ours by force. The venom was our trade first. Our prize first. It is our legacy. Every hundred years, we fight for it. For the years between we sink into the ground, sleeping and waiting, our legacy growing. Did you really think you could take it from us?”

  Aasha called my name. I looked over to see her holding the dagger that Vikram had dropped. She wielded it awkwardly, as if it might bite her at any turn. I thought she was going to throw it to me, but instead she walked to my side, her face grim.

  The Nameless hissed. “This is the last Tournament, girl. If we don’t take the venom, the poison will fade. You will fight your own? You will take this vengeance from your sisters?”

  “No sister of mine would ever do this,” said Aasha quietly. “My sisters don’t call it vengeance. They call it a Blessing.”

  “So be it,” said the Nameless as one.

  They lunged, slashing the air. I clutched the poison in one hand, jumping out of the way. Aasha was a tiny wind beside me, a whirling living barrier. The crowd of Alaka formed a black crust around us, silent eyes tracking our every movement. Everywhere I turned, the Nameless unraveled from the shadows. I couldn’t tell them apart. Even when my eyes cut away from one face to the next, no detail lingered. This was the price of vengeance, a slow obliteration of self until you were nothing but your hate. I roared, charging forward, swinging my arm to slice and cut. But the blade passed through them as if the knife didn’t exist. They grinned.

  One blink later, and the Nameless vanished. Catching my breath, I turned in a slow circle. Alaka stared back. Kubera and Kauveri floated above the crowd. Waiting. Aasha caught my eye, confusion spreading across her features. And then I realized what the Nameless had done. Pushed us to the shadows. They weren’t trading spar for spar or punch for punch; they were trading light for dark.

  I saw the shadow on my feet. I leapt out of the way, but a hand darted out, closing around my ankle. In that moment, I thought I could taste death on my tongue, all funerary ash and burning marigolds. I reached down, hacking violently—uselessly—at the wrist. The Nameless rolled out of the shadows. I lifted my blade. But it didn’t matter. The smile on the Nameless was death. A pressure sank into my stomach. A blade. It didn’t feel sharp. Just dull. They slid a hand across my waist.

  “Ours now,” they said, tugging the vial of the Serpent King’s poison.

  I sank to my knees, black edging my vision. In one fluid movement, the Nameless pulled the stopper from the vial of poison and drank it. Light fizzed across their skin. The blue ribbon each of them wore in tribute to their dead sister glowed and tightened into a knot at the hollow of each throat. My eyes sought Vikram. Someone had moved toward him. A beautiful woman wearing a crown of snow crouched beside his body. I was so cold. So empty. I looked back to the Nameless. The ribbons had transformed. A blue star unraveled at the hollow of each of their throats.

  “Finally,” they whispered.

  I was weightless and empty.

  I was gone.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes, I was thrown over the back of some beast. It smelled of death. Not of rot and blood, but of closed doors and shuttered eyes. The beast whipped its tail, huffed and turned to look at me. A white horse. Almost beautiful, if not for the manic gleam in its eyes. I looked around me, but the landscape cut in and out, as if someone had taken a knife to this world and started hacking. Panic bit into my heart. Where did everyone go? Where was Vikram? And then a terrible thought wrenched through me.

  “Am I alive?”

  The horse laughed, and I nearly fell off in shock.

  “What is alive anyway, but one shape telling another shape that it is there? By that logic, I am alive! And I do not think that I am. But I do think, so therefore … therefore something. Hm…”

  The horse kept running.

  “What’s happening? Where am I?” I demanded. “Take me back to Alaka this instant!”

  “A mortal thing making demands? Hmpf. The nerve. Must run in the blood.” The horse grumbled. “It is most inconvenient that you are inedible. I do like to play with food.”

  The horse, if it could even be called that, stopped running before an ivory door that appeared in the middle of a wasteland. It tossed me off its back and nudged open the door with its nose.

  “Where am I?” I said, digging my heels into the ground. I refused to move.

  “Everywhere!” laughed the horse. “You’re in the shadow of sleep. You’re at the beginning and the end. You’re treading the spit, sinew and gristle that makes a tale worth telling, girl thing.”

  “Who are you?”

  The horse snorted. “Selfhood is a pesky thing. I left it ages ago.”

  It swung its head toward the door. “She won’t be happy to see you,” it said, with a touch of fondness. “But that is to be expected.”

  Not knowing what else to do, I stepped through the door and found myself in the throne room of a vast palace. The palace didn’t feel like Alaka. The windows overlooked nothing but barren scrubland. The tiles beneath my feet pulsed like a heartbeat. I tried to look around me, but I couldn’t even get my bearings. It was as though the room didn’t want to be seen.

  The door swung open. Two figures glided inside. I scrambled to my feet, my heart racing. I couldn’t make out their features but I knew they weren’t Kubera and Kauveri. The Raja wore a charcoal sherwani jacket. Dark, lustrous power curled off of him and he moved with an eerie grace. His queen walked beside him; starry wisps and coils of evening sky lit the space around her. And then she turned, and my heart stilled. My gaze traveled from the Queen’s bare feet, where thunderheads danced around her ankles, past her arms, where lightning netted its way across her wrists, and to her eyes. Dark as dusk. I knew that the Queen’s eyes tightened at the corners when she was nervous. I knew she preferred her room cold and her bed without blankets. I knew that her favorite fruit was guava and that she always ate it with salt.

