Gupta winced. “Noted.”
“Second. There’s something I want to give her.”
Gupta clasped his hands to his chin and made a strangled cooing sound. “Is it yourheart?”
Cold prickled down my spine. And I heard the Shadow Wife’s taunts echoing in my thoughts:You should have learned from the beginning that when someone leaves, it is because nothing was valuable enough to make them stay. You were not enough. And with this curse, I bind your heart.
“Better than a heart,” I said tightly.
Before I left, she had asked for a garden unlike any in all the realms. She would have it.
I wandered through the room where I kept my small creations. On a shelf beside some discarded thoughts, a miniature glass garden caught the light. I had made it on the day I retrieved the soul of a celibate gardener. I had to decide whether he should be reborn as a vivid, but short-lived rose, always pressed to the bosom of the queen he had chastely loved. Or if I should make him into a king, someone who would marry the queen he had loved when she too was reincarnated into a new form. There was something about the garden that reminded me of Night. The way hope grew in every crystal blade, unsure of what it would be next. This would be my starting point. But I could make the garden larger. Grander. Something filledwith translucence and light, crystal roses and quartz lilies, emerald ivy and moonstone jasmine vines. Things that were themselves even as they took on the reflection of the world around them.
Like her.
When I was nearly finished, Gupta called out to me. And I knew from his face what it meant:
Dusk was about to fall.
“Do you have your gift?”
“Yes.”
“What about yoursherwanijacket?”
“What about it?”
He looked appalled. “That’s the same one you were wearing this morning.”
“It will be fine.”
“Iwould notice if someone courtingmewas wearing the same jacket.”
“Hence, why no one is courting you.”
The grove where she danced stood next to the Chakara Forest, where the human and magical world had somehow woven together. Here, small gray birds fed off the moonlight and chirped remnants of children’s dreams. It was a popular haunt of gentlerakshas,those demons who preferred to disguise themselves as boulders for years upon years rather than participate in the blood sport of their brethren. And it was here where Night’s orchard of dream fruit sprouted cold fruit and silver limbs. The more I thought about seeing her, the more something within me gathered into a tight knot.
In the clearing where I had first seen her, I let go of that clamoring sensation in my chest and opened my palms. Tiny glass seedlingsdrifted and swirled into the ground. Translucent roots expanded into tessellations. Before my eyes, the glass garden grew:
Thickashwagandhashrubs, orchids with pale quartz petals, arrowheads fat as palms and bright as topaz. There were jasmine vines with pearl buds, water lilies with diamond petals. Nilofars and lotuses. Beneath the sunset sky, the glass garden transformed into a grove of lush flames.
Behind me, I heard a fierce intake of breath.
I turned around, and there she was. Livid as the sunset. Red and gold streaked across her skin. Her hair was tied back in a loose braid. Mirth filled her eyes even before she smiled and I found myself hungering for the sound of her laugh.
“You asked for a garden unlike any in all the realms.”
“You listen well,” she said. She touched each flower reverently and I knew, with a sudden surge of pride, that she liked what I had made. Crouching to her feet, she held her arm to a glass lotus that resembled her flaming skin. “A garden to match me.”
“Yes,” I said. “For a guardian unlike any in all the realms.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s a far better compliment than your last attempt.”
Lowly painter.I shuddered and inwardly cursed Gupta. “I relieved my instructor of his duties.”
“Ah, see. There is your problem. You consulted a man.” She laughed. And I wanted to catch the sound and play it forever. “You should have asked a woman.”
“Then I shall make amends now. What should I have said to you?”
