Star-Touched Stories

by Roshani Chokshi

  For as long as she remembered, her touch was an extension of her that she hardly gave any thought to. It was like a shadow, forgotten until it loomed stark and vivid upon the ground. And yet her whole life, Aasha could always blame being a vishakanya as the source of her pain. It had kept her in the Otherworld. Then it had threatened the lives of those she loved in Bharata. She wanted to blame it. Wanted to curse it. Wanted to hold out this part of her and say you are the reason. But she couldn’t. Zahril hadn’t even bothered to reject her. She simply ignored it. And Aasha was left staring at her reflection on the polished copper of the kitchen pots. Wondering what fault her reflection hid from her.

  * * *

  The morning of the final examination was black and dark.

  But Aasha had grown used to this. She fell asleep and woke up in darkness. For the past couple of weeks, she hadn’t let the darkness get to her. And yet sometime in the space of last night and this morning, she felt cracked. The velvet fingers of the shadows had found them. Heaviness dogged her steps. Hope, that familiar brightness that she could always reach, felt distant.

  If she didn’t pass, she’d not only leave in disgrace. She’d leave with her heart swollen and bruised. Maybe it would leave her chest altogether. Then what?

  She stepped outside and immediately winced.

  Warm liquid hit her toes. Something sharp grazed her ankle.

  She looked down to see what had been the culprit, and found the broken shards of a teacup.

  That darkness lifted its fingers at the same time as the corners of her mouth:

  Zahril had made her tea.

  * * *

  Aasha had been to enough tournaments of the Otherworld to know what to expect. Her heart didn’t race when she walked to the end of the hall and found that the passageway to the kitchen had disappeared, replaced with a tunnel of darkness.

  A sign floated in front of her, written in light:

  Get Out

  A different version of Aasha would have taken it personally, but Zahril’s command was clear. Her task was to find her way out.

  The moment she nodded, the darkness rippled.

  Walls peeled off from the tunnel, stone grinding together as the slabs of rock closed around her. Her breath tightened. She didn’t like tight spaces.

  Earlier in their lessons, when Aasha had fought back on what the use of these lessons were, Zahril had only laughed.

  “The purpose of this is to teach you how to think,” she had said. “Everything else can be learned on the job.”

  Think, thought Aasha. You already know how to do it all.

  It was that one thought that comforted her, especially when she found herself looking at a bright, empty room devoid of windows and doors. The light seemed to emanate from the walls, like a cave threaded through with quartz. Maps littered the floor. Aasha knelt, touching them, searching them for a riddle. How could she get out when there was no exit? It’s not like she could burn a hole through the ground and escape. Zahril was sneaky. She may have drilled Aasha on the five senses, but she shifted them out of obvious focus. Taught her to think in the manner of absurd things. Taught her that using her senses meant not trusting them at their core level.

  She studied the maps.

  Maps of cities she’d never traveled to, of oceans where creatures rendered of ink and ash widened their jaws, ready to swallow an empire. She trailed her finger up … a square of black.

  A series of triangles. Mountains.

  Close-knit spirals. Ocean cyclones.

  A broken line. Treacherous roads.

  The symbols all stood for something, and she realized what it was from wandering through the Bharata archives. A map key. She pressed her palm to it, and felt it—that sensation of magic, an unexpected burst of cold, like mistaking pulverized ice for a dusting of sugar. Zahril was not averse to using magic in her lessons, and when Aasha drew away her hand, she felt something cold and metallic against her skin …

  A key.

  She grinned.

  But if she had the key, she needed a door. There was nothing in the maps in the shape of a door. Nothing that might even be the semblance of one.

  “What makes something a door?” she asked herself aloud.

  It was a barrier. An entrance. An exit. And all doors had thresholds, a line that split one place from another.

  She stared at the maps. An idea struck. She gathered them one by one, until her arms were heavy with thick papers and sweet-smelling scrolls. Then she arranged them in a line down the room. With the key in her hand, she stepped over the line.

  The room split.

