It was dancing just out of sight, dangling and unspooling from the ceiling. Aasha tilted her head back. It hadn’t occurred to her to lookup.After all, how would a ceiling possibly be the entrance to the kitchens? Then again, in the Otherworld such things had been possible. A headache fuzzed at the edge of her thoughts. In Bharata, her Otherworld instincts kept her from being accepted. Here, her acquired human instincts kept her from being fed. She could not decide which was the worst evil.
What had the Spy Mistress said? She racked her brains.Think of it like a secret you’re supposed to sniff out.A human might have thought that meant to follow a trail on the floor. But what if she did not think like a human at all, but instead, like… like herself?Sniff.What astrange word. It meant to smell something out, but what if that was not what the Spy Mistress had meant? The word itself played on one sense, but perhaps she intended another. That, at least, is how things would have been done in the Otherworld.
There was no scent to follow here. But there was a window. There was something she might see rather than sniff. Aasha walked to the window. She positioned herself with her back to the light, and watched how it flowed out before her, snagging on the ends of a couple of threads. In the moonlight, they were as insubstantial as spider silk. An idea came to her. She stepped forward, piling her belongings on top of each other until she had formed a sort of ladder. Then she wrapped her hand around the silk, andpulled.
The threads may have looked like silk, but they were strong as rope. They didn’t snap off in her palm the way she expected. In fact, she had to drag herself down using most of her body weigh just to move the threads.
Not far from where she stood, the stone tiles shifted. A sound like the gnashing of a monster’s teeth rang in her ears. Within moments, a small hole in the floor had opened up. Kitchen smells spilled into the air. Aasha clambered down from her stacked possessions, approaching the opened floor delicately. Staircases wound down to the bottom.
Aasha gathered her things and took the first step.
***
To break food with another was no small act. In Bharata, even sitting down for tea with a stranger was considered the first step to thawing unfavorable relations. With some courtiers, it was considered a strange act of intimacy. This was something Aasha had notrealized until she had sat down for tea with a woman and immediately heaped spoonfuls of sugar into her cupwithouttea, which—she blushed to remember—indicated interest in a scenario that had startled her.
With tea and eating, parts of oneself were exposed. Not just their teeth or tongue or the slow-flutter of eyelids when something particularly tasty demanded the denial of one facet of the senses. It was the method. Whether they stirred sugar into their drinks or balanced a sweet cube between their top and bottom teeth, sipping like a sieve. These things meant something.
Aasha used to love tea. She loved the lemongrass scents and the sharp spicy note of ginger. But after she had choked during a formal tea with Gauri and an ambassador from the mountain country of Patnagar—and very nearly started a war all because she had served the tea for herself instead of letting the ambassador’s companion pour as dictated by Patnagar custom—she had stopped. She hadn’t thought she’d done anything wrong. She had even read the ambassador’s desire and it was clear that he desired for all of them to drink. But desires are served without instruction. Nuance was a thing taught by constant engagement, something that Aasha had never had the chance of doing until she came to Bharata.
“Even I didn’t know about that rule,” Gauri had confided.
But strain showed at the edges of her eyes. From then on, Aasha had started to take meals alone and in her room if she was not to eat with Gauri or Vikram.
And so it was with great humility and wariness that Aasha entered the dining area of the Spy Mistress. There was a great table, carved of onyx, and beset with ethereal decorations. An enchanted swan of smoke and glass swam from the front to the back end of thetable. A chandelier of black roses bloomed from the ceiling. Each center emitted a shower of sparks that disappeared the second they drifted toward the onyx table.
And yet, for all that beauty…
There was no food.
She glanced behind the dining table to where the Spy Mistress was mixing a number of concoctions in a vial. It was a rough kitchen. Of sorts. Pots and cups. Measuring accoutrements, and a built-in well that Aasha imagined brought water into the subterranean space.
A door led out from the dining room, but Aasha could feel the presence of magic. As if this place might hide multiple doors that would lead to parts unknown.
All she could see of the Spy Mistress was her sharp profile. Her nose was slightly bent. She wore a small diamond in one nostril. Her hair was swept back in a knot, most unusual for a woman holding one of the government’s most distinguished positions. Even more unusual was her dress, which was not asalwar kameezor a formal sari, but a brushed black silk tunic over cotton jodhpurs. Her only concession to the fashions of the harem women was a low-slung belt resting over one of her hips. Except where so many of the women Aasha had seen had used the belt as a kind of decoration, the Spy Mistress had sprays of glowing herbs, tools with sharp edges, something with an end like polished glass, and a pouch fat with coins.
“Tempted by the smells?” asked the Spy Mistress without turning.
“I—” Aasha stopped, gathering her wits.
This was not how she was supposed to act when she met an official from Bharata. There was supposed to be a careful dance of manners and gilded words. Maybe the woman was testing her?
“Forgive me, but—”
“You might as well get out,” said the Spy Mistress, bored.
For the first time, she turned to face Aasha. Aasha bit back the urge to gasp. While the skin on half of the Spy Mistress’s face was smooth, unlined and brown as a ripened nut, the skin on the other side of her face looked puckered. Pearly scars netted their way across her nose, tugging one side of her mouth into a sneer. One eye pinned Aasha beneath its gaze. So black it looked nearly garnet. The other eye was sea-blue pale, its pupil tapered like a snake. It did not look at Aasha. It seemed to look beyond her. And whatever it saw made her snake pupil dilate.
“Spy Mistress,” started Aasha, trying to borrow the right order of words from Vikram. “I believe we might have misunderstood one another from the beginning.”
“I understand that you’re someone who simpered cleverly enough to get a government position. You understand that I’m not remotely interested in training you,” said the Spy Mistress, spinning around. “How’s that for misunderstanding?”
“I’m sorry, but—”
“Don’t be sorry. Just don’t behere.This is no place for apologies. Or sniveling.”
“I—”
“You don’t belong here.”
