“Bind them. Conquer them.”
The stars were on completely different sides of the room. One, with blue edges, dangled above me; the other had a core of fire and the last was nothing more than tendrils of bright smoke.
“They’re too far apart,” I said, holding up the small piece of string. “That’s impossible.”
“Then make it possible. Reinterpret them. The room will answer.”
“It’s not even a room—” I started, gesturing across the vast expanse of sky.
And then I stopped.
It wasn’t a room.
… yet.
As if answering my thoughts, the space around us shrank, dragging the stars together so that their celestial glimmer was lost and they looked like little more than shining cuts. Light still seeped out, but the room felt brighter. The three stars were closer, but still not close enough to tie with a foot of string.
I reached out, my thoughts whirring. Reinterpret them. I used to think of the stars as cruel and fixed ornaments, but what about the sky that held them aloft? Could I … touch it? Push past it?
My fingers grazed the night—cool and sweet-smelling, perfumed with the scent of vespertine flowers that only opened their blossoms to the moon. And then I stepped forward. I gasped. I could move in the night gaps, like they were hallways themselves. Quickly, I slid into the rifts between stars. I imagined the space as a sphere bedizened with little astral ornaments, and soon those heavy celestial bodies became small as candies held in one’s palms. The thread easily looped them together.
I grinned, turning to Amar. Between us was a sphere thick with stars and around us twined soft shadows like cats weaving between ankles.
“Magnificent,” he said.
His gaze was full of awe, but I saw something else in his eyes. Longing. Then, he reached into the sphere, drawing out the string with the three stars. He twisted them between his hands, fashioning a constellation no larger than a sparrow. Amar stepped forward, sliding the stars above my ear. It cast a glow that turned his face silvery and beautiful.
“There, my queen,” he said. “A constellation to wear in your hair.”
*
We spent the rest of the day lost in that room of old planets and forgotten meteors. I stepped across flattened comets and spilled haloes of things that may have burned for centuries or may have always been illusions. It didn’t matter. For the first time, I felt like I was seeing things differently. Amar kept testing my perspective. He clasped nebulas in my hands and told me to think of them as fate.
Being with him was like seeing for the first time. I even started to think differently about the horoscope. Could I see a glimmer of silver in all that darkness? I wanted to. And now, I almost did.
*
When we had closed the door to the star room, Amar reached up to brush his fingers against the constellation in my hair.
“It suits you,” he said.
Warmth crept to my cheeks. For a long moment, we stood in that alcove. The mirror portals faintly shimmered. In the distance, I could see the lines of cities and flush of daybreaks, but everything felt dim compared to the space between us. It felt so charged it could have been alive.
Amar moved closer to me, but a sudden howl across the palace sprang us apart. Amar’s eyes snapped to a distant hall and his mouth, just a moment ago curved in a smile, was now a tight cut.
“Come, Maya. It’s not safe for you to be out here.”
“Why?” I said, following his gaze.
Were my eyes fooling me or did the shadow of a beast just cross the vestibule? Something dank overwhelmed my senses. Wet fur. Salt-crusted claws. That sound of the howling slid under my skin, conjuring something horrifying and nameless in my mind: faceless bodies falling to the floor, the frantic spurt of blood leaving a vein.
Amar half pulled, half ran me to the dining room. Inside, the room was lit up and lanterns of cut topaz hung suspended from the ceiling. Gupta ran to meet me, his gaze shadowed as he and Amar exchanged some silent conversation.
“I am sorry,” Amar said quickly, before running out of the room.
I stood there, unable to shake off the sound of the hounds. Gupta flashed a mournful expression.
“What was that?”
“I—” Gupta started before shaking his head, his face pained. “I cannot say. I am sorry.”
My hands clenched into fists. “The moon?”
He nodded.
“Were those hunting hounds in the palace?”
Gupta paused and nodded.
My skin crawled. “What were they hunting?”
“You know I cannot answer that.”
I sat stiffly in my chair, sparing a single glance to the taunting half-moon outside. There was still time before Akaran would make itself fully known to me. Until then, I had to endure. I tried to pretend that the sound was a warning. That there was a reasonable explanation behind it. But I couldn’t forget the horrible, stomach-churning feeling it rent through me. And when I bent my head to eat, the constellation of stars fell onto my lap.
Dull and silver. But sharp as teeth.
14
THE LION IN THE PILLAR
For three days I did not see Amar. The only sign of him was the sleep-mussed side of the bed. Always, it was cold to the touch. I wandered the halls alone, exploring the doors of Akaran that would open to me. Many of them were bolted shut, but some were not. One door in particular kept flickering to my mind—the charred one, with chains wrapped around it. But I never saw it, despite looking.
On the first day, I found a room where snowdrifts floated upside down in soft, swirling eddies. Once the snow had piled onto the ceiling, it fell in ribbons of translucent silk before sinking into the floor, for the snow-silk cycle to start anew. On the second day, I found a sweltering hot room behind a door that bore a shifting pattern of sand dunes. Inside, sinuous shadows danced across the floor. Curious, I reached down to touch the pattern and the dark puddled into my hands, wet as ink. On the third day, I found a door carved with feathers. Carven niches filled with eggs covered the walls. Behind the shelves of eggs, someone had painted beautiful renderings of rain quails and white-eared pheasants, jungle fowl and storm petrels, ibis and osprey. When I stepped inside, the painted birds cocked their heads, chirruping and crooning to themselves. The eggs became seamed with light and soft birdsong filled the air.
*
On the fourth day, I found a pale white courtyard with a single huge pillar in the middle. The ceiling above was a soft twilight, burnt copper edging a smoky blue. It was a strange place. The air smelled damp and furious.
I ran my fingers across the pillar before snatching my hand back. A crack had split the pillar. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. A hideous roar growled from within the pillar and I jumped back.
“It’s only an illusion,” came a voice near the door.
I spun around to see Amar slouched against the doorway. He looked gaunt; shadows creased the skin under his eyes and his hair was mussed. Still, he smiled to see me and I couldn’t help but smile back. Until now, I didn’t realize that the listlessness I had felt was because of him. I had missed his presence, his speech. Next to him, I felt more alive.
“What is this?” I asked, gesturing to the growling pillar.
Amar sank into an onyx chair that he had conjured from thin air. He tilted his head back and took a deep breath.
“Are you well?”
“Soon enough.” His smile didn’t meet his eyes. “That,” he said, “is a reminder that none can escape death. I am fond of the legend.”
The moment he said that I knew exactly who was in the pillar, and with a strange ache I remembered the harem of Bharata.
“Narasimha,” I breathed. “I have always liked that tale.”
His eyes widened in surprise. “You are familiar with it?”
I nodded. It was the one tale I never told Gauri. Too gory. But for some reason, strangely comforting to me. The pillar quivered behind us, as if it was waiting for me to tell the tale myself. Amar leaned forward, his broad shoulders hunched around him like a predator in wait.
“Tell it to me.”