  Beneath her, the floor shattered. Dark earth flecked the threshold of maps. The smell of damp, growing things and something else … something rancid and sharp dug into her nose. And then she heard it. The snuffling. Scuffing of creature paws.

  The room had warped and pinched, darkening as it transformed into the mouth of a cave. Only this time she wasn’t alone. Something was making its way to her. A creature like a rat.

  But Zahril hadn’t left her entirely in the darkness. The smell of growing things revealed itself. Bushes with sprays of berries. Some were the bright purple of a new bruise. Others were the toasted yellow of turmeric. The creature ambled toward Aasha, and she could smell its breath. The rank, bitterness of food gone unpicked. She stifled a cough, and pressed her arm against her mouth. The creature had a row of needle-teeth, and a long, furred nose. Its eyes were pale as pearls. Nothing at all like the milky eye of Zahril that gazed at something else at all times. She watched it from a distance. It brushed past the purple berries, shivering as it moved, and then nibbled at the yellow berries. Then it licked its small, red mouth.

  It started advancing, as if it smelled her.

  Aasha shivered.

  Was she supposed to get past it?

  A part of her mind chastised her. She didn’t teach you stealth. But panic gnawed at her logic. She tried to skirt past the ratlike creature that loomed tall as an elephant and wide as a building. Its tail, bald but for a few coarse hairs, whipped to her.

  It saw her.

  With something like a roar, it came toward her. Aasha tried to run. It loomed over her. One paw poised to slice her open. She felt something damp and disgusting matting her hair. She tried to rub the gunk onto her arms, wondering if that would make her invisible to it, but the rat hissed. It didn’t make a difference. It would eat its waste with as little distaste to eating her.

  Aasha ran to the other end of the cave. The only things were the bushels of thorned berries. She dove into the thicket of their leaves.

  The rat trotted after her. Snuffling. Easy. It knew that it didn’t have to rush because there was no way she could get past it. Around her, the purple and yellow berries scratched at her face. Aasha breathed fast. She watched as the rat moved closer, forcing her to keep her eyes open. Something caught her eye. A shudder in the creature’s skin. She frowned. Watching again.

  It didn’t like the purple berries.

  Every time it brushed against them, its own skin crawled.

  Aasha grabbed a handful, pulverizing them in her fist and rubbing it onto her hands and arms just as the creature found the bush where she hid. She waited, back pressed against the rocky ledges of the cave. The creature’s nose was hardly a foot away from her. She could count the pores on its nose.

  It snuffled her, a pale tongue trying to lick over her face. With a disgusted snuffle, it shuffled backward. Aasha could hardly breathe. She just grabbed a handful of more purple berries, then crept behind the creature. Its ears perked. Head swiveled. But it couldn’t find her scent anymore.

  With a shaky grin, she ran into the cave …

  And fell.

  Now she was wandering through a new maze. One of sounds. She heard the wingbeats of giant birds carrying thunderstorms in their feathers. Aasha thought of Zahril’s lesson, when she had placed her hands over Aasha’s eyes and told her to listen. Listen to the space between things, until she could hear steam
pluming from a mug of tea. It had been the hardest lesson. Not because she couldn’t learn to listen, but because she couldn’t concentrate with Zahril’s cold palms over her eyelids. They were so much softer than the rest of her.

  Aasha pushed the thought from her mind.

  She did what she remembered from Zahril’s lessons. She closed her eyes to the riotous room before her. Sight would only trick her. Focusing on the sounds to guide her out. In front of her, rain fell sharply, sounding like pearls ripped loose from a sari and clattering loudly to the ground. Not that way. In the other direction was the whumpf of wings. A cold wind pushed her back, stinging her throat and making it hard to breathe. Not that way.

  What did an exit sound like?

  Aasha remembered Zahril forcing her to knock against a thousand gourds, to memorize the sound of crisp bread broken versus the sound of soaked bread ripped into pieces. Don’t roll your eyes at me, Aasha, this sound is the difference between life and death.

  The sound between life and death …

  Silence.

  She needed to follow the quiet.

