“Does she know we’re coming?” asked Aasha.
The soldier, Suraj, squinted up at the tower.
“She should. But then again, that’s never made much of a difference to her.”
“Is she truly so awful?”
“Certainly!” said Suraj. “She wears her hair shorn like a widow, but she has never married. She curses like a man. Wears pants. I bet she was the one who decapitated the Spy Lord of Ujijain.”
Aasha felt a bristle of indignation. She had heard people talk the same way about her own kind, how they were wild and consumed men out of spite.
“Have you met her?” she asked coldly.
“Not at all,” he scoffed. “And I hope I never do.”
Frowning, Aasha looked back at the door to the tower. It was half-open. But it didn’t look like an invitation. It had that same tense quality of a monster sinking back on its haunches. Waiting.
Not even the evening light—hungry as it usually was to spill over the land before it was reeled back into the sky—dared to step past the tower’s threshold. Aasha tilted her head. It looked strange. Flat, somehow.
“Spy Mistress!” called Suraj.
But no one answered.
The other soldiers had begun to discuss the best way to enter. The Spy Mistress was known for laying all kinds of traps around the place.
Aasha walked forward. Strange. The light did not reach over the threshold.
But neither did the dust.
Instead of going in front of the door, she walked off to the side. She reached around for a pebble on the ground, throwing it directly into the door. It ricocheted with a metallic, pinging sound. Aasha almost grinned. It was false darkness. The first trap.
Sure enough, the ground right in front of the entrance to the door crumbled into a pit. If anyone had been standing there, they would have fallen instantly into a hole.
Aasha had seen something similar to this at the entrance of Nagaloka, the realm of serpents. A trapdoor that punished those who were disrespectful enough to enter an open space. It was far more polite to sit at the side, and wait to be noticed. That was the true entrance.
Suraj jogged over to her.
He walked cautiously toward the edge of the hole that had widened where the trapdoor fell. And then he hopped back.
“How did you know?” he asked, staring at her wide-eyed.
Aasha did not know how to answer. Some things were instinct. A human of Bharata would see a tiger and run, thinking it meant to harm them. An individual of the Otherworld would see a tiger and stop, thinking they might know them.
“I just did,” managed Aasha. And then she wondered what Suraj had seen that would make him leap away from the edge. “What’s down there?”
“I do not wish to alarm you. I do not think a well-bred lady would have ever seen such a thing.”
But Aasha was not a well-bred lady.
Ignoring him, she walked to the brink of the trap and looked down. Would she see a pile of bones or a pit of iron spikes? But no.Open water met her gaze. A scaly tail whipped the water into waves, thrashing hungrily. She jerked backward. There wasn’t anything that would save a person, and the Spy Mistress hadn’t even bothered to warn them about the kinds of horrors that might be faced in their halls.
Perhaps someone else would have seen such things and called the Spy Mistress ruthless. It did not seem human to punish intruders this way or to be so cunning. But for the first time, Aasha breathed easier…
This she understood.
This cunning. This testing. This crouching.
Gauri and Vikram had thought that the Spy Mistress position would suit her. This was the first time that Aasha believed that perhaps they had seen something within her that even she had not.
