The Star-Touched Queen (29 page)

Her gaze leapt to my pocket, where the last memory lay buried in the cold onyx stone. The last full memory I had. I held it close to me. Aside from the bracelet of my own hair, this was all I had left of Naraka. It had guided me to the Chakara Forest, left me with a single burning hope that I wasn’t foolish for coming here, that I had some place in all of this. This was the last claim I had to a life I could only remember in wisps. A life that, while I acknowledged, I couldn’t reconcile.

“Why couldn’t we do this earlier?”

Kamala looked at me shrewdly, one eye dark as dried blood.

“Could you have done this earlier?”

I knew what she meant. Before seeing Bharata and Gauri, I had been lugging along the ghosts of my past. But not anymore. Still, something stung me, like tiny insect bites of regret.

“What is the matter?” asked Kamala.

I pulled the stone from the makeshift pocket in my robes. “I feel like I’m losing a piece of myself.”

“Oh, nonsense.”

I glared at her. “You don’t know what happened back there. You don’t know what it’s like to feel like for a moment you were entirely whole. Like you finally knew yourself and then to have that ripped from you.”

Kamala regarded me for a moment. “Yes, actually, I do. That is the whole purpose of a curse. To remind you that you are lacking, but never know what that hollow is.”

I stepped away from her, chastened. “I’m sorry.”

“Do not be. Do not be anything. Do not mourn a life you do not know. It is done, it has happened. It is a riven bone, without meat or memory.”

“But it was
me
, Kamala.”

“You have more than one self.”

“But—”

“But nothing. It is foolish to cling to ghosts or spent bones. It is better to forge ahead. It is better to leave what you do not know and make yourself anew. I have slung the ghosts of memories across my back for years and it has done me no good and earned me no victuals.”

I nodded. She was right. Souls had no shackles. They knew no nationality and swore no allegiances. Whoever I was, whoever I could be … that was a choice. And I had made mine.

“How do I give it away?”

“Consign it to the earth with blood,” said Kamala, before tossing her head at the scorched earth. “Bury it in the ground.”

Despite the curiosity burning inside me to know that last memory, I forced it away. It was part of me, but separate, and I wouldn’t let it define me. I used the sharp edge of the stone to prick the pad of my finger.

“Oooh,” crooned Kamala. “How about a lick, then?”

Ignoring her, I smeared blood across the stone and dropped it to the ground. It landed with a silent thud against the dirt. I knelt toward the stone, bringing the memory close to my eye. I let myself sink into it just barely, teasing only the slightest detail of the memory before I forced myself to drop it.

I blinked back the barest of images—a samite curtain, an upturned hand. I held the emotion coiled inside me, the knowledge that the memory was potent. Beloved. My voice trembled:

“This is what sacrifice I offer you for passage to the Otherworld. Take a memory that I lay claim to only in name, but not in spirit. I will be less whole without it. But let the weight of it, its promise of love and tears, of something lost and beautiful, serve as fair barter.”

I kicked a small hole into the ground and buried the memory there. Earth ate the offering, flashing pale threads of tubers like gnashing teeth until the stone had disappeared. Above, thunder groaned in the bellies of the sky. Kamala and I both started, shocked by the sound. Thunder never used to bother me, but this was a horrible, wrenching sound—like the sky screaming.

Kamala inhaled sharply. “Look!”

I turned.

The memory was gone. The hole I had made for it had fallen in on itself; moon-bright roots clung to the sides, forming a tunnel veined with quartz.

“Is that how—” Kamala began.

“Yes,” I said, pushing her back, “get in, get in!”

“I don’t like being underground.”

“Not the time!” I said. I squatted to the ground, kicking my legs into the hole, and suppressed a shiver. It was cold and damp. But not like dirt. Like sweat-covered skin cooling in the wind. “Ready?”

“Absolutely not—”

I grabbed hold of her reins. “Not looking for an answer.”

And then we slid forth.

25

IMPOSSIBLE HUNGER

Roots tore through my hair. Lodes of quartz banded around the tunnel, but the light was stingy and pale, and refused to illuminate what lay ahead. I threw my hands out against the dark. My insides slammed together and left me weightless. Dark fell in such cold, thick veils that for a moment, I didn’t know whether my eyes were open.

