I ran from him because I loved him. And I would not lose him.
Nritti sent a sickening wave of magic my way. For a moment, I faltered. My legs nearly crumpled beneath me. Tongues of flame lit up the floor, turning everything around me ghastly and shadowed. But I didn’t stop. I didn’t turn. My gaze was fixed on the obsidian mirror glittering at one end of the room. In the portal’s reflection, Naraka’s stone halls twinkled.
My feet stamped into the ground, closer and closer. Heat seared my lungs. The moments between escaping Nritti and entering Naraka sprang out like thorns, each one pricking at me, each one sharper than the next, each one a knot of pain. Until—finally—my hands touched the mirror’s cool surface. My singed fingers skimmed something smooth as glass … and I pushed.
*
The stolen moment from entering one world to the next raised the hairs on the back of my neck and twisted my insides, but then, I was through. Behind me, the portal shivered, the surface curdling black.
I stood in one of Naraka’s pale halls. Lanterns sprang along the stones. Beside me, a carven niche in the wall held a small statue of a mynah bird. I grabbed it and, with all the strength I had left, pitched it straight into the mirror. The surface crackled, light seaming along the edges.
I didn’t know whether it would keep Nritti away long enough for me to do what needed to be done. But I had to try. Against her, I was powerless. I was mortal. She thought that was a weakness, but I knew better.
Being mortal meant that I had a thread hidden somewhere in that tapestry. Being mortal meant that I could free myself from the tapestry. It meant that I still had a chance to claim the powers that were once mine, to fight back against Nritti.
I blinked back tears, trying to forget how still Amar’s body looked on the floor. He wasn’t gone. He couldn’t be. I flew down the halls when I saw it—the throne room. A sieve of dust coated the floor. The air settled heavy and neglected around my shoulders. Outside, the sky of Naraka was a lurid yellow and ice spidered and crackled against the ledges.
The moment my feet hit the floor, a familiar tug in my gut wrenched my gaze away from the window. The tapestry. Its pull had not diminished; if anything its strange lull from before had turned into a pulsing, writhing frenzy. It twisted in and out of sight, shapes sinking and remolding the longer I looked at them. In one second, the threads became bleached as bone, bulging out from the surface until it turned into the beveled form of a white elephant who shook his head with sorrow and bent his trunk to collect a thunderstorm. Airavata.
Color burst prismatic into the threads, each piece of silk or worsted crewel sliding into the burnt landscape of a realm I knew so well—Bharata. Again and again, the tapestry changed: a horse with its ribs poking out of its sides, garnet eyes rolling back into its head; a young man clambering onto a throne; Gauri riding in the dark; the sea of cells beneath my feet in Naraka … each individual in its confines shivering, waiting, wondering. I even saw my father in those threads. His brow was creased, his fingers skimming over the mirrored walls of his prison, wondering when he would be released into the next life. And I saw myself. Not as a former queen who had once commanded the tapestry, but as a woman with her back bent in sorrow and age, still wearing the same saffron sadhvi robes, peddling tales to anyone who would listen.
Tears ran freely down my face. The tapestry was taunting me. Every single one of those images was an invitation to fall to my knees and admit that I couldn’t save them. That I couldn’t save myself. I steeled my heart’s frantic, veering beat.
The tapestry was testing me. It wasn’t prophetic. It could augur nothing from entrails of thread. It was a design. And designs could be altered.
Somewhere in that swirling thicket was my thread.
And I had to untangle it from the black, widening hole of the tapestry. I marched forward, letting the tapestry call to me, sing to me, serenade its secrets and entwine about my ankles. I let it fill me and guide me to myself. I flung out my hands, breathing slowly and deeply, pushing out all the sounds I imagined in the background—of mirrors crackling, and an entrance tearing. My fingers skittered over the tapestry, hovering over threads that I knew weren’t mine … and then I felt it. A pinch in my soul, and something startling me, like a word caught in my throat.
I reached forward, my eyes burning at the sight of the tapestry. Sweat beaded on my skin and my breath fell out in damp heaves. My thread was slick, shining as indigo and oil. But it was caught in something, another thread that was white-hot and iridescent. Nritti.
I braced myself, knowing what would happen the moment my skin touched the threads. I remembered my insides wrenching around Vikram’s thread all those days ago. I remembered the tapestry weighing me and finding me wanting. I remembered his past flickering like a beating heart in my hands. It had been hard then, and that was just one soul. Now, I was plunging myself into two lifetimes.
The two threads seared against my palm. Pain flared behind my eyes and I was falling, my feet slipping against the dusted marble, my whole body tilting around the inferno of the tapestry. I clutched the two threads and my hands burned. I screamed, but never heard myself. The room had lapped up my shrieks.
The skin on my hands peeled back. I was being pried open, each bone lifted from my body to make room for memories—memories stout as trunks, thin as lightning, furred and fanged, solid and slippery. Memories that were mine and Nritti’s. Memories that were starving for recognition. Memories so hungry, they consumed.
The threads called, and I answered—
It was too late to turn back now.
28
LOST NAMES
I remembered my lost names. I unfurled them, smoothing their worn creases, inhaling their scent of star-swollen evenings and monsoon dusks. Nritti had lied. I was no yakshini by the edges of forest glens. I was more, so much more. I clasped my lost names to me—
Yamuna. The name barreled around my ankles, brackish and forceful. A river striped with tortoises and water that glowered and snapped. A force that could drown.
Yamini. The name pressed a cool hand against my heart, warm as freshly wrought stars flung into the winter-black of night.
The names gave me strength. They gave me history. They gave me one more secret to myself, and I would know them all. I opened my eyes, squinting against the brightness as two images spun around before converging into a single scene.
*
Nritti was dancing in Patala, a part of the sprawling Otherworld that held neither sun nor moon, but remained bright with sparkling, unearthly jewels. She danced in a hundred courts, content. Happy. The pride of all the devas and asuras. And then she met Vanaj, the youngest son of a mortal king, brought to the Otherworldly court for his role in vanquishing five rakshas who had plagued sacred grounds.
He loved her.
And she loved him.
And in such bliss does devastation grow.
*
They spent years in each other’s arms. Wandering groves, living as hermits in an ashram of marble where nothing grew around them but lush fruit trees. No one murmured their discontent but the silver fish in the nearby rivers. Nothing interrupted their lovemaking but the cusp of dawn and the famished growl of their own bodies.
*
Then came the war of the two sundered families.
And Vanaj was called away.
*
Nritti stood before me, her lovely face wasted, gaunt. She stood in Naraka’s palace, facing the thrones where Amar and I sat.
“You must help me, sister. He is dying. I know it. I have done everything I can.” Her voice cracked. “I have performed the severest of penances. I have begged each sage. I can do no more.”