Poison's Cage

by Breeana Shields

  “Let me make more,” Vara says, reaching for my cup, and I wonder if her hands need a job too. She refills the kettle, puts it over the heat and then joins us at the table again.

  “So what is the answer to Mani’s question?” Deven asks softly. “How did you become a bird?”

  Vara takes a deep breath before she begins talking. “Because animals can live forever, we found a way to”—her gaze darts to Mani for just an instant, and her voice gets even softer—“to take on enough of their lives that we could become them at will.” She phrases the sentence carefully so that she doesn’t upset Mani in case he’s still listening, but I understand the meaning. More bloodshed, more sacrifice in the Raksaka’s quest for power. My stomach turns at the thought of the four of them killing animals over and over again in order to live forever. I suddenly remember when Deven first told me about the Raksaka. He said that the animals physically grew bigger as their followers increased. Goose bumps race across my arms at the thought that maybe they gained size not because more people were willing to live for them but because more were willing to die for them.

  “Why are you telling us all this?” Deven asks. The question lights a spark of hope inside me. Because if Vara were truly as evil as the Nagaraja, she wouldn’t have saved us in the Widows’ Village. She wouldn’t be explaining herself now. And her expression wouldn’t be so full of regret.

  Vara traces a finger around the rim of her teacup. She doesn’t answer for a long time, but when she finally looks up, her eyes are shiny with tears. “Redemption,” she says. “Hope. Trust that you can make a better future than we did. Our followers wanted to turn us into gods.” A single tear tumbles from her lashes and crawls down her cheek. “And when we agreed to let them, we turned ourselves into monsters.”

  I have the urge to cover her hand with my own, to offer her some kind of comfort, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I’m not sure she deserves forgiveness. “Where have you been all this time?” I ask. “Why have you been hiding instead of helping?”

  Vara dabs the moisture from her face with the back of her hand. “I had been growing uneasy with our…arrangement for decades. I started spending more and more time in my human form. I stopped killing. And because I wasn’t taking more lives, I started to age. I tried to persuade the others that the era of the Raksaka was over and that it was time to let ourselves die. I made a little headway with Bagharani and even with Chipkali, but Balavan wanted no part of it. Ultimately, he was more persuasive than I was, and it created a rift between me and the others. But Balavan was furious I’d even tried to suggest that we were wrong. He declared war against me. I fought hard for a long time, but then something happened that made me realize I couldn’t win against him, that I couldn’t stand to lose anything else, that I was so tired of fighting.”

  I open my mouth to ask what it was, but Vara waves a hand in the air. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Suffice it to say I was heartbroken. So I hid myself away in the Widows’ Village, where I could live in peace. They’ve been the happiest years of my life.”

  I swallow. “Until we brought the Nagaraja to your doorstep.”

  She squeezes my hand. “It was going to happen sooner or later,” she says. “I couldn’t hide forever.”

  The teakettle whistles and I jump in my seat. Vara gives me a small smile. She pours the tea into fresh cups, and the smell of ginger fills the air.

  “So what do we do now?” Deven asks. “How do we destroy him?”

  Vara sighs. “That’s the tricky part. We have to convince him to destroy himself.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask. “Why?”

  “If we kill him, he’ll simply be reborn. His supply of lives is nearly endless—when the Raksaka learned how to take on animal form, we could only hold so many extra lives at once. So we got around the problem by creating relics.”

  All the air leaves my lungs. “He’s been hunting for relics,” I say. “I’ve heard him talk about them. But I haven’t been able to figure out what they are or what they mean.”

  Vara presses her lips together. “The relics were created from parts of the giant animals we became—mine is a large blue feather, Bagharani’s is a claw, Chipkali’s is a tooth and Balavan’s is a snake scale. They serve as reservoirs for the lives we’ve taken—they can hold a nearly limitless number of years, and when we need more, we can simply draw from the relic. The only way to truly kill any one of us is to destroy our relic. And the only way to destroy the relic is by our own blood. But there’s a catch. The blood has to be willingly shed.”

