“Gauri,” he said softly. Too softly. As if my name were made of glass.
I stepped back and forced a smile. “Any more time with me, and you might truly lose your mind. Maybe we’ll come up with the answer to the riddle faster if we take some time to think on our own,” I said quickly. “I’ll meet you here by nightfall.”
Something in his gaze retreated.
“You’re not going back to the Serpent King’s pool, are you?”
“I haven’t gotten this far into existence on stupidity.”
He nodded and flashed a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Don’t start now.”
I smirked, waved him off and stalked back in the direction of the groves. I had no intention of going to the pool, but I wanted to think alone, far away from where he could distract me. I couldn’t shake the sound of my name on his lips. It slinked through my thoughts, spreading roots and thorns. Even though all he said was my name, a question had gathered form in his voice. As if… as if he was asking whether I would let him worry about me, and let him rest his fingers at the nape of my neck, and let him memorize my unimportant secrets that would never bring kingdoms to their knees but still pinned my soul in place. Away from him, I knew the right answer:
No.
Our situation was strange. We’d been thrown together in a competition for something we both desperately wanted. Needed. If we didn’t win, what home would have us? I said I wanted to return to Bharata, but the Bharata I wanted—one with Nalini safe and my freedom secured—didn’t exist without a victory. There was no future without victory. If we didn’t win, we would be like ghosts: our forms held together by the sheer force of our unfulfilled wants, with nothing left of our lives but what had been and what could never be. In the face of that fear, maybe the mind couldn’t help but scrape together feelings toward the only person we had a connection to. That was all it was. A consequence of survival.
I repeated this to myself as I marched toward the grove of magical trees. Every time I heard a sound behind me, I would turn, expecting Vikram. After the first couple of times, I realized I wasn’t expecting him. I was looking for him. I shook my head and concentrated on the riddle.
To one it is invisible
Yet be careful if you lose much
To some it is everything
A history to clutch
Though it is life, it cannot buy time
Speak wrong, and I will take it as mine
My first guess was memory. But memory wasn’t life. And my second thought was breath. But breath has nothing to do with history. I was so deep in my thoughts, turning the riddle over and pushing out the memory of Vikram’s smile, that I almost didn’t see the three people standing before me:
The Nameless.
24
A PLANTED HEART
GAURI
“You should not be here,” they said.
I dug my heels into the ground. “Why not? Lord Kubera has not forbidden the contestants from entering this part of Alaka.”
“We are honoring our lost sister,” said the first, turning her gaze on me. She may have looked young—lovely, even—but her gaze held that flat heaviness of someone whose spirit was ancient. As one, the Nameless reached for the blue ribbons around their throats. Maya’s necklace pressed against my skin. I tried to honor her, to live up to the stories she told me. But I’d failed.
“I’m not preventing you from honoring her. I was just walking around the groves.”
“This grove is for her. Because of her. Because of us. Choose another.”
I looked behind them to the bone white trees. When we walked past the grove earlier, I had dug my nails into my palm, fighting the urge to wander through this haunted grove. Something about it called to me. But what? No leaves sprouted from their ivory branches and no fruit graced their boughs. No earth covered the small grove; it was as if someone had shoved slivers of bone into ashes and called them trees, and the bones had forgotten how to be anything else.
“Queen Tara never liked visitors to her orchards anyway.”
“Queen Tara?” I repeated incredulously. I knew that name. She was the missing queen of thevanaras,the one who had planted demon fruit and been cursed as a result.
“This is her grove.”
