“Yes.”
“What about your sherwani jacket?”
“What about it?”
He looked appalled. “That’s the same one you were wearing this morning.”
“It will be fine.”
“I would notice if someone courting me was wearing the same jacket.”
“Hence, why no one is courting you.”
The grove where she danced stood next to the Chakara Forest, where the human and magical world had somehow woven together. Here, small gray birds fed off the moonlight and chirped remnants of children’s dreams. It was a popular haunt of gentle rakshas, those demons who preferred to disguise themselves as boulders for years upon years rather than participate in the blood sport of their brethren. And it was here where Night’s orchard of dream fruit sprouted cold fruit and silver limbs. The more I thought about seeing her, the more something within me gathered into a tight knot.
In the clearing where I had first seen her, I let go of that clamoring sensation in my chest and opened my palms. Tiny glass seedlings drifted and swirled into the ground. Translucent roots expanded into tessellations. Before my eyes, the glass garden grew: Thick ashwagandha shrubs, orchids with pale quartz petals, arrowheads fat as palms and bright as topaz. There were jasmine vines with pearl buds, water lilies with diamond petals. Nilofars and lotuses. Beneath the sunset sky, the glass garden transformed into a grove of lush flames.
Behind me, I heard a fierce intake of breath.
I turned around, and there she was. Livid as the sunset. Red and gold streaked across her skin. Her hair was tied back in a loose braid. Mirth filled her eyes even before she smiled and I found myself hungering for the sound of her laugh.
“You asked for a garden unlike any in all the realms.”
“You listen well,” she said. She touched each flower reverently and I knew, with a sudden surge of pride, that she liked what I had made. Crouching to her feet, she held her arm to a glass lotus that resembled her flaming skin. “A garden to match me.”
“Yes,” I said. “For a guardian unlike any in all the realms.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s a far better compliment than your last attempt.”
Lowly painter. I shuddered and inwardly cursed Gupta. “I relieved my instructor of his duties.”
“Ah, see. There is your problem. You consulted a man.” She laughed. And I wanted to catch the sound and play it forever. “You should have asked a woman.”
“Then I shall make amends now. What should I have said to you?”
She shrugged. I couldn’t tell whether the faint scarlet bloom across her cheeks belonged to a blush or the sunset. “The truth. What was the first thing you thought when you saw me?”
When I first saw her, I remembered how the sky crouched low over the world, its black belly swollen on thunderstorms and stars. And when I saw her dancing, I remembered the edge of a cloud sliding across her neck. I remembered the ghost-pale cut of its silhouette before it disappeared beneath the fall of her hair.
“I thought you looked like edges and thunderstorms.”
“Should I be flattered?”
“Be anything you want. But I would not have you any other way.”
The sky leaned a little further to the call of night. The red of her skin faded to a dull plum. That brilliant incandescence of the flame-filled sky softened. She looked away and when she looked back, something like mischief sparked in her eyes.
“I was thinking of you.”
“How flattering.”
“I was thinking of your stubborn desire to court me despite inevitable rejection.”
“Less flattering.”
“But mostly I was thinking of how I don’t know you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I’m glad you asked.”
With a small wave of her hand, a richly patterned rug sprawled across the grove. Silk pillows landed with soft thumps onto the covering. The black and white tiles of a shatranj board caught the light and small onyx and alabaster figurines hopped into their respective places.
She seated herself at one end of the game and gestured for me to sit. “For every move I make, you must answer a question.”
Before she could reach for a piece, I flicked my wrist and a wave of shadows rose out of the ground, swallowing up the board. “If you want to know me, then I want to know you too. We are equals. If you may ask a question, so may I.”
She rolled her eyes. “Must you be so dramatic?”
“Is that your first question?”
“You could answer out of the kindness of your heart.”
“I’m not known for kindness.”
She laughed. “Then here is my question. How did you make my garden?”
I liked the way she called the garden hers. “How did you know I made it?”
“My question. Not yours.”
“I took whatever rain slicked each of those flowers and froze the impressions to look like glass. I took every color from dusk and dawn and midnight. I poured hope in every flower, though I must confess that the hope originally belonged to a gardener of an ancient kingdom. He was in love with the queen who spoke to him only three times in his whole life. And yet he hoped that she would know that each bloom and their beauty was for her alone. His hope never wavered,” I said. “That is why this garden of yours will never break.”
Her lips formed a soft O, and she glanced back at the garden as if seeing it with new eyes. “A rather huge undertaking for someone who told you they won’t have you.”
“Do you like it?”
“I love it,” she said fiercely.
“Then I don’t consider it an undertaking at all. Now. My turn. What do you think of when you dance night into the world?”
She kept her eyes on the board, evaluating her next move. “I could refuse to answer since you already asked a question.”
“You could answer out of the kindness of your heart.”
“Like you, I am not known for kindness,” she said. “But I am known for vanity about my own importance, and your question appeals to that.” I bit back a smile as she braced her elbows on her knees and tapped her lips. “When I dance, I think of … stories. I can’t read any of the tales written in stars and inked across my skin. But I think about how we retell them a thousand times over. And when I dance, it’s like pouring ink over a thousand tomes and letting people start anew.”
“Retelling them,” I repeated slowly. “I understand that. Every day I decide a story.”
I told her about the Tapestry. I told her how a single death could change the outcome of a hundred lives. That duty—to move between the fixed and fated moments—weighed on me, but there was more than just sacred purpose in the responsibility. I didn’t have to walk along mortals to know the weight of their dreams, and even though they did not know what they entrusted to me, I was still honored with the task. When I finished talking, she eyed me like she knew a secret.
“I hadn’t realized we were both creators.”