When I stepped through the final gate of trees, there she was. Burning like a star. She softened and then frowned. One look and I knew how impossible it was to live without her. I could exist without question. But live? Think, dream, create?
All those things I had learned in her presence. For a crazed moment, I wondered whether someone could survive on the threshold of love, like leaning over the lip of a cliff. Or would the lure of the fall always prove too great? Maybe I would risk it. For her. But then she stormed toward me and her next words pronounced me cursed:
“I love you.”
Time stammered. Or I stammered. It didn’t seem to matter because she just continued talking:
“I want to be with you because I love you. Not because I need you. I don’t,” she said, gesturing with her arms at the number of dream wells she had set up and the dream fruit that had gone to waste on the trees. “You inspired this, but I did it on my own. And I know I could do more at your side, but that’s not the reason I choose you—”
“Wait,” I said. I felt like I was choking on the word.
“And yet what I can’t understand,” she continued, “is why you insist on a bond with no love. I think you love me too.”
“I don’t.”
She raised an eyebrow. No lip biting. No harsh intake of breath. Nothing but a raised eyebrow.
“Yes, you do,” she said calmly.
“Why is everyone saying that?”
“And I’ve also figured out why you refuse to say it aloud,” she said. “I know who you are.”
“So you’ve guessed what that curse is, have you?” I asked, the words coming out crueler than I expected.
“Not fully. Tell me.”
“If I love you, you will leave me. And it will cause me great pain. That is the curse.”
She stared at me and then she disappeared on the spot. I stood there, stunned for a couple of moments. And then I heard her voice behind me:
“There. Curse fulfilled. You loved me. I left. I will imagine in my infinite vanity that it caused you pain.”
“You’re not taking this seriously.”
“Why should I?” she retorted. “How many people suffer a cursed life simply because they didn’t know how to listen to what the curse meant? Her curse was nothing more than the risk we take to live each day. All I hear is your cowardice.”
“I am not—”
“You’re scared,” she said. “I am too. But I would rather live in fear than live without love.”
“I’m sorry I’m doing this to you…”
“You are not doing anything to me. You are doing this only to yourself. If this is what you choose, then so be it.”
For the first time, her resolve shook. She would not meet my gaze. She reached into her hair, tugging on the little sparrow fashioned of stars.
“Fear is like a curse, Dharma Raja. Like a curse, it lays down lines where none should exist. It squeezes your thoughts into a pattern until you become convinced that there is no other way to see. But I choose differently. I wish I could say the same for you.”
Once more, she left. But this time, she did not return.
9
NIGHT
When he didn’t show up the first night, I wasn’t sure where I should go. Nritti would always welcome me, but I didn’t want to intrude on her and Vanaj with my pathetic tale of rejection. I needed someone with experience, which was how I found myself in the city of Nagaloka.
Down here, the kingdom of the nagas was cold and miraculous. Glossy seaweed wrapped around the turrets, sea roses bloomed down paths of pearl and salt stones. Everything glowed from the small drifting silver thuribles that lit up the city with moonlight. Beautiful naginis showed off their new gems or sharpened fangs and twice I heard their seductive singing through a flurry of waves. It was the thick of night, and her kingdom was nearly empty. Everyone let me pass without question. I walked through the palace until I found Uloopi at the end of an emerald hall. Her face looked a little pinched from the recent flurry of stress, but she grinned the second she saw me.
“Dream fruit?” she asked.
“Hello to you too.”
“What brings you here?”
“Either delusions of love or the confusions of securing it.”
“You know I hate seeing you sad, but I do love a good drama.”
Uloopi and I walked—well, I walked, she glided—to a courtyard strung with seashells. Night was different under water. The waves took on an eerie texture. Almost feathered.
At Uloopi’s prodding, I told her about the Dharma Raja. About the visits where he had promised me a throne, but not his heart. I told her about how each visit was a lesson in wonder, why I had abandoned the dream fruit in search of something more.
“I forgot how little you know,” she said, reaching for my hand. “And I do not mean that in terms of your intellect, my friend. I think I know why your Dharma Raja refuses to utter those words…”
“He is not mine.”
Uloopi raised one bronze shoulder. “He wants to be. And you want him to be. Therefore I am calling it as I see fit.”
“But—”
“Do you want to know or not?”
I nodded.
And she told me the rest of the tale of the Shadow Wife and the cursed boy.
*
When he visited me, I was ready. I was armed with knowledge far greater than his past. Knowledge was powerful, but it was made powerful by the person who held it and spoke it. Knowledge was little more than footsteps pressed into the earth and called a “line” so repeatedly that the act of telling made it true. But I knew better. Perspective propped up the world on stilts of belief. I knew that better than most. And now I had to convince the Dharma Raja.
When I finally saw him, something in me unfastened. Here was someone who would have given me a kingdom and a throne without the expectation of my heart or my bed in return. Here was someone who saw me as no one ever had. When he looked at me, he didn’t see night but the potential it brought: dreams and songs not yet sung, potential and creation.
Uloopi’s and Nritti’s words surrounded my heart and I spoke nothing but truths. I wasn’t afraid of being scared. Life was too long for that. But the more I spoke, the more he curled in on himself. Over and over, I laid my heart bare.
Over and over, it crumpled.
*
A day and a dusk. A day and a dusk. A day and a dusk.
I was losing track of it all. I was sitting in the middle of my garden of glass when the trees rustled. Hope plucked at my bones, playing me like an instrument until I thought my whole body was singing. But when I looked up, it was not the Dharma Raja standing at the edge of the horizon, but Nritti.
“Have you no smile for me, sister?” she asked, beaming.
But one look at my face told her everything. She ran to me then, her arms soft around my shaking shoulders.
“What do I do?”