My eyes were closed, but I opened them when Tuntuni exhaled. “She’s okay!”
Unfortunately, what I saw made me scream again. Ma was alive, yes, but she wasn’t exactly safe. When Ma cut herself free, she fell in the direction of Demon Land. And on that awful shore was a very familiar figure.
“Ai-Ma!” Neel shouted.
“Ma!” I yelled at the same time.
The drooling old crone held my mother in the palm of her ginormous, warty hand. Ma was looking right at her, her hands in a “namaskar.” I couldn’t hear what Ma was saying, but she seemed to be pleading for her life.
“Bogli hungwy!” the demon brat wailed from the border of Maya Pahar, but we all ignored him. The border had shifted even farther away from us now, and the baby demon didn’t seem to know how to get to us.
I focused on what was going on in Demon Land. I aimed my bow and arrow, not caring that it was Neel’s grandma I was aiming at.
“Let her go, Ai-Ma!” My voice shook with fury. I didn’t come this far to see my mother get eaten.
“Kiran, please!” Neel begged.
But I didn’t let him distract me from my target. My arrow was pointed right at the old rakkhoshi’s chest. “Put her down!”
And that’s when Ai-Ma shocked the heck out of all of us. She reached her knobbly hand in Ma’s direction, and, very gently, patted her on the head.
“Ai-Ma isn’t so old she can’t recognize a girl from a boy, or a prince from a pup,” the crone cackled. As she guffawed, her hairy cheeks puffed out in pleasure. “You have a very brave—and yummy-smelling—daughter,” she told Ma, her rough voice carrying over the distance.
Ai-Ma’s lips were covered with drool and her tongue waggled a little, but she walked straight toward the shore of the Ruby Red Sea. No sign of even nibbling a little on her captive. The arm bearing my mother reached out farther and farther from the old rakkhoshi’s shoulder, until, like some extendable fire hose, it reached our peacock barge.
“I give you back to your little coconut beanpole.” Ai-Ma—or rather, Ai-Ma’s extended hand—gently deposited Ma in the barge. “Your nub-nub was good company to old Ai-Ma, and old Ai-Ma always remembers a favor.”
Before it retracted, Ai-Ma’s warty hand chucked me under the chin. I know she was trying to be gentle, but she made my teeth seriously rattle.
“Be good, sweet beetle-dung toadstools,” she cooed from the distant shore.
I threw down my bow and arrow in the bottom of the barge and held my mother tight.
“Thank you, Ai-Ma, thank you!” I yelled as Neel and Baba pushed the barge farther and farther away from the shore of both Demon Land and Maya Pahar.
“Head straight across the sea and you will make it home!” Ai-Ma waved to us, a three-toothed grin on her face. “I make it a rule not to eat mommies while their boo-boos watch,” she called as we sailed. “It’s bad for my digestion!”
*
“What a nice grandmother you have, Prince Neelkamal.” Ma beamed. We’d been sailing for a while into the Ruby Red Sea, and everything seemed relatively calm.
Baba had stopped hugging Ma, and now was just wiping tears away and thanking Neel. “Yes, a very nice … erm … woman.” Ma elbowed him, making him cough. “Most charming.”
I shook my head and smiled as I looked out over the calm, dark waters. People—even demon people—really surprised you sometimes.
“How is my brother?” Ma asked Neel. “And my lovely niece, how is she keeping up with her stable-hand duties?”
“Wait, Neel knows your brother?”
“The prince didn’t tell you, darling?” Baba was rowing us into the dark night, with Tuni perched comfortably on his shoulder. “We were knowing something unexpected might happen around your twelfth birthday, so we took some precautions.”
Ma patted my arm. “It was your uncle Rahul, the stable master, who suggested that the Princes Lalkamal and Neelkamal might be dispatched to help you.”
“Wait,” I said, “let me get this straight. Lal and Neel’s stable master is your brother?”
My mother nodded.
Neel had just finished explaining the Queen’s unfortunate decision to eat Lal and Mati, and their subsequent transformation into inanimate objects.
I pointed at the humming silver object in Neel’s sling. “So that bowling ball is my cousin?” No wonder Mati felt so familiar to me.
“Oh, yes,” Baba agreed. “But as you know, where we come from, even the most distant cousin is called a sister.”
My cousin Mati, I thought. My sister Mati. After having had so little family for so long—and then recently discovering some less-than-desirable family members—it was nice to know I had some normal relatives. If you count someone who was trapped inside a silver bowling ball—and occassionally turned into a solar phenomenon—normal.
“I can’t believe we still don’t know how to get them b-a-ck.” Neel kind of sputtered that last word, because just then, the boat lurched to the right.
“Oh, I think I have an idea,” I said. “The golden branch in the poem must mean …” I stopped mid-thought, because the boat swayed again.
“What was that?” Ma looked over the edge. “The water seems so calm.”
“Oh, nothing,” said Tuni drowsily. “We’re almost—”
But he couldn’t finish his sentence because the next lurch of the boat sent him flying off Baba’s shoulder and onto the floor of the barge. We all collapsed to the left.
“I’m getting a bad feeling about this …” I drew an arrow from my quiver.
But before I had a chance to shoot it I was coughing up water from a wave that rushed over the entire boat. We were knee-deep and the boat was still tossing on the newly rough seas.
“Bail! Bail!” Neel yelled, his hair streaming into his face. We all grabbed whatever we could to chuck water overboard, but all of our hard work was meaningless when the next big wave swept over the peacock barge in a few minutes.
“Are we all okay?” Neel shouted. I took a glance around. Except for being drenched, and the terrified expressions, we all seemed to be in one piece.
But the respite was half as long as the last time. I’d only just scooped a couple quiverfuls of water out of the boat when another wave hit.
“Gaak!” Tuni went overboard, but Baba grabbed a feathery wing and yanked him back.
“I’m afraid this doesn’t seem like an altogether natural storm,” Ma ventured, ever grammatical, even in a crisis.
There was a weird sucking sound coming from somewhere. A hole in the boat? I looked around at our soggy barge, but couldn’t find one.
“What makes you say that?” I shouted over the now rushing winds.
Wordlessly, she pointed at the sea. I felt my heart drop.
“Neel!” I yelled. He was still bailing water from the back of the boat with my boot. “I think you’d better see this!”
All around our boat rose a wall of spinning water, inclined like the steep seats at an auditorium. Only, this was theater in the round, and we were the performers.
“We’re in the middle of a whirlpool!”
The sucking sound was the water below us getting pulled downward. To make matters worse, on the top edges of the giant water tornado were what looked like gigantic rakkhosh fangs.