  “Why?”

  Her voice is soft when she answers. “Sacrifice has enormous power, but sacrifice given instead of taken is the most powerful thing of all. When our followers started giving up their lives as tokens of their devotion, as gifts—it made us nearly unstoppable. Such great strength can’t be stolen. It must be set aside. The only thing strong enough to destroy a power so immense is the blood of the power itself.”

  “But then how did the Nagaraja kill the Tiger Queen?”

  Vara sucks in a sharp breath. “Is that true?” she asks. “Bagharani is really dead?” The raw look of pain on her face slices through me. It makes me think of Iyla—of the way I felt when I heard Balavan claim she was likely dead—and this time I can’t resist taking Vara’s hand. My own grief rises in my throat, and it takes me a full minute before I can speak. The snakes stir in the satchel at my feet. Vara’s hand trembles in mine.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say softly. “But it’s true. I heard Balavan telling the members of the Naga about how he’d killed her. And then I saw her followers rioting in the city.”

  “He must have convinced her to spill her own blood,” Vara says. “It’s the only explanation.”

  “But how would he have done that?”

  Vara shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  “The Nagaraja will never willingly die,” I tell her. “There must be another way.”

  Something flits across Vara’s expression. Deven must have noticed too, because he sits forward.

  “You have an idea,” he says. “What is it?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s probably nothing. It’s just…years ago I heard—now, it was just a rumor, mind you—but I heard that Balavan had fathered a daughter. If that’s true, then her blood could destroy the relic also. Provided she could be found, of course. And then turned against her father.” Vara pinches the bridge of her nose. “Which is unlikely on both counts.”

  My stomach plunges. My mind chills. Daughter. It’s what the Nagaraja has called me both times I’ve faced him.

  Bile rises in my throat. Balavan is my father. And my blood is the key to destroying him.

  Fazel and I hike until dawn. I’m so exhausted I can barely stay upright, but the threat of being caught by either Balavan or the Crocodile King is like a wind at my back pushing me forward. No matter which of them survived, they’ll want me dead.

  “We should find a place to rest,” Fazel says. The pink light from the sky makes his eyes luminous.

  “No,” I tell him. “We need to get farther away.”

  He pulls on the back of his neck, leaving angry red handprints. “We can’t keep walking forever.”

  I give him a sidelong glance. “Maybe you can’t.”

  He comes to an abrupt stop. “Did your parents slap you every time you showed kindness or something? Is that why you can’t seem to serve up a single comment without a side of vinegar?”

  His words are laced with acid, and they spill over the raw wounds that fester in my chest. I try to keep the pain from showing on my face. “I don’t have parents,” I tell him. “I was kidnapped as a baby to serve the Nagaraja. So maybe keep your commentary to yourself.”

  Fazel’s shoulders slump and he lets out a long breath. “I’m such a jerk. I’m tired and I’m hungry and…I’m so sorry.” The tenderness in his expression makes it hard to look at him.

  I shrug. “It’s not your fault,” I say. “You’re n
ot the one who kidnapped me.”

  “Iyla.” His hand catches mine and he spins me toward him. “I’m trying here.”

  I press my lips together and study the ground. Finally I meet his gaze. “Trying what, exactly?”

  He throws his other hand in the air. “Trying to apologize. Trying to connect with you.” His jaw tightens. “Trying not to kill you.”

  “Well,” I say, “you’re doing it all very nicely.”

  His lips twitch like he’s struggling to hold back a smile. “Give me a little bit of a break?”

  I give him a small nod instead of an answer.

  We start walking again, but Fazel doesn’t let go of my hand. I could pull away, but I don’t. I tell myself it’s because I need the extra support to remain on my feet. I tell myself that I need to stay on Fazel’s good side so that he’ll keep helping me. I tell myself a thousand lies so I don’t have to let go.

