Poison's Cage

by Breeana Shields

  He sighs. “I’m sorry. I’ve just grown weary of the Raksaka.”

  “How can you say that? You have a tattoo of Garuda on your arm. Is that just for show?”

  “Of course not. But I don’t think she’s alive, Marinda. She would have shown herself by now.”

  “She’s alive,” I say. “She has to be. And if you don’t find her before the Nagaraja does, he’s going to kill her.”

  Mani falls asleep in my arms. His breathing grows deep and even. His face goes slack. But it’s not until he begins snoring gently that I dare ask Deven the question that’s been thrumming at the back of my mind since I got here. “Could it be vish bimari?” I ask. “Does he have poison disease again?”

  Deven shakes his head. “No. He’s not sick, I promise. But he’s restless all night, every night. And sometimes I find him acting out his nightmares—sleepwalking, destroying things without being aware. He often wakes up screaming.”

  Something lurches in my chest. “Maybe I should go back to the palace. Maybe taking down the Nagaraja is better suited to someone else.”

  Iyla scoots closer and puts a hand on my back. “He’ll get through this,” she says. “We’ll make a safer world for him so that he never needs to have bad dreams again.”

  I hear a sound in my mind like a heavy step on thin ice—a groan, a crackle. And a fissure opens in my heart. I lay my head on her shoulder, and Deven lays his head on mine. I sit like that for a long time, surrounded by everyone I love.

  And even so, the darkness gathers around me. I can feel it closing in.

  Crocodile Island isn’t any easier to manage than it was a few weeks ago. Although, at least this time I wore boots.

  I scrabble up the tree, hand over foot, until I find a spot that affords me a decent view of the empty clearing below. Now there’s nothing to do but wait.

  And worry.

  The bleak expression on Marinda’s face as I left her this afternoon is a sliver in my heart. Seeing Mani unraveled her. She held on to him for an impossibly long time before she let Deven lead him away. She watched the two of them go with her hand pressed to her mouth. And then she didn’t speak all the way back to the Naga palace. We wove through the streets of Bala City in the predawn mist in complete silence. If not for Marinda’s breath curling in front of her like a ribbon of sorrow, I might have forgotten she was there at all.

  When we got back to her room, she sank onto her bed, pulled her knees to her chest and closed her eyes. But I don’t think she slept.

  “We can leave,” I told her a few hours later, when we both had given up on the idea of rest. “We can walk out of here right now and never come back. But we need to decide today. Balavan will be back tomorrow. He’ll expect me to be on Crocodile Island trying to gather information about the Crocodile King. If we’re going, we need to go now.”

  She met my gaze then. Her eyes were vacant. “No,” she said. “We have to stop the Nagaraja. We have no choice.”

  “Marinda.” My voice caught on the word. “Please.”

  “There’s no one else,” she said. “It has to be us.”

  But I’d never seen her more empty. It had cost her to walk away from Mani when he begged her to stay. It had cost her more than she could afford to lose.

  And now I’m in a tree and she’s all alone at the Naga palace. But I can’t think about that. I need to focus on the mission at hand. The sooner we get the information Balavan is looking for, the sooner I can get out of here. The peninsula is bathed in apricot light. The sun is setting. If the Crocodile King’s followers don’t come soon, I’ll have to climb down, find a place to sleep and then return again tomorrow. I crane my neck to try to get a view of the shore and breathe a sigh of relief when I see boats in the distance.

  It takes another two hours for the men to come ashore and gather around the stone altar in the center of the clearing. There are at least triple the number of men and boys as last time. I search the crowd for Fazel. When I see him, his broad shoulders hunched over a crackling fire, his hands splayed toward the flame, my stomach swoops out from under me and I have to grab a nearby branch to steady myself, to convince my body I’m not falling.

  Even after our last humiliating encounter, my traitorous fingers still itch to stroke his hair. I pull my gaze away and try to focus on finding another, more suitable target. One with greasy locks that don’t beg to be touched.

