The Star-Touched Queen (18 page)

A Bharata soldier had walked these halls. And he had disappeared into them too. Even now, I could picture the dead. I could see Amar ripping out the threads in a bloodless slaughter. The images scalded me. Every time I blinked, all I saw was the deceit that I had welcomed so openly, mistaking it for magic, for power … for something deeper.

I willed the shadows to swirl around my feet, mute the jangling of my anklets and conceal me in case the walls were watching. Though the dead had long since passed into the south wing, their echoes lit up the walls, as if the wisps of their lives had stamped burning footprints into the floor.

Slowly, I wound my way through the palace until I stood at the entrance to the glass garden. Behind me, the windows leaked blurry sunlight onto the ground. There was no sign of the smoke and glass door from yesterday. The stonework had swallowed it whole, but even so I could feel it, like a cold shadow. It was hidden somewhere in front of me, wedged between some slice of air. I pressed my hands against the wall, searching inside myself for that spiral of power, that weird sense of calm … of
summoning
 … and the door of the south wing shimmered.

Vast and transient. That is death. I knew because I stood on the other side, peering through a tear in the frame, and all I saw was light. All I heard was my heartbeat’s echo fluttering softly, sleepily against my ribs. All I tasted was smoke on my tongue. A dry wind carried pale ashes across my feet and the particles were so fine, it might have been like stepping over pulverized sugarcane.

I could have turned around, but I didn’t. Guilt stilled me. Who had I left behind when I fled Bharata? What had I done to them?

Life and death surged from behind the smoky portal, calling me from beyond the door.

Breathing deeply, I pushed open the door. Heat seeped through my skin and I shivered. Cold sludge moved through my veins instead of blood. I turned around the room, my ears straining to hear the whisper of a voice, but only silence met me. There were no exits in the south wing and the only entrance had already closed.

The moment my foot touched the gray floor, lanterns sprung up along the dark halls. Their light was as silvery as moonshine, but cast no shadows. They were only beacons in a haze, like thousands of unblinking eyes. My breath came in ragged heaves, and the straight walk forward felt like an uphill battle. My muscles ached and my head was dizzy, but I pushed through. Eventually, the floor ended, melting into a steep cliff with soft sloping sides of ash. The smell made me nauseated. I could taste funerary ash on my tongue and quickly clasped the end of the sari to my nose. Once more, lanterns lit my way along the edge of the cliff. All along the walls, sheaves of parchment covered in Gupta’s neat handwriting fluttered in the windless air. I leaned closer and saw that they were the records of the dead. They stretched in infinite directions.

The sides of the cliff revealed jagged steps leading to the edge of a strange body of water. Sounds bubbled from below. Human ones. Goose bumps erupted along my arms. With one hand touching the craggy slopes, I descended into the depths of Naraka. At the base of the cliffs, a silver pool lapped at the stone. Something about the pool kept teasing my mind, as if there was some reason why I should know about it. From where I stood, the pale moon-bright water looked like a mirror. I leaned over the water’s edge and what twisted in its reflection sent me reeling back—

Spectral bodies writhed beneath, turned over and over by invisible mechanics. In its waters, luminous souls were being sheathed with new skins and new identities. Something in the water fitted a silvery lion pelt over transparent shapes; affixed tusks to a humanoid snout; braceleted a dancer’s
ghungroo
bells around the ghost of an ankle. This was the reincarnation pool. The place for remaking souls.

I stumbled backward, flailing a hand behind me until it hit rock. Something seared my skin and I turned, eyes widening as the wall of rock shimmered and revealed a thousand rooms sprawled behind it—some filled with ice, others with flame. At first I thought the rooms were empty, but then I saw the souls toiling in the flickering light. Some were digging holes, sweat glittering thickly on their necks. Others hung suspended by chains, their groans echoing in their cells. I knew why they were there. Before passing to the next life, the soul must atone for sins of the past life.

I walked past the sea of cells, relief flooding me each time I didn’t recognize someone.

“Mayavati?” called a voice.

