“I don’t have time for this. I have to get to her—”
“She won’t be at the grove. She’s atTeej.”
My heart dropped.
“Even if I go, how will she recognize me? Don’t most of those lovers use ridiculous signals or secret words on their palms or something?”
“Maybe that’s the test,” said Gupta, shrugging. “You saw through a curse. Now she has to see through you.”
***
Choose me.
I stood behind the podium, curtained off from everyone else. There were all kinds of tricks toTeej.People tattooed their hands with hints so that they would not end up with the wrong mate. But there was the leap of faith in this exercise, the same leap of faith required of a relationship. Maybe it was a fool’s errand, but I had made my hand indistinguishable. We had never studied each other’s palms but perhaps that was where the beauty lay. Whatever form she took, I would recognize her. Because it was not me that knew her, it was my soul. And it could never forget her.
11
NIGHT
Hope is light. It shines its way into crevices and shadows you wouldn’t recognize. I held that hope within me, and I let it flare into a fire until it laid to waste my every doubt. I hardly remembered walking to theTeejcelebration and waiting my turn in that line. Nritti held my hand tightly and waited beside me.
“Uloopi told me to give you this,” said Nritti, opening my palms.
A necklace with a round-cut sapphire and strung with delicate seed pearls fell into my hands.
“What is this?”
“She said this was what she created the first time she tried making the resurrection stone.”
“Does it bring back the dead?”
“No. But it calls forth our happiest memories.”
I clasped the necklace around my neck, savoring the strange warmth of the pendant between my collarbones. It was magical, butnot enchanted. No memories surged before my eyes. And yet, I felt a thread of warmth from my head to my toes. Like the afterglow of a long laugh.
When I ascended the stage, some of the lesser beings taunted me. But I pushed past them, clutching that hope within me. This was a beginning. Maybe it would not be the beginning I wanted, but it was a beginning I deserved. I surveyed the row of hands, one by one, stopping when I saw the hand covered in soot. At first glance, it looked like it belonged to araksha.But when I looked closer, I saw cracks in that paint. I saw that the monstrous was little more than a flimsy coat of color. More than that, it was an invitation—to start a life with a different way of seeing. Starting now. I reached out. The curtain fell back with a crumple of silk. Dimly, I heard the audience suck in their breath. There… there he stood. Tall and shadowed, with a crown of blackbuck horns threatening to pierce the split sky above us. Guilt flashed in his eyes, before it became something else entirely: relief.
“I hoped you would choose me,” he said.
I fought back an impossible laugh as that hope and light broke inside me.
“I have no dowry.”
“I don’t care.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“I want to lie beside you and know the weight of your dreams. I want to share whole worlds with you and write your name in the stars. I want to measure eternity with your laughter. Be my queen and I promise you a life where you will never be bored. I promise you more power than a hundred kings. And I promise you that we will always be equals.”
“Not my soul then?”
“Would you entrust me with something so precious?”
I reached for one of my slippers and held it out, grinning.
“Here, my love, the dowry of a sole.”
He held me closer than a secret and when our lips met, the world between us became a charged and living thing.
12
DEATH
I knew little of curses, but much of stories. These were the tales collected in teeth, passed down from the mouth of one generation to the next. I heard the dead murmur them like talismans when they walked through my halls. They shared stories of curses shattered by moonlight or splintered by kisses. In all the years since the Shadow Wife had pronounced my heartbreak, I had never believed them until now. Because here, with Night’s lips to mine, and the world yielding its treasures one by one… I knew that I was free.
