There, in her lap, lay a perfect circle of black roses. She must have forgotten to take them out of her hair before sleep. Now they looked like something she had dragged out of her nightmare.
Last evening, Gauri and Vikram had been so happy.
Already, there were plans being made for her journey to where the Spy Mistress lived. Already, there were political whisperings afoot. More desires to comb through. To make sure that she was not leaving them in a nest of vipers.
It was not anxiousness that drew her from sleep.
If anything, part of Aasha thrilled at a new opportunity. She was still scared to leave Bharata, still nervous that she might embarrass herself there as she did here. But there was urgency in this task. In the harem, everything was slow-moving and planned. In Bharata, it was much the same. Routines, tasks, feasts. No competition to be seen. In the harem, none of thevishakanyascompeted with each other. They were all beautiful. All intelligent. All gifted in some way, shape, or form. And long life, at least amongst thevishakanyas,had all but extinguished any burning desire for recognition. But now she felt that desire. It almost felt like an ache settling against her ribs, this need toshowjust how much she belonged.
Initially she did not know what it was. She told Gauri that perhaps she had eaten the wrong dish at dinner the previous night. But Gauri had laughed:
“That’s just the teeth of ambition chewing at the heart of you,” she said. “Let it bite. It’s good for you.”
Ambition had not shaken her from sleep. It was fear… fear that her horrible secret might hurt the ones she loved.
Yesterday, Vikram had been confident that she would earn the Spy Mistress’s approval and be taken on for the position.
“You can wield and control such force, Aasha,” he’d said proudly. “We’re not worried.”
Control.
She couldn’t. Not anymore.
The blue star on her throat pulsed. Sweat cooled against her skin. She hadn’t summoned hervishakanyapowers, and yet they had reared up anyway, forced to the surface by her own panic.
She couldn’t name the point where it started. It was sometime after she came to Bharata. A courtier had asked where she hailed from, and she had answered that she was avishakanya.Luckily, the court had taken it to be a joke and pretended to faint if she brushed past them. After that, Gauri and Vikram had forbidden her from revealing her true nature.
At first, she had been stubborn.Vishakanyas,though deadly, were not inherently evil. But she quickly learned that nuance meant little to humans. Over the past year, Aasha had grown used to the rumors that snaked after her. It was around the third month of her stay that courtiers—mad with envy over her proximity to Gauri and Vikram—had taken to calling her a witch. In the beginning, Aasha did not mind. She had been called worse. Not all patrons of the Otherworld were kind. She did not mind what someone else thought because she knew who she was.
At least, she used to.
But her greatest desire—to experience a human life—had changed nearly everything.
“If I told people what I was, then they would not be scared,” Aasha said. “People are only scared of things they do not know or understand.”
She knew that better than most.
In the Night Bazaar, there worked a fear monger. He sold pinches of fear—dark purple blooms with thorns so thin and sharp and crowded together that they looked deceptively like velvet. All one had to do was stroke the bloom, and the fear would seep through the skin and lace through the bloodstream. Aasha had seen ancientrakshasfall to their knees, their eyes ringed with white, just to make the torture stop. They were highly sought after by the kings and queens of a thousand different realms. No need to kill a person with this interrogation device. Merely blow out the candles, and let the darkness do the rest. Aasha had asked the fear monger what he had distilled to create the kind of fear that trailed ice down spines and yanked people from dreams.
“The unknown, child,” he had said, for Aasha was young in the eyes of immortals. “I gather the shadow moving swiftly out of the corner of one’s eye. I gather the creaks in the floorboards when the sleeper balances on the precipice of dreaming. I gather the doubts that turn knuckles pale and hollows the stomach with an invisible kick. And I burn them down to this.”
But Vikram had explained that even if their fear was gone, a new emotion would take its place: malice.
“Imagine what someone would do if they found out that you could sense desires?” said Vikram. “They might try to fool you. Or hurt you. And in doing so, they might even put Gauri and me at risk.”
“But that is horrible!” Aasha had said.
“It’s human,” Vikram had answered with a weary grin.
All it took was a few months in Bharata to see that Vikram was right. Aasha had never realized how much humans lied, both to themselves and to those around them. Their desires were so tangled and nuanced. If they knew what she could do, they would just bury their intentions further. Humans were beautiful and deceitful. Even with fury in their hearts, their actions could be virtuous. Even with virtue in their hearts, they could act with cruelty. Why? Did that make them bad or good? To fit in here, she was expected to act like them. Shewasone of them, she supposed. But now all the things that made her who she was had been called into question. No longer could she act on impulse or simply do as she wished. It led to a horrible gap within herself, this sour hollow where all she did was wonder what waswrongwith her. Why could she not do as others did?
And then came the day her powers faltered.
Even now, shame rattled her bones.
It was such a small thing too. To cause such devastation.
Last winter, she had tamed a mynah bird in the gardens. It had hurt its wing. Aasha had created a small splint and fed it bright berries and slivers of sweet nuts. For a time, the bird had been her companion. It liked to sit on her shoulder, and nibble at her bright earrings. In the spring, the bird disappeared, and Aasha, though she mourned it, was happy that it could come and go as it pleased.
