“Oh, many … Kalindi, Yamini, Syamala … surely you’ve heard of her?”
“In passing.”
“Met her?”
“No.”
This, for whatever reason, seemed to be the correct answer to Gupta. He drummed his ink-stained fingers against his arm.
“Rather intriguing guardian. When the day is gone and the night descends to take her place, many people in all the realms consider it a time that belongs to the demons and the dead. And you, naturally. Some perceive her as something of an ill omen.”
I smiled to myself. I knew that feeling of never walking somewhere without a thread of fear unspooling in every living being. Where the shadow of you fell like a veil over every conversation and every interaction. I enjoyed it entirely. No reason to waste a single word on etiquette. It was considered merciful not to speak and thoughtful to avoid, essentially, everyone.
“I imagine she must revel in it,” I said.
“Quite the contrary,” Gupta said. He tossed a slice of fruit in the air to catch it with his teeth. It bounced off his mouth and fell to the ground. “Nooo … that was the last piece.”
“So get more.”
He flailed an arm at the fallen slice. If it were me, I would’ve immediately swiped it off the ground. Actually, if it were me, it would have never fallen in the first place. But Gupta had a deep fear of dirt.
“Can’t,” he grumbled. “She grows them and extracts quite the strange price for one. I had to steal this one.”
“What does she demand in return?”
“She asks them to tell her stories about their day. She asks them to tell her things that no one else knows about them. And if they’re recurring customers, she asks about the dream they purchased.”
A strange feeling prickled in my chest. “Do they remember the dreams she gives them?”
Gupta looked surprised. “No. I don’t think so. But why does that matter?”
“Perhaps she wants to give them dreams they remember.”
“But then it’s not really a dream,” said Gupta.
“Exactly. Then it becomes something else. Something that guides you.”
“I think she just wants to follow up on the quality of her merchandise,” said Gupta dismissively.
“No,” I said softly. “She wants recognition.”
I stared at the fallen piece of fruit on the floor. Even from where I stood, I could sense the cold of it. How it glistened and lulled. Simple, but beautiful magic. No one ever did anything new in the Otherworld. Too often, it was a place of staid contentment. But this gem of a fruit looked like restlessness. Curiosity flared through me.
“She’s quite beautiful too,” said Gupta. “Albeit, not in the traditional sense.”
I shrugged. Beauty meant little to me. Silken hair, clear skin, arresting eyes? I could manufacture all those things and more in the reincarnation pool. Traits like cleverness and creativity? Those could not be made. The longer I sat there, thinking of this guardian I had never met, I realized something strange. I wanted to meet her.
“Is she…” I stopped and tried again. “That is to say, would she even—”
“No consort, but not for lack of interest from others. She went to Teej once, from what I gather. Although the acacia trees near where she dances say that she has no desire to attend Teej ever again. It was quite the point of contention between her and her friend.”
I eyed Gupta a little more sharply. “You had that answer on hand.”
He snorted. “I have most answers on hand. I am the scribe, after all.”
I grinned. Problem solved.
“I have decided. She should be my queen.”
Gupta stared at me and then laughed. “Her?”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“There’s nothing wrong with her. In what world do you imagine she would have you?”
I frowned. “What’s wrong with me?”
Gupta considered this. “Nothing so repulsive.”
“Thank you for that winning endorsement.”
“You are a little arrogant. And sometimes moody and broody, which are such uninspired traits for the Lord of the Dead. And you are obsessed with tinkering with things. Plus, you’re quite blunt. You probably have no idea how to speak to a woman.”
“Of course I know how to speak to a woman.”
Gupta raised his eyebrows. “Do you wish to meet her?”
“Not wish,” I said, heaving to my feet. The onyx chair swiveled and disappeared. “Will meet her.”
“And say what?”
“That I think she would make an excellent consort. I want a companion. She wants recognition. It’s a victory for us both and sound reasoning too.”
I started walking toward the door when Gupta jogged up to me. “That will be your opening statement? You need to make a good impression. Bees are drawn to flowers, not rocks, for a reason. And that is a ridiculous number of assumptions about someone you don’t even know.”
I stopped short. He was, as much as I hated it, correct.
“I pray that these next words never cross my lips again.”
Gupta cupped his hand to his ear and grinned like a fool. “Do go on.”
“… teach me.”
* * *
One more example of how to describe someone’s eyes and I would destroy someone.
“You want to give off an air of refined elegance,” said Gupta. He was gliding to and fro across the mirror-paneled hall. I leaned against the wall and tried not to glower. “You want to be coy but not so reclusive. And you want to be inviting without being too available.”
“I hate this.”
“Last time we’ll practice,” said Gupta. For his own sake, he better be right. “Now. Pretend I’m her.”
He disappeared behind a corner. A thick brume of ink rose up from the floor in Gupta’s impersonation of night. Tiny lights poked holes in the mist. Were those supposed to be stars? And then. Singing. Gupta ran into the hall flailing his arms over his head. Then, he twirled in a circle:
“I am a beautiful maiden!” he trilled in a high-pitched voice.
