The Star-Touched Queen (28 page)

Nritti was still singing. Her hair was pinned back with butterflies whose wings shimmered like stained glass. She wore a
salwar kameez
of green silk, ringed round and round with opal gems so that the light caught and stayed with her. Her arms were outstretched, beckoning something unseen toward the napping hounds. Golden beetles darted in and out of her hair and her smile was soft, generous. Her expression so heart-stoppingly sweet that my legs twitched to run to her, to tell her my secrets.

“Stop that,” grunted Kamala, unmoved.

“Why? She’s … perfect.”

“Hmpf. She smells like blood.”

I grinned, and my head was dizzy and cottony, drunk on her singing.

“Are you jealous?”

Kamala bared her teeth at me.

The beings following Nritti soon came into view and all of my drunken thoughts stopped abruptly.

Children.

There were at least ten in the clearing, and the chatter of voices and laughter hinted at more. The hounds stood up, shaking their brindled coats, watching the crowd of children carefully. Their haunches twitched and drool puddled around them. They were
hungry
. Every now and then, their eyes darted back to Nritti and a sickening realization went through me: they were waiting for a signal. Waiting, I realized, to take the children.

But that couldn’t be possible. That was not how the balance worked. That was not how the threads operated. They were overlaid and knitted in their own patterns. They could never be lulled into a situation and
deliberately
broken. It violated the careful balance of the tapestry.

A young girl with braids that hung to her wrists stepped forward, wrapping her arms around Nritti in an embrace that tugged at my heart. Gauri had once hugged me like that. The girl was lulled by Nritti’s voice and who could blame her? It was a voice heavy with loveliness. Nritti’s song was unlike anything I had ever heard. It had no words. Instead, the sounds conjured clear images in my head. She sang of warm warrens in the ground, slick caves behind waterfalls and the stillness of water. But it was more than a melody; it was an offer of friendship, it was a … request. Nritti’s song grew faster, the tone shifting. Now she sang of the acceptance of changes, and her melody summoned images of ripe pomegranates bursting with ruby seeds and lightning slicing through the sky.

Kamala hissed and tendrils of steam rose from her flared nostrils.

I watched as the girl nodded, smiling. Her expression was clear:
Take what you want
.

Nritti stopped singing. Around her, the children froze, smiles slicked onto their faces, their cheeks coated with sweat. They were so entranced they probably didn’t even notice their feet torn, brambles and burrs and thorns piercing their ankles.

The butterflies in Nritti’s hair dipped in and out of sight. They were nothing more than illusions.

The golden beetles stopped moving, shimmery chitin flashing black and matte as coals. Beady eyes wriggling themselves free of magic until they took on the hunched, feathered shape of cormorants. Even Nritti’s dress began to change color … from emerald to nothing more than ash and a translucent black cowl. Her skin and face, so lovely and bright, faded. She was color-sapped, bleached white as a bone. Her hair turned stringy. The voice that had lulled all the children to this one spot lengthened into a croak. Nritti’s lips pulled back into a smile of spite. Jagged teeth peered out from the ruin of her lips and she screamed her song. But this was no song of
asking
, it was a song of
taking,
and the louder her words became, the more I saw what it was she wanted.

The moment the girl with the shining plaits nodded, Nritti leaned forward, bending as though to kiss the girl on the brow … slowly, breath teased out of the girl. Nritti laughed and that’s when I heard it. The voice of the woman from my room. It
had
been her. Maybe my mind couldn’t believe it before, convinced that my instincts were a broken thing. But I was right. The proof of it filled my ears, fury snaking through me.

I jumped off Kamala, about to run forward and get the girl out of harm’s way, when I felt the drag of teeth at the nape of my neck pulling me back.

“Can’t you see what she’s doing to that girl? If she won’t hesitate to do it to a child, she certainly won’t blink twice to do the same thing to you!”

“Let me go!” I said, fighting against her, but her teeth had latched on to me and I had no choice but to watch, dangling from the incisors of a demon as the little girl’s eyes widened.

I thought Nritti meant to kill her. But life wasn’t what she was taking. It was
youth
. The more she inhaled, the less of the girl’s ethereal sparkle was left. Her skin paled. Hair grayed. Honey voice sharpened.