  “So what about you? Did you have some kind of horrible childhood that led you straight to the Crocodile King?”

  “No,” Fazel says. “I had a great childhood and parents who told me I could be and do anything. Unfortunately, what I wanted to do was have adventures, and what I wanted to be was a hero.”

  “And now you’ve thrown all that away to traipse through the kingdom with me.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. Saving a pretty girl from certain death—it has a nice heroic ring to it, don’t you think?”

  He smiles like he’s teasing, but something flutters in my stomach. It makes me feel off-balance and out of control. I can’t decide if it’s a pleasant sensation or a horrible one.

  “Maybe I rescued you from certain death,” I tell him. “You might have been Chipkali’s next meal. Or Balavan’s.”

  Fazel laughs and my stomach spins and swoops. Definitely an unpleasant sensation. “Yeah,” he says. “Maybe you’re right.” He squeezes my fingers. “Or maybe we saved each other.”

  My heart clenches. I search for a caustic retort, something that will push him so far away that I won’t have to risk his choosing to leave on his own. But my mouth feels glued shut. And then the moment slips away and it’s too late to argue with him.

  Maybe he’s right. Maybe we did save each other.

  Morning slides into afternoon, and the forest gives way to a small village—the trees have been thinning for hours now, and in the distance we can see a herd of cattle and a collection of small huts with thatched roofs and walls made of clay.

  “I smell food,” I say. My stomach grumbles, and a wave of dizziness washes over me.

  “Let’s hope they take pity on us,” Fazel says. We hurry forward. A cluster of children play in the sand in front of one of the huts, and their laughter floats to us on the breeze. Not far away a group of women cook over a fire pit—one woman stirs a huge pot of curry with a large stick. Another woman flips chapati in a hot pan. My mouth waters. I’m ready to run toward the village and beg the women for a bite.

  But then Fazel’s sharp intake of breath makes my heart stutter. He puts a hand out to stop me from moving and presses a finger to his lips. I follow his gaze, and my stomach clenches.

  Several of Balavan’s men—members of the Naga who are vaguely familiar—approach from the opposite direction and begin to circulate among the children. We crouch behind an oxcart piled high with hay. My pulse thunders in my ears. How did they beat us here? But then I remember how quickly they were able to find Chipkali and his people even after they’d packed up and left the peninsula.

  We’re too far away to hear what the men are saying, but they seem to be describing us. One of the men holds a hand, palm down, just above his head—probably to show them that Fazel is a bit taller than he is—and then he does the same gesture near his shoulder to indicate my height.

  At first the children give the men little notice. They shrug and continue scooping sand into piles at their feet. And then one of the men reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of coins. They glint in his palm like jewels. The children stand—he has their full attention now. They bob their heads up and down. They grab for the money with eager fingers.

  If the children spot us, they will sell us out without a second thought. And I wouldn’t blame them. Their homes are tiny with crooked walls. Their knobby arms and legs protrude from their clothing like twigs. And the money they’re gazing at is enough to feed every man, woman and child in their village for a month. The Naga man shakes the coins one more time before he pulls them out of reach and slips them back into his pocket.

  There’s a price on our heads.

  The children groan in protest, and one of the women leaves the cook fire to investigate. As the men talk, her gaze sweeps across the horizon. I flinch and duck out of sight. Several long seconds pass before I dare move enough to see what’s happening, and by that time the men are gone.

  “What are we going to do?” I ask Fazel.

  His expression is tense. “I don’t know. I had planned on going back to my flat or maybe even to my parents’ cottage just to be safe.” He shakes his head. “But if the Naga are already searching for us, neither of those places is an option.”

  I glance around for any sign of a landmark. “Where are we, exactly? Do you know?”

  “In a tight spot, I’d say.”

  Fazel and I both spin toward the voice. The woman who was talking to Balavan’s men a few minutes ago now stands behind us with her hands on her hips.

