“I have control over life and death, but not love?”
“Yes.”
“I made a mistake. I see that now.”
“Why are you doing this?” he demanded.
Because I’d already lived this. Under a shadow, I’d known a cursed existence and emerged into a cursed life.
“I’m cursed,” I said.
Gupta knew that, but I’d never told him the details until now. Over the years, he liked to guess what the curse was. Lack of personality was his favorite guess. When I finished telling him, he stared at the ground.
“I still believe there is a way around this,” he said. He spun a pen in his hand, which meant that he was about to rummage through the archives and find a solution. “But even then, what does it matter? You already love her.”
“That’s not true,” I said, even as something sparked and tugged within me.
“If you can’t see it now, then perhaps that is the true curse.”
He turned, leaving me standing in the middle of the palace. I couldn’t move from this spot. Moving meant that I had to put an end to something I liked far too much. Night came and went, and still I could not find the will to end what I had known. For the briefest space of time, I knew what the Tapestry had first taunted. A jewel no one else possessed: our time together. A door within reach: her arms around my neck.
A soul claimed: my own.
When the next dusk fell, I moved. I commanded my feet to move and they did not question me. But I could not command my thoughts to fall still.
Death was not always inevitable. But pain was. And right now, I couldn’t see beyond the shape of that pain opening inside me. It wasn’t that I could not control myself around her. It was that I had no desire to. Beside her, the world seemed impossible with wonder.
When I stepped through the final gate of trees, there she was. Burning like a star. She softened and then frowned. One look and Iknew how impossible it was to live without her. I could exist without question. Butlive? Think, dream, create?
All those things I had learned in her presence. For a crazed moment, I wondered whether someone could survive on the threshold of love, like leaning over the lip of a cliff. Or would the lure of the fall always prove too great? Maybe I would risk it. For her. But then she stormed toward me and her next words pronounced me cursed:
“I love you.”
Time stammered. Or I stammered. It didn’t seem to matter because she just continued talking:
“I want to be with you because I love you. Not because I need you. I don’t,” she said, gesturing with her arms at the number of dream wells she had set up and the dream fruit that had gone to waste on the trees. “You inspired this, but I did it on my own. And I know I could do more at your side, but that’s not the reason I choose you—”
“Wait,” I said. I felt like I was choking on the word.
“And yet what I can’t understand,” she continued, “is why you insist on a bond with no love. I think you love me too.”
“I don’t.”
She raised an eyebrow. No lip biting. No harsh intake of breath. Nothing but a raised eyebrow.
“Yes, you do,” she said calmly.
“Why is everyone saying that?”
“And I’ve also figured out why you refuse to say it aloud,” she said. “I know who you are.”
“So you’ve guessed what that curse is, have you?” I asked, the words coming out crueler than I expected.
“Not fully. Tell me.”
“If I love you, you will leave me. And it will cause me great pain. That is the curse.”
She stared at me and then she disappeared on the spot. I stood there, stunned for a couple of moments. And then I heard her voice behind me:
