My stomach goes cold. I set the dishes down with more force than I intended and they rattle loudly. “What? But I just finished a job. It’s too soon.”
Iyla narrows her eyes. “Your part takes two seconds. It’s not exactly straining.”
My fingers find the scars at my wrists and trace their contours. Two seconds. If only it were that simple.
“That’s not fair,” I say. I busy myself setting out napkins, pulling glasses from the cupboard—I’m afraid that if I look at her, she’ll see how easily she can hurt me.
Iyla and I have been paired for years now. She does all the reconnaissance for my kills. Gopal has all his girls matched up this way, in neat little couplets—one part spy, one part visha kanya.
Iyla’s job is getting information, and she’s good at it. She could charm the sweet from honey without breaking a sweat. When Gopal gives us an assignment, Iyla does the wooing, the flattering and the seducing. She coaxes information from the mark with small touches, significant glances, compliments; she does it with finesse. And when Gopal has all he needs, I finish the job.
Iyla loves her part. I hate mine.
I finish setting the table and glance up just in time to see Iyla’s gaze skitter away from my bare wrists.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” She’s toying with her bracelets—pressing them together, twisting them around, taking them off and putting them back on again. Under all that gold and silver, her skin is as smooth as river stone.
“It’s fine,” I tell her, because I don’t feel like fighting tonight. “What’s the job?”
Her head snaps up. “You know I can’t tell you that.” It’s another of Gopal’s rules. We aren’t allowed to know any specifics about what the other girls do. Iyla is the only other of Gopal’s girls I’ve even met. We are kept separated so that we can’t be linked to one another if one of us runs into trouble. But it seems so unfair that Iyla always knows all about my tasks, while I know nothing about hers.
I miss the days when we were small and there were no secrets between us.
I try to remember the last time it felt like we were friends instead of adjoining pieces on the Raja’s giant game board. But it’s been a long time. Since before Mani was born. Gopal was away on an assignment for the Raja, and so Gita took us to the Festival of the Beasts—a huge celebration to honor Sundari’s history. Iyla and I were wide-eyed at the riot of color. Men and women with their entire faces painted in bold hues, dancers with brightly dyed skirts and tall headdresses, children twirling umbrellas shaped like stars and moons.
But it was the painted elephants that had us begging Gita for coins.
Their trunks and foreheads were decorated in various designs—delicate pastel vines that sprouted lotus blossoms, geometric shapes in purple and green, wide stripes of orange and pink. And it wasn’t just the paint. The animals were swathed in shimmering silk, golden bands glittered from their tusks, and they wore anklets of silver bells.
It was the most majestic thing I’d ever seen.
We pleaded until Gita relented and dropped a handful of coins in each of our palms, and then we raced to get in line with the masses of children waiting for their chance for an elephant ride.
When it was finally our turn, Iyla and I climbed on the same elephant—a huge beast with painted flames racing up the length of her trunk and exploding on her forehead. She wore a red silk scarf over her head, and her floppy ears donned gold hoops.
“Wow,” Iyla said, sliding her arms around my waist. “Being this high makes me feel so…so…”
“Powerful,” I said.
“Yes,” she breathed against my neck. “Powerful.” The shift in perspective was intoxicating. It was like we could see the secrets of the entire kingdom.
Across the expansive crowd, people waved banners of the Raksaka, but the occasional group had a flag that featured only one of the guardians of Sundari. We watched as a scuffle broke out between two clusters of men, one waving a flag featuring Bagharani, the tiger queen, and the other wielding a banner with the Nagaraja, the Snake King. It started with arguing, but soon the men were shoving each other and throwing punches.
“Why do they even care?” I wondered aloud. What a foolish thing to argue over a preference for a legend. The animals were symbols of a kingdom in balance, not leaders to rally around.
Iyla sighed. “I think some people just want to belong so badly that they pick sides, even if it doesn’t mean anything.”
“So whose side are you on?” I asked her.
She rested her cheek on my shoulder. “Yours,” she said.
But that day seems like a lifetime ago, and now I’m the one she keeps her secrets from instead of the one she tells them to.