“Third moon?” taunted the Spy Mistress. “We’ll see if she lasts that long.”
***
Aasha was left standing outside of the door.
The court of Bharata had taught her how to wait and stay still. Thevishakanyaharem had taught her to fold her hands and look demure. But Aasha… Aasha for all that she had learned, could not unlearn her curiosity. Her fingers twitched even as she tried to lay them flat against the tops of her hands. The sense of useless waiting grew from barely tolerable to scalp-burningly impossible.
Unable to stand it anymore, she stepped aside from etiquette.
“Hello?” she called.
The door swung open. But the Spy Mistress was not there.
The moment Aasha stepped inside, a fugue of magic hit her. Not the kind fashioned of hopes and unexplained wonders, but the kind wielded by demons and deities. It took Aasha by surprise, as if she had wandered to the end of a dark tunnel only to find a secret entrance to her room. The enchantment fanned the blood through her veins, and the blue star, without any summoning, burned on her skin. She clapped her hand over her throat.
Hide yourself.
That was the first and only condition that Vikram and Gauri had imposed.
Not even two steps inside the door, and you’ve already failed,she chided herself.
But the Spy Mistress could not have noticed. For there was no one inside.
Although Aasha could feel the weight of enchantment in the air, she could not find its seams. She did not know where things started or stopped, and she found herself wondering how the Spy Mistress had ever come to wield such magic. If she was a magical being, her desires still should not have been obscured.
No furniture touched the bare stone. But veins of warmth ran through the floor. Life was not here, butbelow.It had to be, because the smells of cooking had seeped through the stone. Luxuriant smells that gnawed at her stomach. Roasted vegetables and rice fluffed with strands of saffron and mixed with ghee. Iced fruits. Bread glistening with oil.
A voice called out from the stone:
“If you can’t find the food, then you can’t eat it,” taunted the Spy Mistress. “Think of it like a secret you’re supposed to sniff out.”
Annoyance flickered through Aasha. Cast out of Bharata, separated from her friends, and now dying of hunger, she had no patience for cruelty too. Perhaps in another time she would have tried to intimidate this Spy Mistress. Perhaps a demonstration of her deadly touch to suggest that she was not someone to offend. But the deadliness of her touch was not a thing to use frivolously. A rush of texture flew through her mind. The iridescent silk feathers of the mynah bird, the warm damp of the child’s palm, and the bird as blue as her star, its feathers still ruffled from a wind it would never again feel.
Outside, the sun had begun to sink slowly, light dribbling over the horizon. Her stomach ached. From a distance, the light looked like a plush mango split open. She licked her lips. Why didn’t she think to bring any snacks with her? Soon, evening fell. Aasha’s hunger sharpened. But so did her sight.
For so long, she had tamped down the instinct of the Otherworld that to reach for it once more felt almost shameful. And yet, even as she tried to read the room once more, it yielded no secret desires. Aasha felt blind.
“You cannot possibly mean to starve me!” she called. And then, in a smaller voice. “Do you?”
That would not be very kind. Bharata hadn’t always been kind either, but at least they had never denied her the pleasure of a full stomach.
“I can and I will,” replied a haughty voice. “If you can’t find your way to the food, you don’t deserve to eat.”
“But you are to be mentoring me,” protested Aasha. “Surely this cannot be your version of such a responsibility.”
“It’s my version of ridding my home of unwanted guests.”
“I am not a guest,” said Aasha. Her hair was beginning to free itself from the stays. She brushed it back furiously. “I am supposed to work alongside you as the next Spy Mistress…”
“You’ll be the next casualty if you spend your time screeching instead of searching,” said the Spy Mistress.
Aasha huffed in frustration. She searched every corner and scanned every wall, but still she was no closer to finding the food. Aasha forced herself to collect her thoughts. She sat in the middle of the stone tower and looked around her.
The stones set in the floor and the wall made no difference whatsoever.
Now the sun had completely sunk out of view. Slow moonlight pushed through the window, and beyond Aasha could see a silver crescent perched along a tree. Hunger was unfastening her thoughts. She sat there, letting her eyes slowly unfocus when she saw it…
A web.
