“Why—”
“I don’t know anything!” I shouted.
The horse considered me for a moment.
“What do you know?” I asked, sarcasm coloring my voice.
“I know emptiness,” said the horse. “I know the taste of blood against my teeth. I know what it is to fill your belly with iron. I know hunger. I know pain. I know memories that won’t stay. I know the ghost of life and the perfume of souls.”
Memories that won’t stay. I almost laughed. Perhaps this horse and I had plenty in common.
“I need to get to the Otherworld. I need to get back to Naraka. He needs me.”
“Who?”
“Am—” I stopped and swallowed his name. I wouldn’t say it again until I saw The Dharma Raja.
“Handsome, handsome. Even I would die for him,” said the horse, smacking her lips. “I’ve seen him so many times. Times, times, times. Oh, and he is cruel. Oh, and his horns are wicked, piercing things; they like to slice through stars and falling birds. Does he taste like bone and kiss like—”
“Enough,” I hissed. “Or I’ll kill you where you stand.”
“With what? Your soft words? Your young hands?”
But the horse wouldn’t laugh and when she spoke, she looked up to the sky, waiting for a thunderclap, some signal that she was wrong.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” I asked.
“I believe in nothing,” said the horse. A touch of her mania was gone.
“If I knew anything before I became this, I have since forgotten. I have forgotten, even, what it is like to speak to another.”
The horse looked once more to the sky, and this time I did the same. Maybe it was the lights from all the palatial buildings of Bharata, but whatever remained of night had left the sky so thick with stars that they looked more like dollops of cream on a black platter.
Once, I would’ve hurled curses at the stars.
But the longer I looked, the less I hated them. The stars, filled with cold light and secrets, held no emotion in their fixed language of fate. Emotion belonged to life, a thing the stars could never experience. I, not the starlight, shaped my decisions. And it was me, not the evening sky, who shouldered the responsibility for decisions gone wrong. My horoscope had already come to pass, leaving nothing before me but a future ripe with the unknown. The stars had already told me everything they knew. And even though it left me untethered from any cosmic map I had once known… I felt freed.
Once, I had shaped the fates of others, even though I couldn’t remember how. I didn’t even know if I could ever do it again. I didn’t know whether the life that I had left behind was something forever out of reach, a relic of a former reincarnation, or something that was mine to claim. But I had no one to tell me otherwise. And I wouldn’t cast away the possibility that maybe it could be reclaimed. I wouldn’t allow myself to belesser. To fall into the lulls of Nritti’s whispers that I was nothing and no one.
“What exactly are you?” I asked the horse.
“I am a shadow. I am apishacha.”
I shuddered. I knew that name from the folktales. A flesh-eating demon. A haunt of cremation grounds.
“But you know where the Dharma Raja goes?”
“Oh yes, maybe-queen-maybe-liar. I know. I know. I smell him.”
“I need to get to the Otherworld, where the Night Bazaar is,” I said, thinking of the bright orchard where he had led me. The nexus between the human world and Naraka. It may be the only place where I could find him and set things right.
The horse laughed. “And you expect me to take you?”
“What can I give you? What do you want?”
The horse’s eyes narrowed. “I’d like to take a bite out of you. Maybe two, if you’d let me.”
Cold frissons flared along my spine. “But I’m the Rani of Naraka. You wouldn’t want to do that.”