  But the men aren’t talking in small groups like last time. They gather quietly. They move without speaking. It’s impossible to find only one who is restless, because that describes all of them—restless, fidgety, expectant. Something about the charged feeling in the air is familiar. I glance up at the sky. A full moon. If the Crocodile King feeds on the same schedule as the Nagaraja, that would explain the mood shift. The thought sends a zing of anticipation through me. I would finally be able to see him. To know for sure that another member of the Raksaka exists.

  The leader of the group—a tall, muscular man with jet-black hair—steps to the top of the circle, and a hush falls over the crowd. “Welcome, my brothers,” he says. “Who will feed me tonight?”

  The question rattles around my mind, reverberating with a wrongness I can hear but don’t quite understand.

  No one in the circle moves for a full minute. The silence stretches and bends, growing into something frightening. Finally a man steps forward. His hair is the color of ash, his shoulders curved with age.

  “I will,” he says.

  A gasp behind him freezes him in place.

  “Father, no.” A palm on his arm. A voice full of pleading.

  The older man turns and fixes his son with a gaze that I’m too far away to see in the dark. Is it sharp? Tender? Wistful? Whatever the expression, it makes the younger man drop his hand and fall silent.

  The older man turns back toward the leader. “I am ready,” he says. He steps up to the altar, and several other men rush forward to lift him until he rests, kneeling, on top of the stone. He clasps his hands in front of him and tips his face to the sky.

  The leader touches his shoulder. “Go in peace, my friend,” he says.

  As he pulls his hand away, it shimmers. I scrub at my eyes, sure that my lack of sleep is making me see things.

  But it doesn’t help.

  The leader’s whole body seems to take on an ethereal, distorted quality, like the air above a hot pan. I watch awestruck as his neck elongates, as his skin ripples, as his body transforms. Terror steals the air from my throat.

  In the leader’s place is an enormous reptile the size of a felled kapok tree. The man who called the meeting to order, who stood here a moment ago, is not the highest-ranking member among the Crocodile King’s followers. He is the Crocodile King himself.

  My vision swims. The earth seems to tilt beneath me.

  My heart knows what this means a moment before my mind does. A single slow beat. And then a quickening as I realize that Marinda is in terrible danger. The giant croc can take human form. Which means that it’s likely all of the Raksaka can take human form.

  And who could the Nagaraja be except Balavan? My pulse spikes. Marinda has been sharing a home with the creature who tried to eat her brother, who possessed her mind so completely that he nearly convinced her to kill Mani herself. And I left her there. Alone. Panic claws at me, but I’m trapped here. Thoughts of Mani on the altar at the Snake Temple draw my eyes downward. The man on the stone slab trembles as the giant croc snaps his jaws, but the man doesn’t run. Why doesn’t he run?

  Who will feed me tonight? That’s what the leader said before he transformed into the Crocodile King. The old man on the altar is a willing sacrifice. But why?

  My fingers whiten as I grip the branch above me. The giant croc swishes his tail, slamming it against a tree trunk. A crack splits the stillness of the night, and the tree groans before falling slowly downward and hitting the ground with such force that it nearly shakes me from my perch. Suddenly the clearing around the altar makes more sense.


  The men all take a knee. They bend their heads low, and I can’t tell whether it’s out of respect or out of a desire to avoid seeing what comes next. But I can’t tear my gaze away. The Crocodile King snaps his giant teeth together once more and then opens his jaws. The man on the altar squeaks—a raw and vulnerable noise that betrays his earlier bravery. The noise splits my heart in two.

  One man in the crowd looks up—it has to be the son—just in time to see the croc scoop up his meal and toss it back like it’s nothing more than a sunflower seed. I squeeze my eyes closed.

  The chanting begins then—a low keening noise that scrapes my soul raw. It’s the sound of worship and grief blended together into a melody that only knows pain. I have to get out of here.

  It might be a mistake to leave. Once the ritual is over, the men will be more relaxed. It will be easier to find a new target, to see which of the followers are more celebratory and which look like they want to bolt. My smartest move would be to find the son of the man who was sacrificed tonight. He will be vulnerable. He’ll probably be angry. And nothing makes the secrets flow more freely than a desire for vengeance.