Nritti pulled away, dragging her arm across her mouth like she had just finished a meal.

“Thank you,” she said, and her voice was all sweetness.

Next, she approached a boy with nut-brown and golden skin who had stood transfixed the whole time, his eyes glassy with magic. She trailed her fingers against his jaw, first softly, then—her lips curled up in a weird smile—harder, until she was scrubbing away at the color of him. The boy winced, his skin flushing crimson with the promise of blood, when Nritti finally pulled away from him. Gone was the paleness of her skin. She was shining and auric, the image of the sun as seen through cut topaz. Glorious.

Nritti flexed her arms, examining the length of her tawny skin and polished hair. She hummed a trill and the things that had once flitted like innocent living haloes around her head took their real form—shrieking cormorants and blood-slicked beetles. Things meant to harm, to scissor, to pinch.

“Much better,” she said. She turned to the hounds. “Drag the rest down to the Otherworld. I want to look my best for my wedding.”

Wedding
? My hands went cold.

Nritti snapped her fingers. “Summon him.”

The hounds nodded. They bayed as one, heads thrown back and throats bared to the night, howls cleaving the sky with thunderclaps and a violent wind.

The forest shadows crept forward like spilled ink and my pulse quickened. And then, in the clearing … there he was. Amar. His crown of blackbuck horns was gleaming, his arms clasped behind his back. In his hands swung a noose.

I dropped wordlessly from Kamala’s mouth, scuffed knees thudding softly in the dirt. I sat there, my legs curled beneath me, heedless of the bugs tracking their way across my thighs or the incessant nudging of Kamala’s nose against my back, trying to shove me into standing. I couldn’t move. Half-remembered memories transfixed me to the spot. I saw him through fractals, veil after veil of memory that was once mine.

The woman I was then and the person I was now may have shared a soul, but everything else between us was a mystery. I knew she had spent her life in the Otherworld. I knew she had ruled Naraka. I didn’t know whether she was a good ruler or a foolish one, but I knew that everything she saw of Amar fitted neatly in my heart, warm as a fire kernel and fierce with belonging, with
rightness
.

The only thing I didn’t know was why she—
I—
had left. I remembered the betrayal, but not the reason. I remembered the fury, but not the fire.

The longer I stared at Amar, the more images flashed behind my eyes—him gathering me in his arms, our eyes drunk on the sight of each other. The silk of skin against skin, the hum of a connection tethered at our marrow, hinging on breath patterns, voice inflection, intangibles of love. I tasted his lips against mine—fervent, firm—smoke and cinnamon and the panic of not catching yourself right before you fall.

Nritti strolled toward him, flashing her glamour of stolen beauty. Lightning splintered across the sky, throwing his face in relief, highlighting the sharp line of his lips and his narrowed eyes. Nritti tilted her head up expectantly, lips pursed and tugged into a shadow of a smile. She stared at him like he was a toy possessed, something that did her bidding.

And it seemed, for an instant, that she was right. My heart stopped.

Amar leaned over mechanically, lips pressing against hers in a kiss that was cold, unfeeling, but … a kiss all the same. Nritti smiled smugly and patted his cheek. I hardly heard what words she uttered. I had drawn my knees to my chest. Kamala had stopped nudging me.

“Come, come,” said Nritti to Amar, as if she were speaking to a child. She threw one last lovely glance at the children standing immovable and paralyzed behind her. “I thought they would be good witnesses.”

Amar’s brow quirked into a frown. “But why?” He surveyed them indifferently, his gaze occasionally flitting to the hellhounds at his side who looked at him with unconditional love. “Their time has not come. They have no place in my halls—”

“
Our
halls,” said Nritti. Around her there was only a haze of glamour and lust. “Don’t you remember when I found you? You were broken. And wasn’t I the one to save you? I pledged myself to you, so we could change the Otherworld forever … isn’t that what you want? Aren’t
I
what you want?”

Watching them was like slamming my arm repeatedly through a door of thorns, trying to get to the other side. Amar’s hand flew to his temple, his face crumpling with a sudden headache. Nritti watched impassively, a small wisp of light forming in her palm that she raised to her lips and blew … like a kiss.

