PART TWO
A GAME
15
THE TASTE OF BREAD
AASHA
The blue star at her throat burned.
“What’s wrong?” asked one of her sisters.
“Nothing,” said Aasha, covering the star with her hand.
“You’re hungry,” said another. “You need your strength, my dear. If you don’t drink down some desire…”
Aasha sighed, shutting out her sister’s words. She knew already what would happen. She’d heard the threat her whole life. Without devouring desires, novishakanyawould be able to fend off the poison in her veins. She’d die. She should eat. Shewouldeat. But in the meantime, she dreamed of what it would be like to eat somethingotherthan desire.
When they had set up their tent yesterday, she could smell the feast from the palace of Alaka. All roasted vegetables and golden bread, crackled rice and glistening sweets. Butvishakanyascould not digest such things. Aasha had nearly tripped on her silks because she couldn’t tear her eyes from the wispy spirals of the cooking fires. Her mouth watered. She knew the words “spice,” “sugar,” “salt” and “sour.” But they were little more than phantom words. She had no experience to bring them to life.
“We are the entertainment after all,” continued her sister, “so—”
“Is that all we are? Just entertainment?” asked Aasha.
“Technically anyone in Alaka during the Tournament of Wishes is a contestant, but it’s not like the human players who get rules and trials.”
“So we could win a wish?”
Her sister laughed. “What would you want with a wish? You came to us so young that hardship never had the chance to look your way. There aren’t enough wishes in the world to make you any luckier, Aasha.”
Aasha twisted her silk scarf into a knot. She didn’t want luck. She wanted something she had never been given, not since the day the sisters had bought her from her birth family at four years old. Thevishakanyassaid they had rescued her. They took her home, opened their veins and poured their bitter blood past her lips until a blue star bloomed on her throat and magic coursed through her. They had taught her their trade: of dancing and music, poetry and philosophy, singing and seduction.
They called their powers—to slay with a touch and feed off desires—the Blessing.
When she was younger, Aasha loved the story of how her sisters inherited the Blessing. They said a warrior queen was called into the fray of battle, but didn’t want to leave her sisters defenseless. So the goddess gave the sisters some of her own blood, and their touch grew venomous and deadly. Every hundred years, the goddess would decide if they were worthy enough to keep the Blessing. For the past three hundred years, they had been worthy.
Most of the sisters joined thevishakanyaharem after losing or leaving a husband, running away from cruel families or simply stumbling into the Otherworld and seeking employment and freedom. Aasha was the only one who had never lived outside the harem. She was the only one who never made the choice between the taste of bread and the taste of desire.
The first time she was sent to the bedchamber of a crooked human prince, her sisters had told her of the man’s misdeeds. They told her how he had found a woman of the Otherworld and seduced her only to abandon her when she quickened with child. They told her how he defiled the sacred spaces of the rivers and how all his people wished him dead. They told her how he deserved it.
Not one of her sisters mentioned what she deserved.
The taunt of that unlived human life started as a seedling of curiosity. It grew in the dark of her thoughts, gaining shape and strength when she wasn’t looking—a home somewhere with a thatched roof and no silk in sight, an orchard where the trees groaned with fruit, an expanse of skin free of a blue star. Now, it ate up the space around her heart. A living nightmare that snapped her joy. What was that life she had been denied? Maybe it would have been short, but at least it would be hers. But no one cared that she desperately wanted to touch someone and feel their pulse rising to her fingertips and not their life withering at her touch. And no one noticed when she returned home from that first mission, sick and shivering, the human king’s sticky desires glommed to her skin. Her sisters called that first mission a mark of freedom.
In the end, no one cared that her freedom didn’t look like the freedom of her sisters.
16
THE GATE OF SECRET TRUTHS
GAURI
Even from a distance, the red gate looked wrong. It was dull, with a jagged texture, like uneven chips of garnet that didn’t reflect the light but guzzled it greedily. When we stood before it, I realized what crafted the strange gates of Alaka.
Not gems, the way folklore would have a child believe…
Tongues.
