The Star-Touched Queen (21 page)

His hands moved to my shoulders, warm and solid, and his arms were a universe for me alone. He had enthralled me, unwound the seams of my being until I was filled with the sight of him and still ached with
want
.

“I hoped you would choose me,” he said.

I blushed, suddenly aware of my unbraceleted arms and simple sari
.
“I have no dowry.”

He laughed, a hesitant, half-nervous sound that did not match his stern features. “I don’t care.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“I want to lie beside you and know the weight of your dreams,” he said, brushing his lips against my knuckles. “I want to share whole worlds with you and write your name in the stars.” He moved closer and a chorus of songbirds twittered silver melodies. “I want to measure eternity with your laughter.” Now, he stood inches from me; his rough hands encircled my waist. “Be my queen and I promise you a life where you will never be bored. I promise you more power than a hundred kings. And I promise you that we will always be equals.”

I grinned. “Not my soul then, Dharma Raja?”

“Would you entrust me with something so precious?”

I was silent for a moment before reaching for my foot and slipping off the worn slipper. “Here, my love, the dowry of a sole.”

I began to laugh, giddily, drunkenly, before he swallowed my laughter in a kiss. I melted against him, arcing into the enclosure of his arms, my breath catching as his fingers entwined in the down of my hair. The music of the songbirds could not compare to the euphony billowing inside me, pressing against my bones and manifesting in a language of gentle touch.

In Naraka, he drew me into the small universe of his embrace, laying kisses at my neck, the inside of my wrists, the dip in my abdomen. Now, the hum had settled to a lustrous melody, ribboning us like silk. And when we clung together, we drank in the other’s gaze, reveling in the secret hope and happiness that blossomed in the space between our lips.

*   *   *

Amar wore many names. Samana, “the leveler”; Kala, “time”; Antaka, “he who puts an end to life.” But I had called him
jaan
, “my life,” and kissed the gloom from the tips of his fingers. Together we had sleeved souls in new bodies, slipped the soul’s crux into a golden-ruffed sunbear or a handsome prince or a troublesome gnat. Together, we danced a quiet happiness, fashioning a room for stars and skimming our palms across cities kept behind mirrors. We drank ambrosia from each other’s cupped palms and tended to our garden of glass. And on and on it went.

I remembered …

 … how acrid heartbreak tastes. I remembered the walk to the edge of the reincarnation cycle—the chill of marble, my plumed breath, betrayal prizing apart my heart.

I remembered fury enthralling me body and bone. I remembered light lapping over my eyes and my soul unraveling, fracturing into prisms of amethyst, lapis, topaz. I remembered a needling twinge of regret and the secret, terrible knowledge that somewhere in Naraka my abandonment would leave behind a chasm of obsidian threads—a chronic rift.

I saw …

 … Amar slumped onto his throne, refusing to look at the empty seat on his left. Gupta was at his side, his face pinched, skin sallow.

“Go over every birth record, every horoscope until we find her again. I want—” He stopped, jaw tightening. “I need her back. I made a mistake.”

“How will I know it’s her?”

“The stars will not lie,” said Amar. “A girl partnered with Death, a marriage that puts her on the brink of destruction and peace, horror and happiness, dark and light. Find her.”

“But even if you bring her back, how will she know—”

“I have taken care of that,” he said sharply.

In his hand was a small branch and a fledgling candle. “I have preserved every memory in the heart of Naraka.”

“A fitting place,” said Gupta in a small voice, but he frowned. “But then what? Mortals cannot receive such divine information. It destroys them. Not even you can break those sacred boundaries.”

“There is a way,” said Amar, breathing deeply. “I cannot tell them to a mortal. But if she becomes immortal…”

“Ah … clever,” said Gupta. “The Otherworld may stop you from divulging those secrets, but a mortal that does not pass through the halls of the dead would eventually be deathless.”

Amar nodded. “Sixty turns of the moon. A handful of weeks in our halls. And then I can reveal the memories of her past life. Her powers will be restored. She will be a queen once more. But until then, she needs protection. Nritti will no doubt try to find her. She knows she has gone missing. She can feel it, and it fuels her destructiveness. Nritti can never know where she is. Or who she was.”

