***
I pulled myself out of the memory. My breathing was ragged. I couldn’t push out the feeling that the memory left. Something so whole that my body craved and curled around it. I thought my soul was leaning toward the stone, wishing desperately to cling to a truth, a beacon that could guide me back to myself. That raw tenderness. Thatkissthat saidgoodbye, come back,andI love youall at once. This memory showed me hope. And that was something I could chase to the ends of the earth.
“We need to get to the Chakara Forest,” I said, turning to Kamala.
She had not moved once since I sank into that memory. She had not laughed, nor gnashed her awful teeth, claggy with blood.
“You changed,” she said slowly.
“What?”
Kamala whinnied. “You looked different. Shade-play, shadow-play against my eyes. Trust me, false queen”—she paused—“maybequeen, I know shadows.”
“What did I look like?”
“Like ink-spills and umbra, cloudless nights and winter mornings. Lovely, lovely,” said Kamala in her singsong voice. “But you wore no crown of blackbuck horns and something swirled across your skin. I almost tried to taste it, but I did not want to get swatted by a maybe-deity. Maybe-deity! Maybe-deity! Oh, what a song.”
I glanced at my arm, ignoring Kamala as she pranced about in a circle, tossing her head and singingmaybe-deityso loudly it might summon thunder. There was nothing on me but the crust of sea-salt and dried ash. I dusted it off. Kamala’s words put flesh on the bones of my hope. Still, that didn’t give me as much comfort as I’d like. I was asking a flesh-eating demon for comfort.
“You wish to go to the Chakara Forest?” asked Kamala when she was done dancing. Pearly sweat left a sheen on her coat.
“Yes. But there’s something I must do first.”
My hand closed around my mother’s necklace and I tried to swallow down all those past hurts that had hardened into iron knots.
“I need to bury this in the place where its last owner lived.”
Even through my grief of losing Gauri, Airavata’s words rang true. To enter the Otherworld and save Amar, I had to release the ghosts of my past. Kamala jutted her nose against my neck and snuffled the necklace before loudly snorting.
“That necklace lived in a kingdom that smelled of stone. It is kinder tosadhusandsadhvisthan its own people and its turrets are fat with mango blossoms. It is on the way to the Chakara Forest.”
My heart clenched. Somehow, I felt like Gauri had given me her blessing.
“Bharata?” I guessed.
“I suppose that is the name it goes by now. Cities shed names like maidens their tears. Does its Raja look like a toad in a golden jacket?”
Skanda had never been… athletic.
“Perhaps,” I said, then thought for a moment. “Probably.”
“Then it is so. It is Bharata.”
“We have to go through it?”
“It is the only way.”
“Then perhaps the stars are on our side.” I hauled myself back onto her saddle and we took off through the jungle.
The moon turned motes of pollen into drowsy glimmers. I watched them drift past me, snatching them out of the air. They looked like the wishes from Naraka’s glass garden. I closed my eyes, letting myself sink into the quiet of it all. In the silence, I wished for all the things I had lost—love, lives, memories.Myself. And I wept for those things as I wept for the dead. And then like the dead, I released them and hoped with all that was left of me that I could give them new life.
I faced the tree-blurred horizon. Somewhere behind that tangle was Bharata. The same Bharata I had abandoned to warfare. Or was it? Guilt slid up my spine.
I would soon find out.
21
THE WARRIOR OF BHARATA
