It swung its head toward the door. “She won’t be happy to see you,” it said, with a touch of fondness. “But that is to be expected.”
Not knowing what else to do, I stepped through the door and found myself in the throne room of a vast palace. The palace didn’t feel like Alaka. The windows overlooked nothing but barren scrubland. The tiles beneath my feet pulsed like a heartbeat. I tried to look around me, but I couldn’t even get my bearings. It was as though the room didn’t want to be seen.
The door swung open. Two figures glided inside. I scrambled to my feet, my heart racing. I couldn’t make out their features but I knew they weren’t Kubera and Kauveri. The Raja wore a charcoal sherwani jacket. Dark, lustrous power curled off of him and he moved with an eerie grace. His queen walked beside him; starry wisps and coils of evening sky lit the space around her. And then she turned, and my heart stilled. My gaze traveled from the Queen’s bare feet, where thunderheads danced around her ankles, past her arms, where lightning netted its way across her wrists, and to her eyes. Dark as dusk. I knew that the Queen’s eyes tightened at the corners when she was nervous. I knew she preferred her room cold and her bed without blankets. I knew that her favorite fruit was guava and that she always ate it with salt.
I knew all these things because the Queen was Maya. Her eyes widened, first with shock and then with fury.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
The Raja moved to her side. Maya turned to him. There was no mistaking the glance that passed between them. Love. He looked at my sister as if she were wonders and miracles made flesh. And then he looked at me. I turned my head. The thought of meeting his eyes made me feel as if it were the last thing I’d ever do. He spoke and his voice was lush and dark: “Forgive my manners, Princess, but I take no pleasure in our acquaintance, and would rather not meet you yet.”
To anyone else, his words would reek of insolence. But I felt as if he had done me a great favor. I fumbled for my voice. “Perhaps another time.”
At this, he smiled. “Inevitably.”
He lifted Maya’s hand to his lips and disappeared. It was just us. I wanted to cry, hug her, laugh. I wanted to tell her I looked for her in every constellation, not just ours. I wanted to tell her I was tired and scared. Maya smiled, holding out her arms to me.
“You’ve worked so hard, my Gauri,” she said. “And I know that it has left your heart wounded and your soul raw. I can take away the hurt. I can erase it from your memory forever. Or you can return and I cannot tell you what will happen. I can only tell you that the choice is yours.
“Do you want to be brave?”
39
BELIEF WAS BREAD
VIKRAM
A woman crouched over him, snow falling from her hair. Her lips were as cold as salvation when they pressed to his cheek. A memory bloomed in his mind—he was laughing with Gauri, telling her how in Ujijain they gave their thanks in kisses. At her taunt, he kissed a boulder shaped like a woman.
For her greed, she is lost until a kiss falls upon her stony brow.
He knew the woman who sat beside him. Tara. The cursed queen of the vanaras.
That kiss.…
It had freed her.
His thoughts felt thick. Slow. Dimly, he remembered a knife parting bone from muscle. The sting of death. Tara reached for him, a glowing thread pulled taut between her fingers. Her expression was benevolent, full of gratitude.
“Is this a gift of Life?” he asked.
“Oh, Prince,” she laughed. “Existence is the gift. Life is a choice.”
Her hands moved over his eyes. He felt her carrying him, cradling him like a child. They moved past halls. Through doors. In a golden room, she lowered him to the ground, cold lips pressing just beneath his ear as she stamped his skin with one command:
Exist.
He opened his eyes, sucking in a lungful of air. He held on to it until it burned, until he knew without a doubt that it was his, his, his. Then he let it go. Callously. Breathlessly. When he looked up, he was on his knees before Kubera and Kauveri. He felt wild. Gauri. Where was she? But if there was anything or anyone outside of this room—a crowd, a sea, an embryo world not yet born—he could not see it. Kubera and Kauveri had shed their human glamour and become impossible to look at. Impossible to look away from.
He was a child and not a child. He was an eight-year-old crying into his pillow and scrabbling for meaning. He was a thirteen-year-old poring over myth and legend, assembling the clues for his future, holding his hopes so tightly within him that they had taken over his bones, his blood, his dreams. His hope was cold. Poisonous. Eclipsing. And he fed it anyway, the way someone feeds something out of habit simply because there is nothing else in their life worth growing.
All this time, he thought magic had chosen him. Maybe magic never chose. Maybe it had always been about the fit. A key latching into a hole. Maybe there had been just enough holes in him for magic to slip through and hook him like spurs into cloth.
Alaka had forced him to look in. Not out. And he had begun to borrow a little of Gauri’s thoughts—her will was her weapon, and everything else was just cobwebs to cut through. Her loss was her own just as her victory was her own.
It terrified him.
Unstrung him.
And yet, he felt stronger. Belief was still bread, still warm and filling. But Alaka had shifted it, pulled it out of sight, so that he could rely on nothing and no one but himself.
It was freedom.
“What more are you going to take from me?” demanded Vikram. “What sacrifice will you demand?”
Kubera merely tilted his head as his wife laughed behind her hand.
“I already took it, Fox Prince. I took the dreams you stored up until the day I came with an invitation. I took your faith every time you stared down death and wondered whether this was part of a plan for you. I took your resilience when you wondered whether the girl of your very soul was destined to die,” said Kubera. “I told you I would take what you would already give. Am I not merciful?”
Vikram stood there, his heart a curious cross between hollow and heavy. He felt the ache of that sacrifice, the loss of that wonder replaced with wariness.“I thank you, Lord Kubera. But—”
“But you want to know why you were brought here?” offered Kauveri. “You want to know why my consort handpicked you and the Princess Gauri, even going so far as to disguise himself as a sage and even a vetala.”
Vikram’s head shot up. “The vetala too?”
He had guessed Kubera was the sage. The golden mongoose had given it away in their first meeting. Kubera grinned.
“Oh yes! But do not think that I had any hand in your success. I merely wanted to watch! And then, oh, perhaps I did feel a little attached to your soft hearts and your lingering looks. You were only bones and wanting. Exquisitely lovely.”
“There’s more to us than that,” said Vikram.