*   *   *

I jolted backward, my breath knocked out in a rush. Spots of light appeared each time I blinked. I shut my eyes tightly, but the images wouldn’t relent. All the love and resignation of my former self, each memory of my past life drifted through me, fitting into my mind like lost pieces of a grand puzzle.

But it was short-lived.

The memories fled as quickly as they came, leaving only ghostly imprints. Like plunging into a vat of warmth before being thrown back into the cold. I shivered. My soul was nothing more than a patchwork of half-memory dipped in rime. Incomplete. And made worse by the knowledge of its own fragments.

Around me, there was nothing but the expanse of evening sky. Stars were beginning to shoulder their way for a place in the tapestry of night. Cold that had nothing to do with myself seeped around me. It was frigid. And yet, the air was full of smoke.

Naraka was gone. No marble met my feet, no splintered branches filled with burning memories fell across my ankles. There was no Amar, pulling my face to his—one last kiss before I damned him. There was no Nritti. My hands curled into fists. Now here I was. Exiled. I had no idea what Nritti had planned, but Amar’s words—
save me—
clung to me. My head was spinning with questions … why had I left Naraka? What
happened
?

A thousand questions gripped me, but no question cut me deeper than one:

What had I done?

PART TWO

THE FORGOTTEN QUEEN

19

THE
SADHVI

At first, I didn’t know where I was. But then the landscape became familiar. I had seen this place, once, from the turrets of Bharata. The stench of smoke and charring bodies filled my lungs. All along the horizon stretched nothing but gray piles of ash, studded with bone. They unrolled toward the horizon, thick as sand dunes. No light penetrated those hillocks of the dead. Small fires wrapped around them, feasting on burning logs and pine. The over-sweet scent of flaming marigolds,
tulsi
and mint stamped the air.

Cremation grounds.

Why was I here?

I choked back my nausea until I saw that I was standing in my own grave. Around me, like the mementoes of the dead, were small objects covered in a fine sieve of dust. I knelt down, my fingers closing around the broken bracelet of my hair that had been around Amar’s wrist. Tears burned behind my eyes.

My hand closed around other things too. An onyx stone that was no bigger than my thumb. Its edges had been sawed off into slick rock. The color was the same velvet black of Amar’s eyes. I turned it over. Two glittering pinpricks of light shimmered beneath the surface of the onyx. I traced the light, something sharp burgeoning within me. They were memories.
My
memories. Against everything, a half-smile quirked at my lips.

And then there was my mother’s necklace … still dotted with rusted blood. The sapphire pendant dulled to a near navy-black. I clasped it around my neck, the barest ghost of strength warming me. By now, the sun was beginning to rise and a gray dawn ate away the night.

I knelt on the ground, my knees pressed against my chest. Ripped from Naraka, my soul was left
grasping
. All those memories had flown through me. For one peerless second, I was whole. I knew, only vaguely, who I had been. The Rani of Naraka. But it lacked all the real weight of knowledge. It was just something I had been told. There were other things, though, that I couldn’t forget. I knew that what was between me and Amar was real. And I had destroyed him, lulled by what Nritti had shown me. We had been friends. We had been sisters. What happened?

I was no
apsara
like Nritti. That day, what felt like a century ago, she had told me that I was a forest spirit, a
yakshini
. But I had seen me. I had recognized myself … sooty dark skin. Coated with stars. And I felt that she was wrong … that maybe, she had lied. It wasn’t arrogance, just a deep-seated instinct in my chest. But instinct, so far, had betrayed me. I had nothing to go on but what two people had shouted at me before a burning tree. Even now, even after everything Nritti did, I loved them.

I clambered out of the hole, gripping the two tokens I had of Naraka. Beside me, a silver puddle of water caught the light. I had not seen myself since my time in Naraka. My father had said I looked different. Changed. But leaving Naraka had changed me too. When I looked down, the sari of darkest sapphire was gone. No anklets adorned my feet. No bracelets cuffed at my wrist. I was wearing the torn, turmeric-yellow robes of an ascetic
sadhvi
woman.