I halted in my tracks. Turning to the sound, a cry escaped my lips—the Raja. My father walked toward me, pressing his palms against the wall of glass separating us. Instead of his familiar
kurta
, he wore armor, his worn battle helmet tucked beneath his arm. Chain mail peeled off his body, revealing a dark gash near his rib cage.

“No,” I whispered.

I stretched out my hand, but retracted it suddenly and wrapped my arms around myself. The last time I saw him, he wanted me dead. Anger should have welled in my heart. But all I could see was a man wearing the wounds of his death day. A man who had once left me gifts of poetry and knew my name when he could barely recall his number of offspring. A man with regret printed on his features.

I tried to control my breathing, but it came in unsteady halts. His chain mail glinted as he moved toward me, throwing his wounds in stark relief. In Bharata, modesty would demand that I cover my head, avert my eyes and wait for him to speak. But death left no room for formality.

“Were you in pain?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

The Raja shrugged and I winced as the gash on his collarbones widened.

“It was fast,” he said, looking away from me.

I knew he was lying, but didn’t press him. For the first time, I noticed that the lines of worry from his face were gone. He was calm, even in this glass dungeon. And he smiled at me, a smile filled with unguarded relief, even joy, to see me once more.

He cleared his throat. “My accommodations are not nearly as grand as the palace. But it is better than most. A sin of selfishness demands a penance of introspection, not labor.”

I nodded numbly.

“You look well,” he said, tilting his head to one side. “I am glad you escaped before they descended on us.”

His eyes shone with tears and I wished there was no glass to separate us. I wanted to press my forehead against the lattice of his armor, tell him I forgave him. But he guessed all that I wished to say because he shook his head with a sad smile.

“We lost the war?” I ventured.

The Raja paused. “Bharata won the war. But I am the one who lost.
I
led people to death.
I
allowed my halls to be swallowed by fire. But Bharata survived.”

He leaned against a wall of mirror, rubbing his temples. His hair had grayed considerably since the wedding. How was that possible? Had time tricked me as well? And then another wrenching thought went through me. The lack of mirrors in Akaran that showed the viewer. There was a puddle beside my feet, no larger than a palmful of water. But I recognized myself. Perhaps a little lovelier, a little more regal. But still seventeen.

“How long did the war last?” I asked, my voice hoarse.

The Raja blinked at me.

“It was ten years ago,” he said slowly. “Surely you’ve seen your countrymen in these halls?”

I suddenly felt dizzy.
Ten years
had passed since I was in Bharata? When Amar asked me to wait until the full moon, he had spoken of a matter of days, not years. Fresh fury poured through my veins. I hated him.

If I’d seen Bharata’s citizens, could I have saved them? I looked up to see the Raja considering me from the wall of his cell. “I never saw them,” I said quietly.

He was silent for a moment. “At first I thought you were your mother, come to free me from my hell. Like an angel. You take after her, though you are as young as I remember.”

I stared at my ash-covered feet, and the hair that fell in a mussed braid by my side. I thought of Bharata’s dead walking past my bedroom while I slept. I thought of Vikram weeping for his dead mother while I kissed the Dharma Raja in a winter room. I was no angel.

“Who rules in your stead?”

“The
yuvuraja
, Skanda,” said the Raja, thoughtfully tugging on his beard. Death had not relieved him of all his habits. I almost smiled to see the familiar gesture. “I hope he remembers all I have said. Sometimes I expect to see him across my cell. And I do not know if he will be young as I remember him, or old because time has passed and I am here.” He looked at the ground. “Do not pity me, daughter. Everyone comes here. Some merely stay longer than others.”

We stared at each other through the glass. I could feel his eyes searching me, trying to match up the memory of when he had last seen me to the person who stood before him now.

“Partnered with Death itself,” he said, repeating a part of my horoscope. A harsh laugh escaped him. “I understand now.” The Raja moved away from his mirror wall, his eyes twinkling as he bowed low.

The gesture was wrong. My cheeks flared with heat.

“No,” I said, “please don’t do that.”

Pressing my palms against the glass, I willed it away, and slowly, it became thinner and thinner until it disappeared. The Raja, still bent in a bow, looked up in surprise as I walked into his cell. I lifted him up by the shoulders, not letting myself flinch when my fingers brushed against the blood on his armor.