  The little hope I still harbored drains away. I start to stand—better to face my fate with dignity than to cower in fear—but the woman gives a sharp shake of her head.

  “Stay where you are,” she says. “I have no intention of turning you over, but if any of the children see you…” She looks back toward the village and her eyes go soft. “Well, their grumbling bellies are likely to win out over their kindness.”

  “How did you know we were here?” I ask.

  She purses her lips. “I could see your feet peeking beneath the wheels,” she says. “Next time you might want to find a more solid hiding place.”

  “We didn’t exactly have a lot of options,” I say sharply. “Why are you even helping us? You’re probably going to turn us over the next chance you get.” Fazel pinches the skin above my elbow. He means it to be a warning, but it makes anger flare in my chest. I slap his hand away.

  The woman narrows her eyes. “I don’t sell people,” she says. “No matter the price.” She swipes a strand of silver hair from her forehead. “I’ll bring you something to eat in a bit. In the meantime, stay out of sight.”

  Fazel and I don’t speak for several minutes after the woman leaves. And then he clears his throat softly. “I’m sorry I pinched you,” he says finally.

  “No, you’re not.”

  He sighs and drops his head into his hands. And I feel it again, that inextricable pull toward him. The desire to say more than I should. The urge to move closer to him when it would be smarter to move away.

  “I just meant that I understand why you did it,” I say. “I know you were trying to keep me from saying something that would make her decide to turn us over to Balavan’s men.”

  “You assume the worst of people,” he says.

  “I wasn’t assuming the worst of you,” I tell him. “I was—”

  “No,” Fazel says. “You assumed the worst of her. She was trying to help us, and you—”

  “Served up my comments with a side of vinegar?” The words have been echoing in my mind since Fazel said them earlier today. They still sting.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “I have trouble trusting kindness.”

  Fazel turns toward me, and his gaze falls on my face like sunshine.

  “Why?” he asks.

  A lump forms in my throat. “Because…” I fumble for an explanation that will make sense to him. “Because my whole life it’s never been given for free.” A beautiful flat, a new sari, an expensive bottle of perfume, all came with price tags—finding the Naga targets to kill, letti
ng Kadru drain away my life, keeping Marinda in the dark about who we were really working for. Even kindness from Marinda came with strings attached—the price of her friendship was that she expected mine in return. And that may have been the steepest price of all.

  Fazel circles my wrist with his fingers, his thumb stroking my skin and leaving a trail of heat behind. Then he turns my hand over and gently traces the lines on my palm like he’s a fortune-teller and touching me will reveal all my secrets. Sparks dance down my spine.

  He leans toward me, and my pulse goes erratic. His breath moves across my cheeks like a warm breeze. His eyes are two bright coins.

  A throat clears behind us and we spring apart. “Sorry to interrupt,” the woman says. She hands each of us a thin metal platter laden with thick, fragrant curry, chapati and a mug of water. My stomach growls.

  “Thank you,” I say. “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate this.”

  The woman tilts her head to one side as if she can’t puzzle out whether I’m being sarcastic or sincere, and I feel a little pang in my chest.

  “Leave the dishes here when you’re finished,” she says. “I’ll collect them later. And then once the children go inside, it’s time for you to move along.”

  “Thank you,” Fazel says. The woman gives him a small nod—there seems to be no question that his gratitude is heartfelt.

  “You’re about a two days’ walk south of the capital,” the woman says. “Stay safe.” She turns on her heel and walks back toward the village.

  Fazel and I eat in silence. We scoop up curry with bits of chapati and stuff it into our mouths. We lick our fingers and sip our water without saying a word.

  Finally, when our platters are empty, Fazel speaks. “I think we should start heading east. We can make it back to my flat in Bala City in a few days.”

  I set my tray on the ground. “But the longer we’re out in the open, the more likely Chipkali is to find us. I think we should go west, toward the Raja’s palace.”