He threw his hands into the air, summoning a rustling cloak of moths. The ground disappeared. Everywhere I looked, moths with muted silver wings stole my vision. I crawled; panic tightened my skin. His laugh filled my ears, and gripped my thoughts. I was out of my head. Out of my abilities. I couldn’t fight his magic with strength.
“The trees want you, Princess,” said his voice from everywhere. “You can grow a beautiful tree from that heart of yours. It’s been so long for them. Not since Queen Tara ripped out a heart and watered it with her tears and sheltered it with her beloved’s bones. I can teach you to live forever. I can teach you how to turn your vengeance into a fruit. I can teach you what it means to be invincible. All you have to do is give me the venom.”
Moth wings whipped my face and tangled my hair. Before Alaka, I would have been tempted. Invincibility was all I had wanted when Ujijain had kept me in that cell month after month. But I’d tasted the fruit of vengeance. And it was narrow and sour. Not a story at all, but an ending. I deserved more.
“Never,” I hissed.
The cloak of moths broke. Grabbing my dagger, I jumped to my feet and faced the yaksha. His eyes narrowed.
“You tire me,” he said. “I will have what I want.”
He glanced once at my dagger and it turned from metal to wood. I barely had a toy to protect myself from him. I steadied my breath, focusing on his weaknesses. The roots. Aim for them. Kick, rend, sever them with my hands and teeth if I had to. I was lunging, hands outstretched, when something bright and golden sailed through the air.
The orchard guardian jumped back just in time to avoid it. I thought the golden ball would splatter against the tree, but instead it sailed straight through the mirror bark. In the distance, I heard voices in a different forest. Even the yaksha frowned. The voices seemed to be coming from inside the tree. The small hairs at the back of my neck prickled. The people sounded too familiar.
They sounded just like me and Vikram.
But I didn’t have time to process the eerie voices. Someone was crashing through the trees. I squinted into the dense net of branches. Whatever it was, it sounded like a deranged bull. I looked closer.
Not a deranged bull.
Not at all.
30
UNFASTENED WORLD
VIKRAM
Vikram was no stranger to finding weaknesses. It had been part of his talent as the Fox Prince of Ujijain. He survived by finding the threads that pulled people together, and stringing out their secrets, finding the holes … and pressing.
On one of his last visits home, he had scheduled a meeting with a high-ranking adviser in hopes of assisting on a city-planning project.
“And why would I allow you to participate in such a meeting, Your Highness?” sneered the adviser. “It is unnecessary for you to attend. We will handle those engagements when you sit upon the throne. There are better ways to spend your hours.”
Vikram had walked in front of the adviser and tapped his fingers together.
“Perhaps I’ll be inspired by the way you spend your hours,” he had said. “Maybe I’ll go to the dice tables. Your winnings, I’ve noticed, are controlled by just how little or how much you pay attention to the city representative’s interests.”
“How do you know that?” asked the adviser, paling.
“As it turns out, not everyone knows that I am merely to ‘sit’ upon the throne of Ujijain.”
He let this information linger just to watch the adviser sweat.
“You have far too much time on your hands, Prince Vikramaditya.”
“So change that,” said Vikram. “Include me in the committees. Spend my time, and I may turn a blind eye on yours.”
He was involved in seven committees that season.
But spending much of his time finding weaknesses meant that he could not ignore his own.
Jhulan Purnima threatened to unfasten him. Even the air turned intoxicating and sweet. It almost, thought Vikram, smelled like her. He had noticed that the other day, when he leaned down to murmur a broken song in her ear and plead with her to live. She had that sharp green fragrance that belonged to unopened flower blooms. Sun-warmed beauty on the cusp of bursting.
He hadn’t even realized his weakness until that night, when those heatless flames licked their way through her bloodstream. What if she didn’t live? At first, his mind refused to entertain the possibility of her death. But then he had carried her. He had held her limp, poisoned body against his chest, and felt her life unspooling. And he knew that the Tournament of Wishes had stopped being a game.
Since that night, he needed to tell her … something. But what? “Please don’t die” sounded foolish. “You smell nice” sounded worse. He wasn’t even sure what the right words were, but they sat on his tongue and made it impossible to speak around them. Before Alaka, he would have been content keeping whatever thorny not-feelings had reared up inside him. But Death commanded urgency. Death tore the skin off dreams and showed the bones underneath. And Vikram saw the bones now. When he closed his eyes, he saw Gauri’s long-lashed gaze closing. And staying closed. He saw his own body crumpled by the shores of a pool not unlike the Serpent King’s portal, turning to a skeleton for some ignorant prince to ponder or ignore.
Irritated, Vikram stalked through the revels and swiped a jeweled goblet from one of the floating crystal trays. He swirled the goblet, watching as the pale pink drink deepened from rose to garnet to winter black. The same shade as her eyes. He spilled the drink onto the ground.
Vikram stood far from the revels now, at the edge of the orchards. A low laugh resonated through the silent trees. It wasn’t a laugh of camaraderie or love. It was a laugh of control.
Chasing the sound, he stepped into an orchard full of needle-thin bone white trees. Here, the snow and ice faded into soft ash. The grove possessed the undisturbed quality of cremation grounds. Grief dented the air, turning it so heavy and thick that he thought he could cut through it. His breath feathered into cold plumes as he crept forward, mindful of the strange trees.
Through a net of branches, he saw Gauri crawling along the orchard floor. Some distance before her stood a yaksha with amber hair. He held himself strangely, his legs ankle-deep in the ground, his face harsh and twisted. Vikram froze, mesmerized by the black blooming across the yaksha’s face, oil and fungus, roots dripping and dangling from nose and chin.
Something snapped. A howl from the yaksha. Gauri rising victorious. It wasn’t until he saw that her hand gripped a wooden dagger that panic grabbed his heart in a fist. If she had her true dagger, she might turn them on him for daring to interrupt her victory. But this was not her usual flesh-and-blood opponent. Vikram glanced down and cursed. In Ujijain, he’d never had reason to carry weapons and so he never developed the habit. He was muscular, but that didn’t matter in the face of magic.
However, he could run.