Please stop.
Gupta stopped spiraling in manic circles when he saw me, and clasped a hand to his chest. “Who are you?”
“It is I … the Dharma Raja…”
“And what do you want, handsome man?”
I glared, but Gupta remained in character and blinked furiously. There were times I wondered what dying was like. This was one of those times. Except I wanted to die out of necessity. Not curiosity.
“I was captivated by your beauty,” I deadpanned.
Gupta—curses upon him—ran his hand through a false pile of hair that was more or less a strategically placed ink blot. “What beauty?”
“You look like a”—nightmare, my mind supplied—“dream.”
The shadows and ink vanished and Gupta clapped. “That wasn’t so miserable, was it?”
“You made me resent immortality.”
“Now you have a place to start in your conversation. And you owe it all to me,” he said, grinning. “Now go.”
“You do not need to tell me twice.”
* * *
When I saw her, the world ceased to exist beyond where she danced. I forgot Gupta’s lessons. I forgot why I stood there. I forgot what I wanted. I even forgot the curse the Shadow Wife had placed on me all those years ago.
Night’s dance thrummed with purpose. Her grace sharpened into a lathe, and with it she sculpted the promise of tomorrow from nothing but shadows. She was potential incarnate. When she shaped shadows to every sleep-creased fold in the earth, she was balancing time, wiping slates clean, allowing any beginning to take shape. When she frosted night over the world, dawn whispered the lyrics of every tomorrow: here is a thing not yet started, here is a thing of magic. My own halfhearted attempts of invention paled before her. She was the beginning of all ideas.
And before her, I was humbled.
* * *
Her laught
er was still ringing in my ears when I arrived back to the palace. Gupta was meditating upside down and cracked open an eye when he heard me.
“Oh no,” he said, paling. “Not a single insult? My sherwani jacket is practically around my head.”
“I can see that.”
My hounds ran up to me, snuffling my palms with bemused expressions. I scratched their ears absentmindedly.
“What did she do to you?”
She had laughed at me. And made me laugh at myself. And she had been freely honest. People always threw their honesty and last secrets at me, as if by expelling them in a dying breath, they could shorten their time in the less savory parts of my kingdom. But she had given her honesty without expectation. And her honesty was a gift.
“How did the introductions go? Was she adequately wooed and smitten courtesy of yours truly?” asked Gupta.
“She hated every word your ‘expert tutelage’ forced me to say.”
Gupta gasped, and his eyes narrowed. “Impossible!”
“She is.”
“Don’t take it personally. Women are hard to please,” he grumbled. “Especially beautiful ones.”
Beauty. I hadn’t thought much of it before. Beauty seemed too random, too flimsy to pin any true value to. Her features were lovely, but that wasn’t what made her memorable. Stars and constellations had knitted their way from her forehead to her toes. She wore the stories of the world as if every story had only ever been about her. And wasn’t that what beauty should be about? A rhythm of features and colors trying to be remarkable enough to earn a tale? If so, she had that in infinite quantities.
“What did you tell her?” asked Gupta, hopping from his upside-down perch.
“That I wanted to make her my queen.”
Gupta squeaked and tugged at his hair. “Where is the mystery in that, you fool? What did she say?”
I laughed, thinking of her response. Sharp tongue. Clever.
“She said no.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“But I thought…” started Gupta, before he frowned and tented his fingers. “Don’t despair, there’s always—”
“No,” I said. “If not her, then no one.”
“But she rejected you.”
“And she said I may see her tomorrow. And even court her.”
Gupta raised a skeptical brow. “Seems like you’ve met your match in cruelty.”
“I’m not cruel,” I said, waving a hand. I was pacing back and forth. How many hours until nightfall?
“There’s only two months until Teej. Even by your normal standards, you seem a little overconfident.”
“I think she’s far too ambitious to refuse my offer.”
Gupta muttered something that sounded a lot like “arrogant cow.” Then, with a flick of his wrist, a flurry of heavily inked parchment papers soared into his arms. “If that is what you wish, then how can I help?”
“First of all, never instruct me on the art of courtly coquettishness again.”
Gupta winced. “Noted.”
“Second. There’s something I want to give her.”
Gupta clasped his hands to his chin and made a strangled cooing sound. “Is it your heart?”
Cold prickled down my spine. And I heard the Shadow Wife’s taunts echoing in my thoughts: You should have learned from the beginning that when someone leaves, it is because nothing was valuable enough to make them stay. You were not enough. And with this curse, I bind your heart.
“Better than a heart,” I said tightly.
Before I left, she had asked for a garden unlike any in all the realms. She would have it.
I wandered through the room where I kept my small creations. On a shelf beside some discarded thoughts, a miniature glass garden caught the light. I had made it on the day I retrieved the soul of a celibate gardener. I had to decide whether he should be reborn as a vivid, but short-lived rose, always pressed to the bosom of the queen he had chastely loved. Or if I should make him into a king, someone who would marry the queen he had loved when she too was reincarnated into a new form. There was something about the garden that reminded me of Night. The way hope grew in every crystal blade, unsure of what it would be next. This would be my starting point. But I could make the garden larger. Grander. Something filled with translucence and light, crystal roses and quartz lilies, emerald ivy and moonstone jasmine vines. Things that were themselves even as they took on the reflection of the world around them.
