“A dance for lovers,” said Gupta, jabbing me with his elbow.
The princeling and Nritti whirled off and into the stage, leaving her alone. Alone with her chin perched in her palm, an arch smile stretching her lips. But I knew her smile. The details of it had somehow emblazoned itself into my bones so that I couldn’t smile myself without feeling the weight of her grin propping me up. The smile she wore now was only a memory of how a smile should look.
Gupta grumbled, and I was shoved forward.
“Move, fool.”
I moved. And when I walked to her, I certainly felt like a fool. A crowd watched as I cut a path to her. She hadn’t noticed yet. Her gaze was distant and unfocused. A comet’s tail left a trail of smoke across her shoulder. Today, she was dressed in all her finery. Thin rings of beaten gold and amber circled her wrist. A delicate chain of silver bells fell across her waist.
“Who is he?” whispered a naga.
His would-be mate shrugged, her cobra hood flaring out so she could gossip in privacy.
“Not a demon,” whispered an asura to the yakshini with sea-foam hair.
“Not a human,” she replied.
I felt the silk of the hood tickling my neck and drew a sigh of relief. In this way, at least, I was safe from their gaze. No line flanked her vendor stall, and yet she had returned to rearranging night fruit and sprucing up the plate of sample slices. When she felt my shadow across hers, she spoke without looking up: “I’ve poisoned all the fruit, so think twice before you…”
She looked up and stared.
“Poisoned fruit?” I asked. “What a romantic thing to sell on this momentous occasion.”
A corner of her lips quirked into a grin. I felt it in my bones.
“I am certain there is at least one lover out there who will thank me.”
“The unfortunate thing is that I believe you. But if you did such a thing, then I would have to work on a holiday.”
“We can’t have that.”
Why did I thrill when she said we? I and you were thin, solitary words remade by her lips the moment she spoke we.
“No,” I said, savoring the next words, the unshaped wonder of them: “We can’t.”
She looked behind me, and the smile slid off her face. I followed her gaze to see a small crowd milling from the outskirts of the stage where couples leapt and danced.
“Dance with me,” she said. Commanded.
And I nodded dumbly. As if I could do anything else.
Her hand rested on my shoulder and my thoughts splintered at her touch.
“I almost didn’t recognize you with that hood on,” she said.
I spun her in a circle and a constellation slipped from her wrist to her elbow.
“I would have worn it the first time we met if I knew it would make you laugh.”
“It makes me laugh only because you look ridiculous,” she said. “And I can’t tell what you’re thinking or feeling when it covers your eyes.”
“Maybe I don’t want you to know. Maybe I am intentionally obscuring my feelings from view.”
She looked at me, her gaze suddenly hooded. At first, I thought she would speak. But instead, she sipped on her lower lip and turned from me. The music fell thick and honeyed around us. I spun her again. But she did not come back to me. She frowned, like she was remembering something.
“I thought I’d see you here, but perhaps not under so strange a disguise. They said the Dharma Raja was looking for a wife,” she said lightly. Too lightly. “I suppose my rejection has finally sunken in. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you with a hood?”
“Those rumors were started by my advisor, Gupta.”
“The same one who taught you how to speak to a woman?”
“The very same.”
“That almost explains it.”
But there was still a frostiness to her voice.
“He started it because I came to see you in the grove and you weren’t there. Gupta thought you would be here. I only came here for you.” She fell quiet, but she looked up at me. Her expression, for one sliver of a moment, was unguarded hope. “Do you truly think I meant to disguise myself from you? That this hood would be enough to hide my identity?”
She crossed her arms.
“It only exposes your jaw and lips,” she said. “That’s hardly enough to recognize.”
“That’s implying there’s nothing memorable about the lower half of my face. My lips are certainly memorable.”
She moved closer. Or I moved closer. Or the music had grown so greedy that it ate away the distance between us.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. Lightly. Mockingly. But there was something uneven in her tone.
The music made me bold. I slid my fingers into her hair. Her hair was cold silk against my palm. Her eyes fluttered shut. Then opened. And I knew what the unevenness in her voice had been: want.
“Would you like to?”
I waited for the moment of waiting, but it never came. Without answering, she tipped forward. Her fingers tapped a secret rhythm across the nape of my neck before she pulled me to her. Her lips met mine. No, not met. She was not capable of something so gentle. Her lips conquered mine. But I didn’t mourn my loss for long. I braided my fingers in her hair, fire edging my thoughts when she sighed against me.
In that strange lightlessness that belonged to closed eyes, I thought I could see inside myself. Whatever was inside me was no stage like the one upon which we danced. Kissed. What was inside me could not fit beneath the sky even though it was lit up by an inferno of stars. Her lips opened beneath mine. She tasted the way she looked—like wonder and cold, velvet shadows and hidden paths beneath too-dark woods. She tasted like the edge of imagination, like the shadows of a new idea, which chases away your thoughts and leaves you lost in dreams.
I was lost.
But as long as it was with her, I never wanted to be found.
6
NIGHT
The kiss changed everything and nothing.
When we emerged from that strange stage, no one commented. No one saw. The whole world turned joyously selfish and curled inward. We left the Night Bazaar behind, hands entwined. We didn’t speak of Teej—mere weeks away—or what the kiss meant. We had torn a chunk of that enchanted silence from the stage and carried it within us like a talisman, something to ward off every worry.
“Will you come back tomorrow?”
“And the next day. And the day after that.”
I bit back a smile. “For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
*
Every night, he visited me. And every night we walked to the moon-mirror throne, which was not quite a throne, but all that a throne should be, and got lost together. On the third night we walked through an enchanted desert where the mirages took on the forms of fantastical bodies of water—ice braided along a ravine, quartz-clear puddles shot through with small violet flowers. The mirage promised cold, clear water. But at a single touch, it was nothing but singed weeds and dry sand.
“It’s maya,” I said. “Illusion.”
“They say that is all the world is.”
“How pessimistic you are,” I teased.
“What do you think?”