  She listened to another direction, trying to pinpoint her attention on one direction at a time. Then she heard it: nothing. But there was fullness to it, like walking down a completely empty street during a summer night where the air—so soaked through with damp—used you to bolster itself upright.

  Without opening her eyes lest another sense betray her, Aasha followed the promise of quiet …

  The other sounds faded.

  Now when she opened her eyes, she was standing at the end of a gigantic feast table.

  Aasha’s stomach gave a desperate grumble. Hungerrrr …

  She wished Zahril hadn’t just left a cup of tea outside her door where anyone could have stepped on it. Then again, Zahril had told her that she never went to state banquets on a full stomach. It was the emptiness that heightened the senses. She told Aasha how some holy men and women would undergo rigorous fasting just to capture that euphoric transcendence that came from depriving the body. When one thing was denied, it felt and reached with all senses, frantic to keep itself alive.

  The feast table groaned. Moths with wings of light darted overhead, transforming the ceiling into a glittering array of living stars. There was no one here. Not like the famous eaters that supposedly lived within Kubera’s monstrous palace.

  The food was tantalizing. But poisonous. Aasha could feel her star pushing against her skin, ready to burst free. For the first time during the examination, she exhaled. Relaxed. Nothing could kill her here. And yet … she looked around at the stone enclosure. The glittering ceiling. Even the wooden floor of interlocking stars that was polished to a shine as bright as a mirror.

  Zahril was watching. Weighing.

  If she chose wrong, she would know what Aasha was.

  Aasha fought against touching her throat. She scanned the feast and its multiple dishes, all of which rested on rectangles of thinly hammered gold. Fat plums with rinds like dusk, shining with dew. Mounds of pearl-white rice, flecked with gold. Candied pistachios. Rose sweets wrapped in silver foil. Egg curries with translucent spheres of oil separating at the top. Aasha breathed in … she tasted without tasting. The trace of too much almond in the palak paneer. The rancid note that all that sugar in the carrot halwa could not hide. One by one, she touched the foods, careful to smell indirectly, lest she inhale poisonous fumes and be forced to fake a faint.

  She circled the feast table until she realized …

  All of it was poisonous.

  The only thing that wasn’t were the thin pieces of gold holding up the dishes of food. Even the plates and cutlery were dusted with finely milled apple seed. A poison that would leach into the skin.

  She tore off a corner of gold. Ate it.

  It tasted as she expected:

  Like nothing at all.

  And the moment she ate the piece of gold, the table cleaved in half. Beautiful dishes of food slid off and crashed onto the floor. A pair of stairs appeared. Aasha took them slowly. Only dimly did she realize what had happened. She had conquered sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.

  She had succeeded.

  At the bottom of the stairwell, Zahril was waiting. Her arms folded. Aasha recognized the lines of worry that she’d never announce. The taut pull of her wide mouth. Even the extra flutter of her eyelashes, as if she had to look twice to acknowledge what she saw.

  Aasha walked to her, and as she did, she felt as though she were holding her heart out. Zahril tensed. But she didn’t move. She thought of Zahril’s words to her when she told her that she sometimes wanted to kiss her. It is fine to want things. It is far worse to need them. That is the risk of acting upon want.

  Going through that hell of an arena had only strengthened Aasha’s resolve to look at things differently. And when she beheld Zahril’s words through the lens of a victory, she saw another emotion unfold before her:

  Fear.

  The fear of loving and losing. The fear of letting a temptation become more than a luxury, but a lifeline. The fear of like ripening to love.

  Aasha knew she was not in love. But she felt the stirrings of love’s desire to live here, in her heart. As if it were a hand knocking on the door of her soul, waiting to be welcomed. She could love her. She wanted to. And not because Zahril had won her over with her kindness or her sweetness. But because she had awakened a fierce sense of belonging within herself. Because Zahril was a moon amongst stars, distant and inspiring. Enigmatic. Because she reminded Aasha of all the reasons why she had left the vishakanya harem, and all the reasons why she no longer cared to fit within Bharata’s rules. Zahril belonged to herself. And Aasha carried a hope that one day they might belong to each other.

  She kissed her.