The light sank into Amar’s skin and he drew his hand away, a dazed and remote expression slipping over his face.

“The pain doesn’t stop, does it?” asked Nritti. “It’s because you can’t rule over the dead by yourself. You need me. And what better way than to pair us together? What better way to relieve you of this tension than to will your power to me?”

Nritti stroked the noose in her hand as if it were a pet. Amar nodded, but the movement was wrong. Limp. His face was ashen. I wanted to rush to him, but I saw now that everything he had said in those last moments in Naraka were true. He was lost, and in need of saving. But I couldn’t subdue Nritti the way I was. Whatever latent power had once curled at my fingertips was gone.

“Come, come, my pet,” said Nritti, patting her leg like she was calling a dog to her.

Amar didn’t even notice; his gaze was far off, his arms like phantom limbs at his sides. The children clambered to her, gathering hold of anything they could—the ends of her hair, her dress, her fingers. She smiled thinly at all of them, shaking off their hands like they burned her and calling the hounds to howl once more at the sky.

“Take us back,” she commanded.

Lightning flashed once more through the sky. The noose glimmered in Nritti’s clenched hand, shining like an eel. Beside her, Amar was a specter of himself. Neither of them was looking at the other. Amar’s gaze was downcast, fixed on the sky. Nritti’s gaze was on the children. She was looking at them with a rapt desire.

In a flash they were gone. Nothing remained of where they stood except for a burnt ring in the ground. Within seconds, oily black mushrooms sprouted through the ground, unpeeling into blackened rings. Where the children stood, poisonous plants pushed themselves from the soil—violet petals of monkshood, horse-chestnut branches with pale blossoming heads, purple columbine and sorrowful betel palms.

My throat was thick with pain and I blinked wildly, trying to restrain the tears prickling behind my eyes. Anger had gouged a pit inside me. I tamped down my doubt. Whatever the reason behind why I left Naraka, Nritti and Amar together wasn’t it. I wouldn’t let my insecurities drape a noose around my mind. I was done with that.

Wordlessly, Kamala stepped forward, and she was thin, thin as false hope. But still, she swung her neck, bringing me to her until my tear-stained cheeks were dampening her bony neck.

“There, there,” she crooned, “would that I could eat anyone that made you unhappy.”

I laughed despite myself.

“Perhaps not so much a maybe-false-queen after all,” said Kamala.

I looked down at my skin, still sooty and tracked with brambles. I could feel my shorn hair move against the nape of my neck and my robes were as tattered as before.

“What makes you say that?”

“It is in your eyes,” said Kamala. “You do not look for yourself. You look for
them
. A true queen knows that doubt is as unwieldy and powerful as a forest fire. It is good, good, good. Good as mangoes during summer. Better than the flesh of new brides.” She smacked her lips. “If you do not doubt, you do not see.”

“I doubted too much,” I said, walking to the scorched earth where Nritti and Amar had disappeared. “I need to get to the Otherworld. You saw her, she was taking children from the
human
world, who had no business going to that blasted realm, let alone
dying
before their time.”

Kamala nodded. “Her hunger is worse than mine.”

At this, I looked sharply at her. “What is she hungry for?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe bones, like me. But I doubt it. It’s only those that deserve nothing that want everything.”

“It’s not right.”

“What is right? What is wrong? Too complicated,” said Kamala with a huff. “Better to do as I do and not think about those things. Live eternal damnation with the utmost simplicity: Stay on your own cremation grounds and eat only the bones that you find yourself.”

“As ever, brilliant advice.”

“I try.”

“Is our questing done now?” asked Kamala, trotting up beside me. “Will you nurse your broken heart and moan over it forever? May I now take a bite of that lush-lush arm?”

I snapped my arm back. “No.”

“Good,” said Kamala. “Because I hate the taste of cowardice.”

“There’s no way we can get back to the Otherworld.”

Kamala cocked her head. “Yes, we can.”

“What, do you have a bellyful of sapphires and a double-rainbow?”

“No. But you have something that will make the world open,” said Kamala. “A sacrifice.”

That
other way.

“I have nothing to give.”

“Everyone always has something to give. Always. It does not matter whether it’s worth something to anyone but you; all that matters is that it is cherished.”