“Now you want to take away my last consolation in old age,” said Mother Dhina, her voice heavy with accusation. “You want to send Gauri into some no-man’s-land and you expect me to help.”
“She expects you to help, and if you didn’t agree with her yourself, I doubt you would have accepted,” I said. “Besides, I can assure you that it is not what either of us want.”
That much was true.
“What would you have me do?” asked Mother Dhina.
“The Raja Skanda is fond of his wives, yes?”
A cruel smile turned up the corners of Mother Dhina’s lips. “Oh yes. He adorns them with jewels and spends each night in their company. He gives them the largest rooms and drives out the old. He lets the wives stomp on those of us who had been there first, who had served the realm longest, who had yielded the palace children that didn’t live long enough to deserve names.”
Her voice had lost none of its smoke-rasp, but where it was once husky and sultry, it was now like dragged-over stones. The darkest sense of triumph snuck into my heart. Now she knew what I had known all those years.
But I felt something else too. Pity. The thought that it would even find its way to me was its own irony. Still, I felt it, a humming in my throat. A desire—though I tamped it down—to forgive her. I knew the future that had been before me, and I had escaped. Even if it felt like days since I had left Bharata, I always knew that my future there had been a lonely cage. Mother Dhina had only recently come to that conclusion.
“Start a fire in the harem,” I said.
Her eyes sparkled. She smiled.
“Don’t harm anyone,” I added quickly. It was best not to stoke Mother Dhina’s particular brand of cruelty. “The last thing we want is for Gauri to be blamed for any deaths.”
Mother Dhina considered this and nodded reluctantly.
“Send them all to me. All the wives, all the women of the harem. The Raja Skanda will be able to take care of the fire, but by the time that happens, Gauri will already be gone.”
“You speak her given name,” warned Mother Dhina. “That is far too familiar for my liking.” She took a step closer to me, her eyes scrutinizing my face. Whatever ash and paint streaked my features, her gaze seemed to chisel everything away. “Do you know the Princess Gauri from before?”
I swallowed. “No.”
Mother Dhina stared at me for a long while. “You remind me of someone.”
I could guess who.
“She died in childbirth,” said Mother Dhina. “She left behind a daughter who needed a mother—” She broke off and her face, even through the veil, was stony. I knew who she was talking about. Advithi. My mother.
“She was not afraid to trust and hold someone’s trust in return,” said Mother Dhina, in a tone of begrudging respect. “Though that didn’t earn her any admirers. Or my friendship, for that matter.”
“And her daughter?” I prompted, trying to hold back the tremble in my voice.
“She had an affliction, one could say,” said Mother Dhina. “This was during a time when the realm gave credence to horoscopes.” She sighed. “That time is gone. But the girl had a poor one. A dangerous one. And we were living in strange times, not nearly as strange as now. But it was a start, you understand. We were not used to it. We wanted answers and had none. We wanted an explanation for our grief but could find none. So many of us had lost children, brothers, families in war … and so the girl became, well, she—”
“Became someone to blame?” I finished.
“You have to understand that it was easy for us.” Her voice was choked on tears.
A familiar acidic feeling gripped my chest and I turned from Mother Dhina and spared a glance at Kamala. She was watching a peacock drag a bejeweled train across a tangle of brambles.
“Why are you telling me all of this?” I asked.
Mother Dhina blinked at me. “Gauri asked me to stay away for a while before I did as you asked. But I believe I would have come to you anyway. The Raja Skanda told us that you are here to offer spiritual consultations. Counsel me, then.”
Had she asked me this years ago, I would’ve had a more colorful response. But that was in a different time that no longer belonged to either of us.
“You haven’t asked a single question.”
“Weren’t you listening?” said Mother Dhina. “I have told you my story, my shame. There is no one left alive that I may beg of for forgiveness. So what would you counsel me?”
I kept waiting for the desire to see her cry, to let my mouth fill up with so much anger for another person that I could feel it claggy between my teeth. I waited and waited until it felt like a century had pried its fingers off my hate one by one. At the end of it all was nothing but pity.
Mother Dhina stood before me, her lips slightly parted to reveal a row of decaying teeth behind her lips. Nothing I could say would serve as absolution. Mother Dhina was past the point where she might believe in words. She had even given up on horoscopes.
My gaze fell on a statue that no one had moved for years. The stone was fashioned in the lithe shape of an apsara, her torso jutting dramatically to one side, hair frozen in tendrils of polished diorite and granite. It looked surprisingly heavy, but I remembered that the one time I had moved it aside, it had been light. It was hollow, after all, and the space inside was large enough to hide small things within—things like books you didn’t want to part with or candies wrapped in linen or even … a pair of slippers that didn’t belong to you.
I pointed to the statue. “Look inside.”
“You must be daft,” she said with a huff. “That statue is far too heavy to be moved.”
“Just because it hasn’t been moved doesn’t mean that it can’t be,” I said, conjuring the most sage voice that I could.
Mother Dhina went to the statue and, with a pointed glare in my direction, moved to pick it up. It gave way with ease, as I knew it would. The only sound was the soft whumph of upturned earth.
“It’s hollow,” she said.
She reached in, drawing out a pair of dirty but altogether unscathed slippers. The tassels were still intact, as were the annoying pair of bells that used to jangle each time she stomped through the harem. Mother Dhina held them in the air for a full minute before clutching them to her chest, as though doing so could seal some terrible void within her.
“The daughter,” she said through soft gasps, “she had hid these from me. I could never find them.”
I considered scrubbing my face and telling her who I was and that I had forgiven her, but that wouldn’t be true. I did not forgive her. I pitied her. I preferred our screen. She had her veil. I had my costume of a sadhvi. That would serve us both.
“I should go to the harem now,” said Mother Dhina, her gaze not moving from the slippers, an awed smile on her face. “Enough time has passed. Is that all I should do? Start the fire?”
“That is all. If you see Gauri, you can tell her I will be at the palace gates. She can let me and my horse out that way, facing … north?”
I checked with Kamala that this was the right direction and she grunted. Mother Dhina was still staring at the shoes, her fingers tracing the seams of silk that shone like light upon water.
“You’re not a sadhvi, not a thief and not entirely a charlatan,” said Mother Dhina. “Who are you?”
If I could tell her, I would. But that answer was beyond me, so I gave the only one that felt right.
“I’m a dead girl walking.”
*
Kamala kept pawing at the ground.
“Let me, let me, let me,” she pleaded.
“No.”
“I’ll be so very nice. If you let me, I’ll only nibble at your skin. You won’t even bleed too much. I swear on my soul.”
“You have no soul.”
Kamala considered this. “Just let me, let me—”
“There are no bodies to be found there. Trust me. She gave me her word no one would be injured.”
“Then let me make sure,” wheedled Kamala. “Let me make sure that the nasty crone kept her word—”
“No. We are waiting for Gauri and then we are leaving.”
“You are not very kind.”