In Bharata,
sadhus
and
sadhvis
were considered dead. They held no records. No land. No property to claim their own. Some were even known to attend their own funerals, to signify their separation from the mortal world. Somehow, being exiled by both Bharata and Naraka had turned me into one of them. A member of the living dead. My skin was gray, slicked in ash like rough, interlocking scales. I knelt over the pool, my heart hammering. What had I become?

Black hair coiled around my forehead, strung with porcelain beads. My skin was the same sooty, dusky complexion I had always known, but there was something more. My face had changed. I had finally grown into my nose. My forehead was high. Full lips curved downward in a grimace. Thick brows framed my eyes and my gaze was an angry, furious … heartbroken thing. But I was not unlovely. And, more than anything, I began to recognize a little of that woman from the memory. The woman who had pruned a crystal rose in a garden of glass. The woman whom Amar had looked at, as though she held the universe in her gaze, as if galaxies lined her smile, as though she were myths and love and song contained in one body.

Tears burned behind my eyes. Cursed impulse. Foolish decisions. I kicked ash and bone into the puddle, scattering my reflection before I turned once more to the bleak landscape. There was no one attending the fires. Family members or loved ones who had lit the pyres had since left.

There had to be communes for
sadhvis
. Places where people would allow them to enter their homes. I remembered from the archives in Bharata that they were at once revered as much as they were repulsed. No one would break bread with a
sadhvi
. But no one would turn her away either. It was best to throw money at her feet, bow and run away before she could ask for more.

Mother Dhina’s needling comments flickered in my head. “
Sadhvis
hold communes with ghostly
bhuts
, whisper to snakes and make their beds on funerary ash. Perhaps
you
should join them, Maya.”

I grimaced. She had been right.

Still, how would I get to Naraka? How would I find my way back to the Otherworld?

I was still turning over Amar’s words, trying to find some sliver of reason when the darkness rustled. Something tall and bestial rose on unsteady legs, unfolding itself from the shadows and pools of flame where a dead body had charred into something nearly unrecognizable. My heart thudded in my chest. What
was
that? I had nothing to defend myself. No weapon on hand except for the blunt end of my mother’s necklace and I knew that would do nothing.

A painfully thin horse emerged. It looked like it had one hoof on death’s doorstep. Although, given where I stood, maybe it did. Its bones jutted out of translucent skin and a dark bulge that could only be the animal’s heart quivered between spindly legs. The horse turned its skeletal face toward me, snorting to remove the gray wisps of hair from its face. A pearly sheen coated its milky eyes.

“What are you?” asked the horse. Her voice was rasping, shadowy, like corrugated steel dragged across marble. “You can see me, can’t you, false
sadhvi
? Oh, your fear is a thing so lovely. Like a salt wheel. I could lick it if you gave me the chance. I am all out of sustenance, as you can see.”

I’d never heard a voice so cold. My knees buckled. The horse jolted her head to the charring body beside her.

“He dreamed of barley his whole life and yet he worked in rice paddies. Strange are the ways of humans. But I am more interested in you. Not human. You don’t smell of sweat and reek of lust. But you are not Otherworldly either.”

The horse cocked her head to one side, a quizzical motion. And then she smiled, revealing bloodstained teeth. I suppressed a shudder. “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything like you. Such a delectable morsel. May I take a bite? Just one … or maybe two…”

“No,” I said firmly, digging my heels into the ground and crossing my arms.

“Oh, look at that,” said the horse. “Feisty too. I bet you taste like spice and cinnamon. I bet you taste like heartbreak. Young things always do.”

Something caught in my throat and the horse laughed and it was a terrible thing, like blood sluicing between broken teeth.

“Oh, I am good, I am good. I want to play again. May I guess again? You are heartbroken. You are broken, broken. Which is to say, you are like
me.
Where is your tail, false
sadhvi
? Where is your soul? Do you feed off of them too? Where are your hooves?”

The horse trotted forward, snuffling at me. I could smell rot and blood on her breath, and bit back the urge to gag.