27
A TANGLE OF THREAD
Nritti flicked her wrist and this time I fell to the ground, my knees slamming into the packed earth. Blood thrummed in my ears. Pain radiated through my body. I looked at Amar, sprawled across the floor, his wrist flung out. The bracelet gleamed pale as moonstone against his skin. His eyes were fixed on the fathomless ceiling above us. He may have been immortal, but Nritti’s control had rendered him into a mere echo of himself. He was worse than dead.
Nritti’s shadow fell across the floor. She was coming for me. I began to crawl toward Amar, ready to fold him to me in my last moments, but I stopped. That was what she wanted. What sheexpected. But that was where she was wrong. She had mistaken my strength for weakness. I loved Amar. I loved him enough that it catapulted my fear into frenzy, my hurt into hope.
I didn’t run to him because I had loved and lost.
I ran from him because I loved him. And I would not lose him.
Nritti sent a sickening wave of magic my way. For a moment, I faltered. My legs nearly crumpled beneath me. Tongues of flame lit up the floor, turning everything around me ghastly and shadowed. But I didn’t stop. I didn’t turn. My gaze was fixed on the obsidian mirror glittering at one end of the room. In the portal’s reflection, Naraka’s stone halls twinkled.
My feet stamped into the ground, closer and closer. Heat seared my lungs. The moments between escaping Nritti and entering Naraka sprang out like thorns, each one pricking at me, each one sharper than the next, each one a knot of pain. Until—finally—my hands touched the mirror’s cool surface. My singed fingers skimmed something smooth as glass… and Ipushed.
***
The stolen moment from entering one world to the next raised the hairs on the back of my neck and twisted my insides, but then, I was through. Behind me, the portal shivered, the surface curdling black.
I stood in one of Naraka’s pale halls. Lanterns sprang along the stones. Beside me, a carven niche in the wall held a small statue of a mynah bird. I grabbed it and, with all the strength I had left, pitched it straight into the mirror. The surface crackled, light seaming along the edges.
I didn’t know whether it would keep Nritti away long enough for me to do what needed to be done. But I had to try. Against her, I was powerless. I wasmortal. She thought that was a weakness, but I knew better.
Being mortal meant that I had a thread hidden somewhere in that tapestry. Being mortal meant that I could free myself from the tapestry. It meant that I still had a chance to claim the powers that were once mine, to fight back against Nritti.
I blinked back tears, trying to forget how still Amar’s body looked on the floor. He wasn’t gone. He couldn’t be. I flew down the halls when I saw it—the throne room. A sieve of dust coated the floor. The air settled heavy and neglected around my shoulders. Outside, the sky of Naraka was a lurid yellow and ice spidered and crackled against the ledges.
The moment my feet hit the floor, a familiar tug in my gut wrenched my gaze away from the window. The tapestry. Its pull had not diminished; if anything its strange lull from before had turned into a pulsing, writhing frenzy. It twisted in and out of sight, shapes sinking and remolding the longer I looked at them. In one second, the threads became bleached as bone, bulging out from the surface until it turned into the beveled form of a white elephant who shook his head with sorrow and bent his trunk to collect a thunderstorm.Airavata.
Color burst prismatic into the threads, each piece of silk or worsted crewel sliding into the burnt landscape of a realm I knew so well—Bharata. Again and again, the tapestry changed: a horse with its ribs poking out of its sides, garnet eyes rolling back into its head; a young man clambering onto a throne; Gauri riding in the dark; the sea of cells beneath my feet in Naraka… each individual in its confines shivering, waiting, wondering. I even saw my father in those threads. His brow was creased, his fingers skimming over the mirrored walls of his prison, wondering when he would be released into the next life. And I saw myself. Not as a former queen who had once commanded the tapestry, but as a woman with her back bent in sorrow and age, still wearing the same saffronsadhvirobes, peddling tales to anyone who would listen.
Tears ran freely down my face. The tapestry was taunting me. Every single one of those images was an invitation to fall to my knees and admit that I couldn’t save them. That I couldn’t savemyself. I steeled my heart’s frantic, veering beat.
The tapestry was testing me. It wasn’t prophetic. It could augur nothing from entrails of thread. It was a design. And designs could be altered.
Somewhere in that swirling thicket was my thread.
And I had to untangle it from the black, widening hole of the tapestry. I marched forward, letting the tapestry call to me, sing to me, serenade its secrets and entwine about my ankles. I let it fill me and guide me to myself. I flung out my hands, breathing slowly and deeply, pushing out all the sounds I imagined in the background—of mirrors crackling, and an entrance tearing. My fingers skittered over the tapestry, hovering over threads that I knew weren’t mine… and then I felt it. A pinch in my soul, and something startling me, like a word caught in my throat.
I reached forward, my eyes burning at the sight of the tapestry. Sweat beaded on my skin and my breath fell out in damp heaves. My thread was slick, shining as indigo and oil. But it was caught in something, another thread that was white-hot and iridescent.Nritti.
I braced myself, knowing what would happen the moment my skin touched the threads. I remembered my insides wrenching around Vikram’s thread all those days ago. I remembered the tapestry weighing me and finding me wanting. I remembered his past flickering like a beating heart in my hands. It had been hard then, and that was just one soul. Now, I was plunging myself into two lifetimes.
The two threads seared against my palm. Pain flared behind my eyes and I was falling, my feet slipping against the dusted marble, my whole body tilting around the inferno of the tapestry. I clutched the two threads and my hands burned. I screamed, but never heard myself. The room had lapped up my shrieks.
The skin on my hands peeled back. I was being pried open, each bone lifted from my body to make room for memories—memories stout as trunks, thin as lightning, furred and fanged, solid and slippery. Memories that were mine and Nritti’s. Memories that were starving for recognition. Memories so hungry, theyconsumed.
The threads called, and I answered—
It was too late to turn back now.
28
LOST NAMES
I remembered my lost names. I unfurled them, smoothing their worn creases, inhaling their scent of star-swollen evenings and monsoon dusks. Nritti had lied. I was noyakshiniby the edges of forest glens. I wasmore, so much more. I clasped my lost names to me—
Yamuna. The name barreled around my ankles, brackish and forceful. A river striped with tortoises and water that glowered and snapped. A force that could drown.
