Zahril choked. “How much ginger did you butcher for this?”
Aasha glanced at the cutting board. She knew ginger made food spicy. But she liked spicy things. She liked when her nose burned and her throat felt as though it had caught fire. It seemed that she was quite alone in this.
“A little bit?” she ventured.
Zahril glared. She waved her hand. Out of nowhere, a hand made of smoke appeared. It plucked the steaming tea from off the table, then tipped it. Aasha imagined that it would spill on the ground, but instead it disappeared in some enchanted, concealed pocket of air. At another wave from Zahril, the enchanted smoke hand collapsed into a spiral of tea steam. Aasha stared at the space in the air where the hand had disappeared. Zahril could domagic.
“How did you…? What—”
“I traveled extensively and made friends. Those friends gave me gifts and taught me many things,” said Zahril. “As one does.”
Friends?
With that?
Aasha found that hard to believe.
She’d no sooner be friends with Zahril than she would cuddle a basket of razors. When she glanced at Zahril, she saw the near-creature blankness of her sea-glass eye. Her black eye was just as cruel. Little more than chips of obsidian. Aasha was sitting across from her, her elbows perched on the polished wood. Without realizing it—or even thinking it—she had leaned forward, the better to peer closer at that one black eye… and maybe it was the way the chandelier light rippled across her face or the remnants of steam left over from the discarded tea cup, but Aasha thought she caught a certain glint there. A sheen not quite rubbed away, no matter how much the person wished to conceal it.
“What. Are. You. Doing,” hissed Zahril.
Aasha was hardly a foot away from her face, risen up on her elbows, leaning awkwardly across the table.
“Oh! I—”
Zahril shoved herself back from the table.
“Come with me,” said Zahril flatly. “In three months’ time, I will decide whether or not you’re worthy of the position. And so far your only talent has been to show me how poorly you make tea. No doubt that will be useful should you choose to kill someone during lunch, but that’s not enough for this duty.”
Zahril walked toward one corner of the kitchen. While her back was still turned, Aasha drained her tea. The spice felt like a living beam of light twisting down her veins. Gauri said that anything was better with tea. Even battle. Aasha had not understood at first. It was not as though someone could pause warfare for a steaming cupof liquid. But now Aasha realized that Gauri had not been referring to the tea. Not really, at least. She had been referring to the beauty of ritual. The way routines lay tracts in the soul that when they were performed felt like a gentle propping up of a weary spirit.
In the kitchen corner, Zahril reached for a hanging rope of garlic in the corner of the kitchen and pulled. A little ways from where Aasha stood, three of the stone tiles shimmied out of the floor. In the gaping darkness, Aasha heard theclip-clipunfurling of wood slatting against wood as the shadows birthed a set of stairs.
Part of Aasha crumpled.Moredarkness? Did this person never bother with the sun anymore?
Zahril took the steps briskly, and Aasha followed.
At the bottom of the spiral staircase, she felt something in the air, a slight hook and tug beneath her navel as if the last step she’d touched wasn’t a step at all but a thresholdelsewhere.She thought there would be another hall at the bottom, but instead the room peeled back into something blinding.
Soft dirt pressed back against the soles of Aasha’s feet. The milky-sweet scent of leaves crushed underfoot and wet animal pelts stung her nose. A bolt of blue-silk sky arced overhead, and sunlight spilled from the tops of trees, dripping down between the leaves and leaving pools of gold. They were standing in a forest clearing. For a moment, Aasha was so shocked and then blissfully delighted by being outside that she did not realize where she stood. But when she noticed Zahril out of the corner of her eye keeping to the edges, she had the prickling sense that she was missing something. Aasha glanced at her feet. She was standing in a circle outlined by small, glowing stones. Near her stood a large pile of stones nearly double her height.
“There are five senses to conquer. Sight. Smell. Sound. Taste. And touch,” said Zahril. “Your duties will require a little of all of them simultaneously. I don’t suppose you have any military training?”
Aasha shook her head.
“Typical,” said Zahril. “This is what happens when bureaucracy rules the day. Whatcanyou do, Aasha?”
It was the first time that Zahril had ever spoken her name.
“I can sing. Dance. Make tea. Albeit poorly. I can… read,” she said softly.
But she did not specify what, exactly, she could read.
“And I’m told I can fell a man with a touch,” she added.
She summoned her best smile from her courtesan training, and when she spoke the words, she remembered how Vikram had taught her how to tell a truth so wryly that its meaning stayed hidden.
“Flirtation only gets you so far in life,” said Zahril. “Here’s your first lesson then, Aasha. If you see it, you can stop it.”