I blinked, squeezing my eyes shut before opening them just in time to see the earth leaping out to meet us. My shoulder knifed into the ground. Light spiraled across my vision and pain needled into my joints.

Kamala tumbled beside me. The moment she found her bearings, she cast a withering glance my way.

“I do not like you.”

I winked at her.

She bared her teeth at me.

Around us, the Night Bazaar was more than just unrecognizable—it was gone. Where the sky had once been divided by perpetual day and night, it now appeared uniformly black. Haphazardly strewn gems poked out of the ground, casting a cold light that joined the glow of bone-white corpses hanging from trees in a shadowy orchard. The vendor stalls were gone. Snapped wheels, chipped signs and shattered jars littered the outskirts of a large clearing in the middle of the bazaar. Except for some shriveled trees, it was deserted. Everything had a haunted look. Scorch marks covered the dais where the
gandharva
musicians had once played beautiful music.

And in the orchard where Amar had handed me a fey fruit, nothing remained but charred stumps. Beside me, Kamala suppressed a shiver before glancing around. Sounds fluttered from a haze-riddled section of the Night Bazaar. The noise was at once soft and deafening, like a frenzied heartbeat or a scream unleashed underwater.

“He is here.”

I didn’t need to ask who.

I pulled my robes tightly across me. Heat slapped the air, but the atmosphere held not warmth, but fury. The ground changed beneath us. Where it had been coarse and ashy, now it was smooth and cool. I glanced down and my stomach flipped. We were walking on sanded bones. Their slender, asymmetrical shapes were fitted together like slats of wood. Strange crenulations like teeth marks dented the bone floor and I looked away sharply. By now, my sandals were hardly more than thread and I could feel each bone’s smooth ridges curl beneath my feet.

The sounds around the corner were deafening and chaotic, not at all like the alluring music the
gandharvas
played. Even the air felt foreign. Where the Night Bazaar once smelled of secrets and the promise of adventure, the smell of the Netherworld had a cloying unpleasantness ripe with the stench of fermenting fruit and sulfur.

“What happened to everyone else?” I asked.

Kamala shuddered, her withers rippling with goose bumps. “They have fled.”

“Where did they go?”

“In the trees, in the rivers, in the glens,” murmured Kamala, swaying her head from side to side. “In all the hidey-holes left in the world.”

I remembered the first time I came to the Night Bazaar, how the crowds parted like water before Amar and me, how their gaze was frantic, but always
reverent
. He had kept them safe. Whatever had happened, they must not have thought he could keep them safe anymore. I couldn’t blame them. The Night Bazaar was in disarray. Lightning hung from the torn seams of the sky, flickering weakly in the air. The shadowy dome above held no signs of the sun, moon or stars. Here, there were chalky square outlines in the floor where towering
raksha
s wrestled and sparred. In a darkened corner, a horde of footless
bhuts
swayed in a terrifying dance to the rhythm of their own screams. On the outskirts stretched an expanse of black water. Something skimmed the waves; great fins and a jaw jutted outward—poised for biting and crowded with teeth. A
timingala
. Its eyes never blinked and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were fixed on me, shining with hunger.

“I miss my cremation ground,” said Kamala, sniffing disdainfully at the scene before us.

I ignored her, my throat suddenly tight.

I saw Amar. Perched on a towering throne of thorns. There was no compassion in his eyes. Only steel. But there was also a blank look to his expression, as though he couldn’t quite remember how he’d gotten there or what he was supposed to do next. Images rustled beneath my skin, lighting up behind my eyes. I saw us along the ocean at the edge of the world, his hands twisting the black curls of my hair. I saw him standing near the shore, smiling as he placed a wreath of rosemary and honey myrtle around my head like a crown. I saw our fingers interlace, felt the roughness of his hands against my own and heard him speak my name like a prayer.

Beside him, Nritti leaned out on a throne of bleached bones. Her full lips curled in a smile as she lifted one perfectly groomed eyebrow and surveyed the destruction.