  But I can’t stomach it. Not tonight.

  The two desires war inside me—the need to get to Marinda, to warn her, and the hope that by staying I’ll find some piece of information that will save us both.

  I look right and then left, in front of me and behind, but there isn’t a clear path down that won’t put me in reach of the giant croc or deposit me in the midst of his followers. I bite the inside of my cheek and lean my head against the rough bark. The moonlight filters through the trees and falls on my face with a chill glow. The night deepens, and eventually—what seems like hours later—the chanting subsides. I risk a glance down. The Crocodile King is gone, transformed back into a man, though it’s too dark to find him in the crowd.

  The men start to disperse. One smothers the fire. Another wipes at the blood on the stone altar with the sleeve of his cloak, as if it can be made clean again. Nausea roils in my stomach.

  I can’t stand to stay here for one more second. I start climbing down. If I’m quiet, I can slip away in the opposite direction and the men will be none the wiser. Halfway down, the heel of my boot catches on an unsteady branch. My still-tender ankle turns painfully. I smother a gasp as the smooth inner edge of my boot’s sole slides along the branch. I try to regain my footing, but it’s too late. The wood snaps, and suddenly I’m plummeting downward, weightless and screaming.

  I’m going to die. My mind catches the thought from the air like a handful of dandelion seeds. The realization is soft and painless. A relief. I stop screaming. And then my back slams into the ground, knocking the air from my lungs, and the world goes black.

  Balavan returns to the palace like a conquering hero.

  Amoli and I are sitting at the dining table eating bowls of thick, hearty rajma when the front door flies open and dozens of voices spill over the threshold. The sudden noise is too loud, too jovial.

  It rankles in the mournful silence, chafes against the raw pain of leaving Mani. My appetite abruptly vanishes and I push my bowl away.

  Amoli’s face sparks to life like a lit candle. She rushes to greet Balavan, but I stay where I am. I have no desire to see him. No wish to hear about the sacrifice he just witnessed.

  But that doesn’t stop him from finding me. A few minutes later he strides into the dining hall with the energy of ten men.

  “Rajakumari,” he says. His voice is strong and he wields his gaze like a weapon. This is hardly the same man who left here a few days ago unfocused and distracted. He must find the ritual at the Snake Temple refreshing. The thought sickens me. “Have you enjoyed your break?”

  There’s something dangerous dancing in his eyes. It feels like a trick question. I wish that I had thought to bring the snakes with me so that I could see inside his mind, but they’re back in my room, tucked beneath the wardrobe. I don’t dare risk trying to call them to me.

  “Not particularly,” I tell him.

  “No? Your excursions weren’t all you hoped they would be?”

  I swallow. I expected nothing less. I knew the guards would tell him that I’d left, and I’m prepared to answer his questions. But something about his triumphant tone chills me.

  “I wasn’t aware I was a prisoner,” I say lightly. “You should have been more specific if you didn’t want me to leave.”

  He smiles and covers my hand with his. “Of course you’re not a prisoner,” he says. “Why would you think such a thing?”

  I stare at him, speechless.

  “Did my guards try to stop you from leaving?”

  “No.”

  “Did they punish you when you returned?”

  I press a hand to my throat. The idea of the guards being ordered to punish me hadn’t even crossed my mind. But it has obviously occurred to him.

  “No.”

  He cups my chin in his fingers. “I don’t blame you,” he says. “The pull must have been irresistible.” Looking into his eyes is like sinking into the depths of an ocean made of tar. Unpleasant. Inescapable. I resist the urge to wrench away from him.

  “I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” I say. “What pull?”

  “Your brother,” he says. “I assume that’s why you left here? To see him?”

  Fear curls in my stomach. I try to shake my head, but Balavan is still holding on to my chin. He lets go and strokes my cheek with the backs of his fingers. “I must say, rajakumari, you look beautiful today. Far better rested than Mani.”