“You do not need to bow to me, Father.”

The Raja smiled. “Your forgiveness makes my hell easier to bear.”

This conversation, this air of ease unshackled from courtly posturing, struck me. It was so natural. We might have even been close in another lifetime.

“I do not know how you became a princess of Bharata,” he said. “Who knows how our last lives slip into the ones we live in now. I will never know those memories. And perhaps that is for the best.”

A lump rose in my throat.
I will never know those memories
. The tree behind the chained door … it had so
many
memories. All of which, I was convinced, belonged to me. Nritti’s image flashed in my head, bright as a flame. I didn’t know her from this life, but I must have known her from before.

My father must have seen a look cross over my face because he stepped away from me. “You do not belong here, daughter. Go. Be who you will be. Do not waste your life mourning the dead.”

I nodded tightly, my throat thick with so many things left unsaid. “I will not forget you, Father.”

He smiled. “That pleases me. A memory is a fine legacy to leave behind.”

*   *   *

I stood before the tree filled with memories. My feet still bore the signs of the south wing. Gritty bits of ash clung to my ankles. Each time I blinked, I saw the sea of cells stretched out in front of me like waves.

My father’s words echoed in my thoughts. In death, he found what he could not in life—peace. Even then, my hands curled into fists. A single door, not a thousand miles, had separated me from my father. And Amar had known the whole time. He had gathered the souls of my countrymen, shepherded them to their next lives without once telling me what was happening outside my very door.

On the far side of the wall, the obsidian mirror glittered. It was still a blank expanse of black, but there was something else there … a warmth. Like it was awake.

Turning from it, I circled the tree trunk before climbing into the hulking branches, ignoring the snags of boughs that pulled at my hair as I reached higher and higher. When I reached the middle, I caught my breath and grabbed one of the candles. It trembled in my cupped palms and light spilled over my fingers, stealing my vision …

I saw Amar bent over the reincarnation pool, his knuckles gripping the water’s pebbled edges. There was something in his hand, an amethyst crown. I couldn’t tell what he saw in the pool, but whatever it was, it twisted his face in anguish. In fury. In another candle-flame, Amar was cradling a tree limb that held a single flame green as new jealousy. I couldn’t understand it. What was he doing? I reached for a final candle and something in my chest splintered—

When I opened my eyes, I was inside Bharata.

To the right were the familiar honeysuckle vines and the copse of trees. On the left was a statue covered in jasmine, where I had once hid Mother Dhina’s slippers. My smile faltered.

A sound in the vision caught my attention, and I turned to see three girls standing in front of a decorated tent. I frowned. I knew that tent. It was the snake singers’ tent from my tenth Age Day. The two girls had to be Jaya and Malika; therefore, the girl beside them had to be …
me
.

The vision changed.

Now I was inside the snake singers’ tent, standing before a basket of cobras. Amar stroked the inky creatures, patting their heads. His hands twitched at the defiant, tremulous sound of a voice in the distance. My stomach flipped at the memory—this was the moment I lost the argument against my half-sisters. Any minute now my younger self would be thrust inside the tent.

The vision spun and from the shadows of the tent, I saw myself lying facedown in the dirt. My half-sisters had upturned the baskets of snakes. I watched myself anticipate the cobra’s bite, my hands clenched and my eyes squeezed shut as the same snake that Amar had stroked slithered toward me … only to flick its tongue playfully around my ears. In the vision, I heard Amar sigh with relief.

And then the image faded, the halo surrounding the flame receding into a miniscule glow. I slumped against the tree. Amar had been there on the eve of my tenth Age Day. He had watched me from the sidelines the entire time.

He had protected me.

I reached for another candle, and this time when the vision took, I froze. I saw the profile of an unfamiliar woman. The vision broadened, revealing the glass garden. The woman bent over a shrub of crystal roses, her hair neatly obscuring her face as she slipped a ruby blossom into Amar’s palm.

There was a quiet love in the way the woman gave Amar the crystal rose; it was a promise and a declaration contained in scarlet fractals. My limbs felt leaden. Over and over, I watched the woman slip the ruby blossom into his waiting palm.