  I knew all these things because the Queen was Maya. Her eyes widened, first with shock and then with fury.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  The Raja moved to her side. Maya turned to him. There was no mistaking the glance that passed between them. Love. He looked at my sister as if she were wonders and miracles made flesh. And then he looked at me. I turned my head. The thought of meeting his eyes made me feel as if it were the last thing I’d ever do. He spoke and his voice was lush and dark:

  “Forgive my manners, Princess, but I take no pleasure in our acquaintance, and would rather not meet you yet.”

  To anyone else, his words would reek of insolence. But I felt as if he had done me a great favor. I fumbled for my voice. “Perhaps another time.”

  At this, he smiled. “Inevitably.”

  He lifted Maya’s hand to his lips and disappeared. It was just us. I wanted to cry, hug her, laugh. I wanted to tell her I looked for her in every constellation, not just ours. I wanted to tell her I was tired and scared. Maya smiled, holding out her arms to me.

  “You’ve worked so hard, my Gauri,” she said. “And I know that it has left your heart wounded and your soul raw. I can take away the hurt. I can erase it from your memory forever. Or you
can return and I cannot tell you what will happen. I can only tell you that the choice is yours.

  “Do you want to be brave?”

  39

  BELIEF WAS BREAD

  VIKRAM

  A woman crouched over him, snow falling from her hair. Her lips were as cold as salvation when they pressed to his cheek. A memory bloomed in his mind—he was laughing with Gauri, telling her how in Ujijain they gave their thanks in kisses. At her taunt, he kissed a boulder shaped like a woman.

  For her greed, she is lost until a kiss falls upon her stony brow.

  He knew the woman who sat beside him. Tara. The cursed queen of the vanaras.

  That kiss.…

  It had freed her.

  His thoughts felt thick. Slow. Dimly, he remembered a knife parting bone from muscle. The sting of death. Tara reached for him, a glowing thread pulled taut between her fingers. Her expression was benevolent, full of gratitude.

  “Is this a gift of Life?” he asked.

  “Oh, Prince,” she laughed. “Existence is the gift. Life is a choice.”

  Her hands moved over his eyes. He felt her carrying him, cradling him like a child. They moved past halls. Through doors. In a golden room, she lowered him to the ground, cold lips pressing just beneath his ear as she stamped his skin with one command:

  Exist.

  He opened his eyes, sucking in a lungful of air. He held on to it until it burned, until he knew without a doubt that it was his, his, his. Then he let it go. Callously. Breathlessly. When he looked up, he was on his knees before Kubera and Kauveri. He felt wild. Gauri. Where was she? But if there was anything or anyone outside of this room—a crowd, a sea, an embryo world not yet born—he could not see it. Kubera and Kauveri had shed their human glamour and become impossible to look at. Impossible to look away from.

  He was a child and not a child. He was an eight-year-old crying into his pillow and scrabbling for meaning. He was a thirteen-year-old poring over myth and legend, assembling the clues for his future, holding his hopes so tightly within him that they had taken over his bones, his blood, his dreams. His hope was cold. Poisonous. Eclipsing. And he fed it anyway, the way someone feeds something out of habit simply because there is nothing else in their life worth growing.

  All this time, he thought magic had chosen him. Maybe magic never chose. Maybe it had always been about the fit. A key latching into a hole. Maybe there had been just enough holes in him for magic to slip through and hook him like spurs into cloth.

  Alaka had forced him to look in. Not out. And he had begun to borrow a little of Gauri’s thoughts—her will was her weapon, and everything else was just cobwebs to cut through. Her loss was her own just as her victory was her own.

  It terrified him.

  Unstrung him.

  And yet, he felt stronger. Belief was still bread, still warm and filling. But Alaka had shifted it, pulled it out of sight, so that he could rely on nothing and no one but himself.

  It was freedom.

  “What more are you going to take from me?” demanded Vikram. “What sacrifice will you demand?”

  Kubera merely tilted his head as his wife laughed behind her hand.

  “I already took it, Fox Prince. I took the dreams you stored up until the day I came with an invitation. I took your faith every time you stared down death and wondered whether this was part of a plan for you. I took your resilience when you wondered whether the girl of your very soul was destined to die,” said Kubera. “I told you I would take what you would already give. Am I not merciful?”

  Vikram stood there, his heart a curious cross between hollow and heavy. He felt the ache of that sacrifice, the loss of that wonder replaced with wariness.“I thank you, Lord Kubera. But—”

  “But you want to know why you were brought here?” offered Kauveri. “You want to know why my consort handpicked you and the Princess Gauri, even going so far as to disguise himself as a sage and even a vetala.”

  Vikram’s head shot up. “The vetala too?”

  He had guessed Kubera was the sage. The golden mongoose had given it away in their first meeting. Kubera grinned.

