I raised my chin, determined to shove past them all until a small voice caught my attention. Gauri ran to me, brown curls flying as she threw her arms around my legs. I curved around her, burying my face in her sweet-smelling hair and gripping her shoulders tightly, as though they were the only things anchoring me to the spot.
“Are you leaving me?” she asked.
I knelt beside her, searching her face, memorizing the rosiness of her cheeks and her dimpled smile. There was no way I could lie to her. I wanted to tell her that I had no choice and that she would have to find another person to tell her stories and spin her nightmares back into dreams. But before I could wrangle out an explanation, one of the wives rushed past me, pushing me backward.
I looked up to see Mother Dhina and instinctively clutched Gauri closer.
“Don’t poison this girl with your bad fortune,” she hissed, pulling Gauri away.
Gauri protested but Mother Dhina’s grip was relentless. I rose from the floor slowly. I wanted stillness, poise. I wouldn’t show Gauri hysteria or rage. Mother Dhina’s gaze met mine.
Around me, the line of women converged like a warped mirror. Here was my future—a cage fit for breeding bitterness and spite. I stumbled backward, edging along the walls as if I could avoid that fate through sheer force of will. The voices of the wives and my half-sisters billowed around me, but I couldn’t separate their words. They seemed to speak as one.
“Wherever you go, you’ll only bring death with you. Take your pestilence elsewhere,” spat Mother Dhina.
The marble beneath me was cold and dry, but my feet slipped as if I stood in water. A ringing sound filled my ears and I sprinted out of the halls. Rage vibrated from my heels to my head as I swung open my bedroom door and sank to the floor.
Where my room once glowed rosy in the sunset, now the glint of the walls shone scarlet and flame-like, poised to swallow me. Bharata wanted to be rid of me, just as much as I wanted to be rid of it. But not like this. Not like some parcel of land bartered between countries. That wasn’t freedom.
I thought of Gauri’s face when I had knelt beside her. I thought about the words that I would have said—I had no choice but to leave. Maybe only half of that was true. I did have to leave, but the manner in which I left could be a choice that was entirely my own. I stared out the window, watching the infinite sky stretch before me. If they didn’t give me a choice, then I would make my own.
I would escape.
4
THE INTRUDER
Night coaxed out the stars, my jailers. Above me, the moon burned dull silver. In the dark sky, it looked flat enough to pry and use as a mirror. I had spent the last hour staring out the window, watching the sentinels patrol the vast walls that enclosed everything I had ever seen, touched and known for the past seventeen years. After hours of staring, I had found a spot left unguarded, a hole in the palace’s security. All I had to do was reach it and then… freedom.
But until I could escape, other tasks clamored for my attention. I faced my room. It was the smallest of the chambers in the harem, shunted to the end of a hall that had no other occupants. They moved me here when I was ten. Mother Shastri told me that it was punishment after a swarm of bees chased my half-brother Yudhistira into a pool of water. He had teased me that day and had kicked over a drawing that I had labored over. I had glared at him, wishing that he would go away. That’s when I learned that sometimes my wishes had a strange way of coming true. Over the years I told myself that it was all mere coincidence, but now I hoped that whatever saved me back then from Yudhistira’s bullying would save me from theswayamvara.Stop that, I scolded myself. Hope and wishing wouldn’t save me.
A veil of cold purpose fell over me. Enough meetings in the sanctum had taught me the layout of the city, the demographics of its inhabitants. I could do this. I just had to move fast. I opened up my chest of clothes and began separating the gaudy fabrics from the practical, the nonessential from the necessary. I was halfway through when I heard a voice at the door. Shoving the two heaps of clothes behind a screen, I jumped to my feet.
“Mayadidi?” called the voice. Immediately, my heart sank. Gauri. I would never see Gauri again. “It’s time for my story!”
In spite of myself, I smiled and opened the door for her. She glowed against the dark of the hallways, and it took every last wisp of strength not to hold her to me and weep into her hair. Tomorrow loomed in my mind. I could feel the heft of it like a solid weight against my fingers.
“Story!” she said, shaking my arm in a mock-pleading voice.
“What story do you want?”
It was a tradition between us. The moment evening slipped into night, Gauri would sneak into my room and I would recite fairytales to her—embellishing the beautiful, glossing over the grotesque. Gauri clambered onto my bed, tugging the blankets around her. I sat by her side.
“Tell me about the other realms,” said Gauri wistfully. “I’m going to live there when I grow up.”
“Which one?”
Gauri frowned. “How many are there?”
As far as I knew, there was only one and it had nothing in it but scheming courtiers, lying wives and gilded menageries. But I wasn’t going to tell Gauri that. In all the tomes and folklores I had read from the archives, there was no limit to the worlds around us. Somewhere unseen were demonic realms filled with laughingasurasand blackened suns. There were austere kingdoms on the peaks of mountains where phoenixes serenaded the moon and the halls of the gods glinted with lightning. And there was our own, human world, mortal, with only the comfort of stories to keep away the chill of death.
“There’s thousands, but mainly three. Think of it like cities within kingdoms,” I said when I saw her brows scrunch up. “There’s our world, which has you, and is therefore the best one.” Gauri grinned. “Then there’s the Otherworld, with its Night Bazaar and strange but beautiful beings. And then,” I dropped my voice to a whisper, “there’s the Netherworld, which holds Naraka, the realm of the dead.”
Gauri shivered. “What’s there?”
“Demons,” I said, raising my arms like a giant bat.
Her eyes widened and she curled closer to me. “Tell me about the Night Bazaar.”
