I had lost myself. Sometimes I didn’t think I’d drawn breath until her lips touched mine. Sometimes I saw the world as she did, and it was no longer an old and creaking thing, but a song I had not been able to hear until now. I told myself it was nothing more than the perfect companionship. Devoid of love but full of understanding. And every time I told this to myself, I thought the whole palace of Naraka shook with laughter. I ignored it.
For the past few days, I had imagined the world as it might be and not as it was. I had collected souls and spun them into new forms. There had been no need to visit the Tapestry. Until now.
The moment I stepped into the room, it sensed that I had changed. And like any beast that sensed weakness, the threads pushed and pushed until they broke into my thoughts. They rummaged with cloth fingers, ignoring my protest and fury. They spoke over me with taunts, dragging a noose of my past around my neck until I was yanked into a memory I never wished to revisit:
The Shadow Wife wore my mother’s face. She crouched by my side, grabbing me by the shoulders.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” she asked.
“I’ve done nothing but tell the truth. Something you should have done years ago.”
I had been younger and more foolish then, eager for justice. My mother had been missing for centuries. Some said that the Sun Palace was so bright that the light could cut you if you weren’t careful. Some said that the light had cut my mother, splitting her heart right down the middle and blinding her heart to the love she should have carried for the child she left behind. I never asked why she left or where she went. When I was younger, I thought I had not loved her enough and that was why she left. When I grew older, I saw how love was sometimes not the tether but the whip. The thing that made you run far and fast and never return.
“You exposed me. But every truth comes with a price,” said the Shadow Wife.
I would never call her Mother. I would never call her Lady Chayya. I would never speak her name.
“You don’t frighten me.”
She tilted her head to one side, worrying her lip the way my mother did when she was considering something.
“But love frightens you. Love and the loss of it frightens you, doesn’t it?”
I said nothing.
“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. For this, boy, I curse you. And with this curse, I bind your heart. The woman you give your heart to will leave you just as the Lady of the Wind left your father. And the heartache you feel now will be nothing to the loss of her.”
The Tapestry taunted the words over and over. I reeled back, and the cloth fingers that had carded through my memory like so much silk suddenly crumpled and fell limp. My breath rattled in my lungs like the dead. I left the Tapestry behind me, determined to sort out my thoughts when Gupta appeared carrying a bundle of parchment roses.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Getting the palace ready, of course!”
“For what?”
“For her,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It needs to be fitting for a queen. You already made her that garden, but I thought she might like something a little more intellectual. Look!” He tossed one of the parchment roses into the air and it opened into a mouth, shouting out snippets of Gupta’s reports:
It really comes down to opposable thumbs.
And:
There is something rather grotesque about pearls. Why does anyone like them? It is spit. Congealed spit.
“You can’t be serious,” I said. “You expect her to walk through a garden of reports?”
“It’s better than what you did! You gave her a garden of glass. That is actually hazardous to life.”
It struck me then. Gupta was preparing for her to come here. Because he assumed she would become the queen of this kingdom. I turned slowly on the spot, staring at the halls where she might walk down, the mirrors where she might pause to consider a strange reflection. The dining table where she would sit across from me. The bedroom where I would sleep by her side. And as I imagined these things, the truth of the Shadow Wife’s curse took hold.
If I fell in love with her, I would lose her. Maybe she’d come here and hate this place and leave. Maybe she’d realize that she couldn’t stand the thought of eternity with me after all. The Shadow Wife’s curse was true. I had felt it press itself into my bones the moment she spoke, and there it stayed, biding its time. Waiting until I fell in love.
The only difference was that I could stop this before it ever started. I could spare us all a world of pain. Even if it broke me.
“I’m sorry,” said Gupta. “It’s not a hazard. If she likes your garden, then who cares?”
“She … she can’t come here.”
Gupta stepped back, stunned. “What? Why?”
Because I am dangerously close to falling in love.
“It won’t work.”
“I thought you said that if it couldn’t be her, you’d have no one?”
“I did say that. I choose no one.”
“But you love her…”
“Don’t say that,” I said under my breath. “Don’t say those words. I don’t love her. I can’t love her and I won’t love her.”
Gupta raised an eyebrow. “You do realize you have little choice in the matter.”
“I have control over life and death, but not love?”
“Yes.”
“I made a mistake. I see that now.”
“Why are you doing this?” he demanded.
Because I’d already lived this. Under a shadow, I’d known a cursed existence and emerged into a cursed life.
“I’m cursed,” I said.
Gupta knew that, but I’d never told him the details until now. Over the years, he liked to guess what the curse was. Lack of personality was his favorite guess. When I finished telling him, he stared at the ground.
“I still believe there is a way around this,” he said. He spun a pen in his hand, which meant that he was about to rummage through the archives and find a solution. “But even then, what does it matter? You already love her.”
“That’s not true,” I said, even as something sparked and tugged within me.
“If you can’t see it now, then perhaps that is the true curse.”
He turned, leaving me standing in the middle of the palace. I couldn’t move from this spot. Moving meant that I had to put an end to something I liked far too much. Night came and went, and still I could not find the will to end what I had known. For the briefest space of time, I knew what the Tapestry had first taunted. A jewel no one else possessed: our time together. A door within reach: her arms around my neck.
A soul claimed: my own.
When the next dusk fell, I moved. I commanded my feet to move and they did not question me. But I could not command my thoughts to fall still.
Death was not always inevitable. But pain was. And right now, I couldn’t see beyond the shape of that pain opening inside me. It wasn’t that I could not control myself around her. It was that I had no desire to. Beside her, the world seemed impossible with wonder.