  “Oh yes! But do not think that I had any hand in your success. I merely wanted to watch! And then, oh, perhaps I did feel a little attached to your soft hearts and your lingering looks. You were only bones and wanting. Exquisitely lovely.”

  “There’s more to us than that,” said Vikram.

  “To be sure, Fox Prince, to be sure,” said Kubera, waving a hand. “That was why I selected both of you.”

  The marble floor shifted, pale colors moving and sliding beneath its sudden translucence. Images flickered before him, stretched out like a hope not realized—an empire that looked a little like Bharata and a little like Ujijain. He felt the land beneath him, the bright and burning urgency of it to innovate and sink its teeth into history. It was a kingdom in the midst of creating its own legend, ushering in an age that had no room for magic. The strangest feeling was how possessive he felt. He knew it. He knew its libraries and buildings, its landscapes and temples. As if this land stretching beneath him was somehow … his.

  “Soon,” said Kauveri, “one will not be able to step into the Otherworld. We will seal our doors. Shut our portals. Live apart. These tales are not just pieces of magic. They are the foundations of legacy. We tried for years to find the right vessels. A lord and lady of the new era, so to speak. Two people who would break time because their stories would be timeless. We listened for hollow hearts and hungry smiles and guided them to our land only to watch them fail over and over. Until now.”

  Behind his eyes, Vikram saw the banks of the Serpent King’s portal littered with bones. All of those who had been brought to Alaka possessed the same potential that he and Gauri had. But potential meant nothing in the face of willpower, and that was something no one could possess or preordain but him.

  Kubera held out his hand. A small coin of light sat in his palm.

  “You earned your wish.”

  40

  THE GLASS HAND

  GAURI

  Do you want to be brave?

  I heard the choice in Maya’s words—

  Do you want to start being brave?

  I thought I had been brave. I had fought power wars with Skanda, defended my country, protected the people I loved. But that bravery required no choice. It was something I had to do. Living under Skanda’s rule hadn’t frightened me because I had expected his brand of horror and trained myself.

  True terror came when a knife drew blood from Nalini’s skin and Arjun stood in the gloaming of the throne room, silent and ruthless as my world went from an expected dose of horror to a long stretch of unknown tomorrows. That was the beginning of strength. At the threshold of strength and bravery stood hope. If I was going to be brave, it meant acknowledging that hope was not a promise. I wasn’t returning for the hope of saving Vikram or even saving Bharata. I was returning for myself.

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to be brave.”

  As soon as I spoke, a tapestry to the side of the room lengthened. As if it were changing just because of my words. Maya smiled. I looked around us, but I couldn’t get a sense of the surroundings.

  “Where am I?”

  Maya tilted her head. “Where would you like to be?”

  “Home.”

  And so we were. We were sitting on the floor of Maya’s old chambers in Bharata. Shades of deep violet painted the sky. Small clouds of fireflies drifted sleepily through the gardens. Maya pulled me into an embrace, resting her cheek on my head.

  “Don’t ever believe that I am not proud of you,” she said. “I always am.”

  I clung to her and breathed in her scent. My sister always smelled like flowers that opened their blooms only to the moon.

  “I missed you.”

  “I missed you too.”

  Outside, the sky changed. Deepening to night. And then, even the night began to lighten. A cold sense of loss worked its way through my limbs. I knew, some
how, that the moment the sky turned to dawn, Maya would leave. I wanted to ask where she was, who she was, but those questions kept being snatched off my tongue. As if I was not allowed to ask. Not to control me, but because those questions weren’t important.

  “Will you tell me a story, didi?” I asked.

  Maya nodded. I curled against her, resting my head in her lap as I used to do. And she braided my hair as she used to do. The sun poured gold into the sky. I couldn’t remember the details of the story Maya told me. But when she finished, I felt whole. Sometimes when you stare at a thing for too long, the moment you close your eyes, you can see the outline blurred in light. That’s how my heart felt, clinging to a last image and letting it illuminate me.

  “When will I see you again?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to know. It will always be too soon to me, and too far for you. But I promise when you visit, you will linger a little longer. You will sleep in my palace and dine at my table. I will show you my favorite room with all of its glass flowers, and I will hold your hand as we walk down the halls,” said Maya. “You will always be my sister.”

  Consciousness crept back to me. Bit by bit. The sky outside our stolen hour changed. The floor disappeared. The last thing I felt was my sister’s arms around me, warm and firm. I didn’t know if I had dreamt the whole thing, but when I opened my eyes, heat surged through the sapphire pendant around my neck. I was kneeling before Kubera and Kauveri. Reality came back to me, first in wisps, before crashing into waves. Vikram. Aasha. Where were they? What happened to the Nameless? The last thing I remembered, they had drained the vial of the Serpent King’s poison—my only bargaining tool to win an exit out of Alaka—and changed into … vishakanyas.

  I looked around the room, searching for answers. But the crowd from the Otherworld had vanished. Nothing but polished floors and gleaming walls surrounded me.

  “He is here. He is alive. And he is safe,” said Kauveri, as if she heard my thoughts. “He is waiting for you.”