  It was not a first kiss for either of them. It was a kiss like a palimpsest, layered with near-invisible things. Aasha could taste Zahril’s hesitancy laced with the mint-sweetness of her mouth. She could taste her wonder … and it was lightness upon her tongue, a sparkle on her teeth.

  The kiss lasted two blinks. Maybe three.

  When Aasha pulled away, she saw that some of the gold foil from the feast clung to Zahril’s lower lip. The barest crescent of a smile curved Zahril’s wide and lovely mouth. The smile wasn’t a declaration. Or a promise.

  But it was something.

  And then she wrinkled her nose.

  “Did you try rolling around in that rat dung before you went for the purple berries?”

  Aasha nodded wearily.

  Zahril sighed. “Let’s get you a bath. You reek.”

  9

  Aasha had been so worn out from the competition that she slept for a day and a half. Zahril brought her tea (Aasha poured it into a vase when she wasn’t looking … Zahril had mistaken the salt for sugar). Aasha also caught her sitting stiffly at the foot of her bed, not sure whether this closeness was too strange. Or too soon. Once or twice as she dozed off, Aasha tried to tell her that this made her happy. But all she managed was a vague and unintelligible grumble.

  When she woke up, Zahril stood on the opposite side of the room. Aasha’s smile shrank. Had something happened when she slept? There was a sudden cold where there had been none …

  “We must leave for Bharata immediately,” said Zahril.

  No greeting. No … nothing.

  Aasha’s cheeks burned.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “There will be a formal hearing with the heads of state and the future monarchs where I will give my official recommendation. I am told there will be a feast to follow.”

  “And then what?” asked Aasha. “Will we come back here?”

  Zahril hesitated. “You will need more training, of course. Whether they would prefer that is done here or at a tower of your own is not my decision.”

  “So it’s my decision?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Aasha sat up, pulling her blankets around her shoulders.

&nbs
p; “Do you want me here?”

  Zahril looked up at her then. “I don’t want anything.”

  And with that, she left.

  As the door closed, Aasha looked to where Zahril had been standing. Her heart fell. The painting of Bharata with the star balancing on a mountain’s peak. Everywhere she looked, she was reminded that Zahril’s heart had belonged to Sazma. Perhaps … perhaps it still did.

  * * *

  When the chariots came, Aasha sat at one side, ready to make room for Zahril.

  The charioteer turned to her, brows tilted in confusion.

  “Lady Aasha, you may take more room than that if you wish. The Spy Mistress always takes a private chariot.”

  “Oh,” said Aasha, adjusting in embarrassment. “Does she travel to Bharata often?”

  “I would not know, my lady,” said the charioteer. He lifted a vial filled with pale liquid. “Even those of us who see her face quickly forget. It is part of the policy and part of our duty to Her Majesty, Queen Gauri.”

  Aasha sat quietly, her fingers twisting in the silk of her sari. What else had Zahril made other contestants for the position of Spy Mistress or Spy Master forget? Had she kissed them too, and then when she changed their mind, forced them to drink a draught that would cleanse them of the memory? Or worse … had she given it to herself? So that she wouldn’t remember the press and part of Aasha’s lips against her own. Maybe she was trying to rid herself of some guilt.

  The days passed in a blur. The two chariots stopped and rested at alternating times, so that Zahril would reach Bharata faster. Aasha tried urging the charioteer to match them for speed, but he shook his head sorrowfully.

  “I am under orders, my lady,” he said.

  Four days later, they reached Bharata. There was no grand welcoming for Aasha. But then again, no one was supposed to know when she left and when she returned. It was safer for Gauri and Vikram that way.

  The moment she got out of the chariot, she made her apologies to the women of the harem who were insisting that she at least take a long, proper bath and change out of her travel clothes before she saw Gauri. Bharata moved in a flurry of activity. Servants carrying silver platters piled high with marigold garlands rushed in and out of the palace. The palace decorators shouted ridiculous orders for glass birds and sword flowers. Aasha frowned. She’d long since stopped questioning what Gauri and Vikram found delightful. It was their home, after all. Or at least, it would soon be their home.