One more example of how to describe someone’s eyes and I would destroy someone.
“You want to give off an air of refined elegance,” said Gupta. He was gliding to and fro across the mirror-paneled hall. I leaned against the wall and tried not to glower. “You want to be coy but not so reclusive. And you want to be inviting without being too available.”
“I hate this.”
“Last time we’ll practice,” said Gupta. For his own sake, he better be right. “Now. Pretend I’m her.”
He disappeared behind a corner. A thick brume of ink rose up from the floor in Gupta’s impersonation of night. Tiny lights poked holes in the mist. Were those supposed to be stars? And then. Singing. Gupta ran into the hall flailing his arms over his head. Then, he twirled in a circle: “I am a beautiful maiden!” he trilled in a high-pitched voice.
Please stop.
Gupta stopped spiraling in manic circles when he saw me, and clasped a hand to his chest. “Who are you?”
“It is I … the Dharma Raja…”
“And what do you want, handsome man?”
I glared, but Gupta remained in character and blinked furiously. There were times I wondered what dying was like. This was one of those times. Except I wanted to die out of necessity. Not curiosity.
“I was captivated by your beauty,” I deadpanned.
Gupta—curses upon him—ran his hand through a false pile of hair that was more or less a strategically placed ink blot. “What beauty?”
“You look like a”—nightmare, my mind supplied—“dream.”
The shadows and ink vanished and Gupta clapped. “That wasn’t so miserable, was it?”
“You made me resent immortality.”
“Now you have a place to start in your conversation. And you owe it all to me,” he said, grinning. “Now go.”
“You do not need to tell me twice.”
*
When I saw her, the world ceased to exist beyond where she danced. I forgot Gupta’s lessons. I forgot why I stood there. I forgot what I wanted. I even forgot the curse the Shadow Wife had placed on me all those years ago.
Night’s dance thrummed with purpose. Her grace sharpened into a lathe, and with it she sculpted the promise of tomorrow from nothing but shadows. She was potential incarnate. When she shaped shadows to every sleep-creased fold in the earth, she was balancing time, wiping slates clean, allowing any beginning to take shape. When she frosted night over the world, dawn whispered the lyrics of every tomorrow: here is a thing not yet started, here is a thing of magic. My own halfhearted attempts of invention paled before her. She was the beginning of all ideas.
And before her, I was humbled.
*
Her laughter was still ringing in my ears when I arrived back to the palace. Gupta was meditating upside down and cracked open an eye when he saw me.
“Oh no,” he said, paling. “Not a single insult? My sherwani jacket is practically around my head.”
“I can see that.”
My hounds ran up to me, snuffling my palms with bemused expressions. I scratched their ears absentmindedly.
“What did she do to you?”
She had laughed at me. And made me laugh at myself. And she had been freely honest. People always threw their honesty and last secrets at me, as if by expelling them in a dying breath, they could shorten their time in the less savory parts of my kingdom. But she had given her honesty without expectation. And her honesty was a gift.
“How did the introductions go? Was she adequately wooed and smitten courtesy of yours truly?” asked Gupta.
“She hated every word your ‘expert tutelage’ forced me to say.”
Gupta gasped, and his eyes narrowed. “Impossible!”
“She is.”
“Don’t take it personally. Women are hard to please,” he grumbled. “Especially beautiful ones.”
Beauty. I hadn’t thought much of it before. Beauty seemed too random, too flimsy to pin any true value to. Her features were lovely, but that wasn’t what made her memorable. Stars and constellations had knitted their way from her forehead to her toes. She wore the stories of the world as if every story had only ever been about her. And wasn’t that what beauty should be about? A rhythm of features and colors trying to be remarkable enough to earn a tale? If so, she had that in infinite quantities.
“What did you tell her?” asked Gupta, hopping from his upside-down perch.
“That I wanted to make her my queen.”
Gupta squeaked and tugged at his hair. “Where is the mystery in that, you fool? What did she say?”
I laughed, thinking of her response. Sharp tongue. Clever.
“She said no.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“But I thought…” started Gupta, before he frowned and tented his fingers. “Don’t despair, there’s always—”
“No,” I said. “If not her, then no one.”
“But she rejected you.”
“And she said I may see her tomorrow. And even court her.”
Gupta raised a skeptical brow. “Seems like you’ve met your match in cruelty.”
“I’m not cruel,” I said, waving a hand. I was pacing back and forth. How many hours until nightfall?
“There’s only two months until Teej. Even by your normal standards, you seem a little overconfident.”
“I think she’s far too ambitious to refuse my offer.”
Gupta muttered something that sounded a lot like “arrogant cow.” Then, with a flick of his wrist, a flurry of heavily inked parchment papers soared into his arms. “If that is what you wish, then how can I help?”
“First of all, never instruct me on the art of courtly coquettishness again.”
Gupta winced. “Noted.”
“Second. There’s something I want to give her.”
Gupta clasped his hands to his chin and made a strangled cooing sound. “Is it your heart?”
Cold prickled down my spine. And I heard the Shadow Wife’s taunts echoing in my thoughts: You should have learned from the beginning that when someone leaves, it is because nothing was valuable enough to make them stay. You were not enough. And with this curse, I bind your heart.
“Better than a heart,” I said tightly.
Before I left, she had asked for a garden unlike any in all the realms. She would have it.
I wandered through the room where I kept my small creations. On a shelf beside some discarded thoughts, a miniature glass garden caught the light. I had made it on the day I retrieved the soul of a celibate gardener. I had to decide whether he should be reborn as a vivid, but short-lived rose, always pressed to the bosom of the queen he had chastely loved. Or if I should make him into a king, someone who would marry the queen he had loved when she too was reincarnated into a new form. There was something about the garden that reminded me of Night. The way hope grew in every crystal blade, unsure of what it would be next. This would be my starting point. But I could make the garden larger. Grander. Something filled with translucence and light, crystal roses and quartz lilies, emerald ivy and moonstone jasmine vines. Things that were themselves even as they took on the reflection of the world around them.
Like her.
When I was nearly finished, Gupta called out to me. And I knew from his face what it meant: Dusk was about to fall.
“Do you have your gift?”