“I’ll forgive you, sister. Embrace me as you once did. Let us start anew.”
I moved to her, the grass blades cutting into my feet. Blood beaded on my skin. I looked down, frowning. Grass shouldn’t cut.
“Come to me, Gauri,” said Nalini. Her voice bordered on desperation. “Don’t I deserve an apology and embrace after what you did to me?”
“What did I do to you?”
Nalini said nothing. But the skin on her arms flickered from her usual lacquered brown to an unusual oily black. I stepped back.
“What did I do to you?” I asked loudly.
The question yielded the answer:
I had put her in prison. She was supposed to be lying somewhere in a cell in Bharata.
“Why aren’t you in prison?”
She tilted her head. Cold spread in my chest. The gesture was wrong. Inhuman. I was forgetting something. I stared at my hands: They were dirty. Bloodstained. I shouldn’t be dressed in a man’ssherwani.Slowly, I lifted my hand to my eye, the movement guided by some knowledge that glinted at the edge of my thoughts. Nalini hissed, her jaw snapped open in a gruesome grin.
And then I saw her for what she was:
A monster of smoke and teeth. It clicked its teeth. Wet talons reached for me. I stumbled back, breaking the wall of mist. Thisthinghad used my best friend’s voice.
“Gauri?” it called sweetly, its belly scraping along the ground as it started crawling.
I picked up my knife, flinging it straight at one of its arms and pinning it to the ground. It let out a shrill and icy scream. A small boulder nudged my foot. I lifted it, not looking at the thing as I heaved it over my head and smashed it into the creature’s body. The screaming stopped. I covered my eye, plucked my dagger from the inky arm and started running.
The cave at the end of the Grotto shone with light. I ran. I ran past a vision of Maya sprawled out with her throat cut. I dodged a vision of Mother Dhina rocking back and forth, blood running down her wrists. Vikram passed me. I chased his lean shadow, and the ground disappeared beneath me. My memories loomed dark and lurid until a crease of light caught my eye.The cave.I was nearly there. As the mist sulked and spun, a dark blot scuttled toward me on ragged wrists and knees. Thevetala.His hand wrapped around my foot.
“The boy thing is dead,” he huffed. “Pick me up.”
12
THREADBARE HEART
VIKRAM
As a rule, Vikram ran only when he was furious. As it so happened, he was almost always furious. Every day he treaded the threadbare line between livid and lucent. There was horror in knowing that he was only ever meant to be a puppet king. And there was hope in knowing that he was capable of so much more. When he ran, those sticky intangibles—title, birth, expectations and resentments—couldn’t cling to him.
He was simply moving too fast.
Thevetalacackled, roping bony arms around his neck.
“Faster, donkey! Faster!” he screeched.
Vikram knew what the Grotto would show, which memories it would pluck from his mind and spin into spiteful sylphs. It took years of practiced charm to erase the boy that the Ujijain Empire grudgingly accepted. Only his father remembered the day he was found. No one remembered the wilting blue flowers in his hand, or the way he had clung to the brittle, colorless blossoms until they crumbled to dust. No one chose to see. It was the way of royalty.
He was nearly at the cave, dry winds burning in his lungs, when he heard it:
“Beta?”
I knew you would come for me.
Thevetalacackled and whispered in his ear: “Protect the head, protect the head.”
Vikram clapped one hand over his eye, but a tug in his heart stalled his feet. He had steeled his heart against seeing her. Buthearingher? He hadn’t trained his heart against the longing to curl around the sound of her voice. Whenever his mother spoke or sang, the sky brightened. Even the stars would drift a little closer to catch the silver of her voice.
“My child, have you forgotten me? I waited a long time for you to come back,” said his mother. “You wanted to surprise me. Remember?”