  A spark of shock flies through me. I heard him wrong. I must have. “What do you mean?”

  He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Relax, my darling. It was a compliment. Your skin is dewy and your eyes are radiant.” He pauses for a beat. “There aren’t any hollows under them.”

  All the heat drains from my face. He’s seen Mani. Or knows someone who has. I’m certain of it. Panic blooms in my chest.

  “What have you done?” My voice comes out high and thin.

  “Nothing,” he says. “But I would hate for something to happen to the boy. Something worse than nightmares.” He touches my nose with the tip of his index finger. “It would sour your expression, and it would be a pity to ruin such beauty.”

  My heartbeat is a roar in my ears. Balavan smiles as if he can hear it, as if he already knows he’s won. “I’m going to ask you a question, rajakumari,” he says. His voice is low and silky. “And I want you to think carefully before answering, do you understand?”

  I swallow the lump in my throat and nod.

  “How have so many of the Raja’s men survived your kiss?”

  He already knows. He must. This is only a test to prove my loyalty, and it’s one I can’t afford to fail. It’s the kind of choice I’ve been trained to make. The kind of choice I promised Hitesh I would.

  I clear my throat. “The Raja has an antidote to the poison,” I say.

  His expression is blank. “What kind of antidote?”

  “A fruit that the Raja grows in his orchards,” I say. “But I suspect you already knew that.”

  “Is that why you didn’t tell me?” he asks. There’s a bite in his voice that makes my skin prickle.

  “Of course,” I say. “I assumed you have spies stationed all over Sundari—ones who know far more than I do. You haven’t exactly sought out my opinion since I arrived here. I’ve been more decoration than anything else.” It’s a risk to speak with such insolence, but it has the desired effect. Balavan lets out his breath in one long exhale. His expression relaxes. “If I’d known you wanted information…”

  He waves away the rest of my thought. “I’m sorry that I haven’t made you feel important to our cause,” he says. “You are far more than decoration, my darling.”

  I school my features into submission. Force my expression to stay relaxed so that my face doesn’t give away my rage. My left eyelid twitches.

  “That’s nice to know,” I say from under my las
hes. “I was beginning to wonder.”

  “Yes,” Balavan says. “So was I.”

  Balavan’s mind is impenetrable. I send Jasu to try to discover his secrets, but she returns in despair. I send all five snakes at once, with the same result. At first I think that they’ve lost their abilities, but they have no trouble accessing the minds of everyone else. They still warn me before Amoli enters my room. They continue to report on the thoughts of the rest of the Naga as they come and go.

  It’s as if Balavan’s mind is encrusted in ice.

  I think of my meeting with Kadru a few weeks ago and the chill realization that she knew my thoughts but could close the door on her own. Balavan must have the same ability. And if he can keep me from his thoughts, does that mean he can see mine? I’d be dead by now if that were true.

  I sit on my bed and stare blankly into the distance. The snakes curl around my wrists and ankles—it’s an apology and a comfort all at once. I sort through my options, lay them before me like playing cards and try to select the best one.

  The choices seem endless, but the more I turn them over in my mind, the more I see that they boil down to only two: stay or go. If I stay, I have a better chance of getting enough information to destroy the Nagaraja. But if I go, I can protect Mani.

  And Mani’s safety is the one thing that I’ve never been willing to risk.

  But I can’t just leave without Iyla. I sigh and drop my head into my hands. I wish that I’d listened to her, but I insisted we stay focused on the mission. I told her to go to Crocodile Island. Told her to keep gathering intelligence on the Crocodile King’s followers. I knew we couldn’t win a game against Balavan without having the same information that he did. Now who knows when she’ll be back? When we were younger, sometimes she’d find the information she needed quickly, and sometimes it would take her months of slowly getting to know her target before she discovered his secrets.

  If I go before she comes back, it could put her in danger. But if I don’t leave soon…A shiver runs through me. Balavan has someone watching Mani. Someone who could hurt him at any moment. I rake my fingers through my hair. There are no good solutions.