A hum gurgled through the air, like a thousand stomachs rumbling. A wrenching pain twisted through my gut and I doubled over. Beside me, Kamala keened. A
dakini
sank to her knees in front of us, her necklace of animal skulls scraping against the ground and flinging dirt onto my legs. Five
peys
wailed and clawed at their faces so deeply that blood welled to the surface. They sucked on their fingers greedily.

I fought against the fug of magic—it was an enchantment of
hunger
. I’d never known an appetite this furious. It was in my skin, under my nails, like grit between my teeth. My throat was parched. The air tasted stale on my tongue, but I lapped at it anyway. I wanted to fill up my emptiness with anything. Everything.

“Do you feel it?” hissed Kamala. Her hoof stamped the ground, like the hunger was just an itch she could get rid of. Even if I could speak, I didn’t have the chance. A sound bellowed at the front of the chamber.

“Too long we have been confined to the rules of the Otherworld … too long we have starved for more than the scraps the universe throws our way,” said a voice.
Nritti
. “But I ask that you stay hungry just a little longer before we glut ourselves on the world. For our victory, I want you
hungry
.”

My head snapped up. I clamped down on my lower lip so hard that the rust and salt taste of blood surged in my mouth. I licked it away, focusing all my attention on her. I stepped forward unsteadily, my feet slipping, legs bowing under the weight of unnatural starvation.

“We are! We are!” chanted a thousand voices.

“I want you
aching
,” she crooned.

One more step. Another. Another. I was dragging my feet through the dirt, fighting my way to the front.

“We do! We do!” rose up the voices.

“Good,” she said. “Tonight, in honor of my pending nuptials”—she stopped to stroke a finger against Amar’s cheek; he shuddered and my heart flipped—“I will let you go
anywhere
you please.”

Horror surpassed hunger. I pictured all these horrible bodies slinking across the lands I loved, living nightmares with empty stomachs and lips pulled back to reveal teeth made for rending. Gauri’s determined face flashed in my mind.
No
.

Nritti stood, reaching behind her for the boy I recognized from the glen. He stared up at her and his face was incandescent with joy. He was so distracted that he did not see the blade glinting or notice how Nritti’s smile stretched thin and predatory.

“Let this soul pave our way,” screamed Nritti to the crowd.

They roared with happiness, surging together. Bodies pressed against my back and I reached out blindly for Kamala. Her muzzle pushed against my neck and her jaws snapped when a
churel
moved too close to me. The
churel
’s feet were twisted, her toes wrenched in the opposite direction of her face, and when she met my gaze, I saw her longing—hands twitching to feel something more than dust against palms, lolling mouth aching to be slaked with shuddering hearts and slick organs, anything to feel alive.

Amar never once raised his head. Beside Nritti, he was a shadow. I leapt onto Kamala’s back and leaned close to her ear:

“
Run
.”

And she did.

Nritti raised the knife, her head tilting, voice crooning. Her voice broke my heart, but still we kept moving. Never stopping. Lightning flickered above us. A
pey
lay trampled in the rush. I never once looked away from Nritti. I didn’t know what had happened to the girl who had been my best friend. Whatever reasons once existed had gathered moss and dust in their edges. All that mattered now was the scene before me—laughter seeping into my ears, the floors thick with spilled blood, hunger that hollowed your innards and coated your tongue with dust.

Kamala reared to a halt, her forelegs clinging for purchase.

I leaned across her back, my hand outstretched—“Stop!”

There was a moment where I didn’t know if anyone had heard. My word felt like little more than a croak. Silence fell around us. Nritti’s blade clattered to the ground and the boy stumbled back, unscathed.

Amar’s head snapped up and for the first time since leaving Naraka, we stared at one another. His expression hadn’t changed since the glen. It was flat, but not unkind, just … out of reach.

He looked as though someone had summoned him from stone. The more I looked at him, the more images prickled behind my eyes—him walking toward me, in one hand carrying a glass rose while his fingers reached for me, eager to close the space between us; his hand slung over my waist while we slept, two bodies curled into the shadow of each other.

But those images were mine alone. Amar blinked, his brows furrowing before he looked away. My heart slammed against my ribs. If I had any doubt about his last words—that he wouldn’t remember me, that I would be lost to him—this moment cured them.