25
A TALISMAN OF TOUCH
VIKRAM
The bones had stood out too sharply. A little too knowingly. As if they had been waiting for him to find them. Maybe those bones belonged to someone like him. Someone who believed that magic meant they were destined for more. Maybe they believed it right until the moment they died.
Vikram wasn’t so blinded by the idea of magic that he thought it was a toothless and beautiful thing. He knew it bit. But he hadn’t imagined it could bite … them.
If he lost, what use would magic be? The life that waited for him in Ujijain was a husk of an existence. He couldn’t return. And yet he no longer felt that glittering certainty that victory danced within reach. He felt … outside of himself. Grasping, once more, for that hope and belief.
And so he danced with Gauri not out of want, but out of necessity. In the ashram, pupils carried luck charms in their pockets or hid tiny figurines of deities all over their rooms. Vikram never understood that compulsion to hold what felt sacred. Now he did.
It was the connection people craved; the feeling that touch connected them to something beyond themselves. That was why he needed to dance with her. He craved that connection to the moment when magic had snapped his reality and showed him that his destiny as a puppet was only a path. Not a promise.
Before he met Gauri, he thought that the invitation to the Tournament of Wishes marked the entrance of magic into his life. But that moment was nothing more than what it served: an invitation. Gauri was the real beginning. He knew it the moment she flew toward him, lips pulled back in a snarl, eyes black as winter and just as unforgiving.
Vikram pulled Gauri to the revels. The air felt heavy and damp, as it always did during the rainy season. He drew her close until their bodies were flush. He wanted to memorize this, the way her leg pressed against his, the way strands of her hair got caught in the small buttons of his jacket. Even the way she glowered at him when he grinned. When he touched her, he didn’t feel like some thread in a tale, pulled along without will. He was something that reached out and responded.
Gauri laughed when he stumbled through the movements of the dance.
“You are a discredit to your title, Vikram. Fox Prince, indeed,” she said. “I’ve never seen a clumsier fox.”
“What I lack in skill, I make up for in enthusiasm.”
“Do you even know how to dance?”
“Not at all,” he said, spinning her in a circle.
“I can tell. Were you lulled by the music?”
“The company.”
“Now you’re just trying to be sly and charming.”
“I am a credit to my title, after all.”
Twice, he had pulled her so close that her gaze threatened to eclipse his thoughts. When she danced, her eyes softened. No longer harsh and winter black, but vast and … not breathtaking, but breath-guzzling. Breath-devouring. This close, her eyes shone like fragments of night sky. If he looked closer, he wondered whether he’d see stars burst into life behind her lashes.
Twice, her lids dropped and her eyes traced his lips just as his traced hers. But he always pulled away in the end. He’d spent enough time with her to guess how she would interpret a kiss. She would see it as a reckless act of bravery, a thing to be done before death. It would have been a reckless act of bravery. But not for those reasons.
They danced until even the stars limped out of the sky. Only a few stragglers remained to watch the revels. A handful of hours were left between now and dawn. And at dawn, he knew that she would be up and ready to fight, so he led her away from the dance.
“Finally,” she said. But he thought he heard faint disappointment in her voice.
When they trudged upstairs, he took the couch at the opposite side of the room without comment. Within moments, she was asleep. One arm flung over her stomach. One ankle tucked beneath her knee. He’d never seen anyone sleep in a knot, but Gauri made the pose look like the soul of slumber. He allowed himself a single moment to wonder what it would be like to know that warmth, to rest his cheek against her bare shoulder and trace what dreams fluttered beneath her eyelids. And then he closed his mind to her.
As he expected, Gauri was up with the dawn. She woke him up none too gently, but made up for it by shoving a cup of chai in one of his hands and a plate of uttapam in the other.
“Ready to die?”
He groaned. “I realize you’re newly adjusting to a sense of humor, but have mercy.”
“Not known for it.”
He raised his glass to her. “It’s never too late to start.”
The world was gray and dark when they left their chambers and trudged through the grove. Gauri kept looking over her shoulder at a copse of skeletal-looking trees, one hand on the weapons belt slung around her waist. At the pool, Vikram held out his arm and Gauri quickly drew a knife across her forearm and then his. He didn’t wince when the blood unfurled in the milky water, staining the riddle invitation scrawled across the pale surface. The water trembled. The pool sank into the earth, transforming into a set of sapphire staircases that formed a serpentine coil straight into darkness.
“Well done, mortals,” called a voice from the depths.
26
THE SEVEN BRIDES
GAURI
I imagined that the Serpent King’s lair would look like a snake’s burrow—a hole in the ground littered with bone fragments, and shed skin boasting a phantom of its former brightness. But this subterranean palace was beautiful. At the bottom of the stairs, a large chamber sprawled out. Glassy stalactites spiraled from a cavernous ceiling flecked with bits of quartz and silver. A wave of still water covered with a thin piece of glass formed the floor.
At the bottom of the stairs, I grimaced. The stairs were the only entrance and exit. If we had to fight in the middle of the room, it strained an exit strategy. Even though the room was barren, the atmosphere felt strung taut. It felt … watched. I waited. In battle, I could sometimes guess when an enemy soldier would charge out of the dark. You could feel the air gather and release. As if it had guessed what was coming next and chose to step aside.
The dark unraveled:
Tail.
Torso.
Teeth.
“You came looking for a monster,” said the Serpent King. “And now you have found one.”