Like her.
When I was nearly finished, Gupta called out to me. And I knew from his face what it meant:
Dusk was about to fall.
“Do you have your gift?”
“Yes.”
“What about your sherwani jacket?”
“What about it?”
He looked appalled. “That’s the same one you were wearing this morning.”
“It will be fine.”
“I would notice if someone courting me was wearing the same jacket.”
“Hence, why no one is courting you.”
The grove where she danced stood next to the Chakara Forest, where the human and magical world had somehow woven together. Here, small gray birds fed off the moonlight and chirped remnants of children’s dreams. It was a popular haunt of gentle rakshas, those demons who preferred to disguise themselves as boulders for years upon years rather than participate in the blood sport of their brethren. And it was here where Night’s orchard of dream fruit sprouted cold fruit and silver limbs. The more I thought about seeing her, the more something within me gathered into a tight knot.
In the clearing where I had first seen her, I let go of that clamoring sensation in my chest and opened my palms. Tiny glass seedlings drifted and swirled into the ground. Translucent roots expanded into tessellations. Before my eyes, the glass garden grew:
Thick ashwagandha shrubs, orchids with pale quartz petals, arrowheads fat as palms and bright as topaz. There were jasmine vines with pearl buds, water lilies with diamond petals. Nilofars and lotuses. Beneath the sunset sky, the glass garden transformed into a grove of lush flames.
Behind me, I heard a fierce intake of breath.
I turned around, and there she was. Livid as the sunset. Red and gold streaked across her skin. Her hair was tied back in a loose braid. Mirth filled her eyes even before she smiled and I found myself hungering for the sound of her laugh.
“You asked for a garden unlike any in all the realms.”
“You listen well,” she said. She touched each flower reverently and I knew, with a sudden surge of pride, that she liked what I had made. Crouching to her feet, she held her arm to a glass lotus that resembled her flaming skin. “A garden to match me.”
“Yes,” I said. “For a guardian unlike any in all the realms.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s a far better compliment than your last attempt.”
Lowly painter. I shuddered and inwardly cursed Gupta. “I relieved my instructor of his duties.”
“Ah, see. There is your problem. You consulted a man.” She laughed. And I wanted to catch the sound and play it forever. “You should have asked a woman.”
“Then I shall make amends now. What should I have said to you?”
She shrugged. I couldn’t tell whether the faint scarlet bloom across her cheeks belonged to a blush or the sunset. “The truth. What was the first thing you thought when you saw me?”
When I first saw her, I remembered how the sky crouched low over the world, its black belly swollen on thunderstorms and stars. And when I saw her dancing, I remembered the edge of a cloud sliding across her neck. I remembered the ghost-pale cut of its silhouette before it disappeared beneath the fall of her hair.
“I thought you looked like edges and thunderstorms.”
“Should I be flattered?”
“Be anything you want. But I would not have you any other way.”
The sky leaned a little further to the call of night. The red of her skin fad
ed to a dull plum. That brilliant incandescence of the flame-filled sky softened. She looked away and when she looked back, something like mischief sparked in her eyes.
“I was thinking of you.”
“How flattering.”
“I was thinking of your stubborn desire to court me despite inevitable rejection.”
“Less flattering.”
“But mostly I was thinking of how I don’t know you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I’m glad you asked.”
With a small wave of her hand, a richly patterned rug sprawled across the grove. Silk pillows landed with soft thumps onto the covering. The black and white tiles of a shatranj board caught the light and small onyx and alabaster figurines hopped into their respective places.
She seated herself at one end of the game and gestured for me to sit. “For every move I make, you must answer a question.”
Before she could reach for a piece, I flicked my wrist and a wave of shadows rose out of the ground, swallowing up the board. “If you want to know me, then I want to know you too. We are equals. If you may ask a question, so may I.”
She rolled her eyes. “Must you be so dramatic?”
“Is that your first question?”
“You could answer out of the kindness of your heart.”
“I’m not known for kindness.”
She laughed. “Then here is my question. How did you make my garden?”
I liked the way she called the garden hers. “How did you know I made it?”
“My question. Not yours.”
“I took whatever rain slicked each of those flowers and froze the impressions to look like glass. I took every color from dusk and dawn and midnight. I poured hope in every flower, though I must confess that the hope originally belonged to a gardener of an ancient kingdom. He was in love with the queen who spoke to him only three times in his whole life. And yet he hoped that she would know that each bloom and their beauty was for her alone. His hope never wavered,” I said. “That is why this garden of yours will never break.”
Her lips formed a soft O, and she glanced back at the garden as if seeing it with new eyes. “A rather huge undertaking for someone who told you they won’t have you.”
Star-Touched Stories Page 5