“Then it cannot hide from you,” said Aasha. “Strike a bargain. It has been done before, once.”
Gauri knew the tale. It was the story of Savitri, a princess, andSatyavan, her husband. Satyavan was fated to die a year and a day after their marriage. Because of Satyavan’s piety, it was said that the Dharma Raja himself came to collect his soul. But Savitri refused to part with her husband. She followed him through the twisting lands of Naraka, extracting one boon after the next. Even though she had angered the Dharma Raja with her stubbornness, her devotion impressed him. At last, Savitri requested a boon with a catch:Grant me a hundred sons by my husband.And Death, perhaps exhausted from his ordeal with the clever princess or perhaps softened by her entreaties, had no choice but to let the soul of Satyavan return to the light.
“Maybe Vikram could outwit death,” said Gauri miserably. “But I—”
“—youare an extremely ferocious individual,” said Aasha. “I don’t think Death would wish to converse with you at all.”
Aasha’s words dragged forth a light. And Gauri’s soul strained toward the radiance of those words as if she were a plant newly freed of the ground’s darkness.
No one would take her bridegroom from her.
Gauri’s smile became a vicious slash.
Let them try.
“Bring me my best weapons,” she said.
***
Gauri had laid many traps in her life. She had laid branches over trenches studded with iron spikes. Mimicked the birdcalls of spies to soothe her enemies’ suspicions. Placed gaps in her speech that courtiers fell into, and spun their own words into chains.
But she had never laid a trap like this.
It would have to be enough, she thought. She settled down to wait.
By now, night had ripened to full dark. Time turned stingy. Seconds lasted for minutes. Minutes for hours. Hours refused to melt, holding their shape like frost on a winter morning. Sleep seduced Gauri’s thoughts, but every time her chin dipped, the sharpened points of her jeweled choker jolted her from rest.
All through the evening, Vikram had not moved. Once or twice, Gauri had felt her gaze straying to him, but she willed herself not to look. Look at him, and the image would hold. She would be too scared to blink. Too scared that if she did, his soul would slip out from beneath him, and she would not catch it in time. But even lying there, Gauri could not ignore the taste of betrayal at the back of her throat. It seemed impossible to imagine that there was a world where she could not follow, a world that even now his soul leaned toward. As if that was where he belonged. And not by her side.
No sooner had that dark thought burst inside her did she feel it:
The presence of Death.
Some might think death felt like a slowing down, the lull of closed eyes, the body settling in for sleep. But they were wrong. Death commanded urgency. Its presence squeezed life like a fruit. Her chest clenched. Her soul, frightened, curled in on itself and yet life sluiced out anyway. Life dribbled down the ridges of her anima. Life was a puddle of spilled ambrosia on the floor of a grand room, and in its reflection, every mundane action had been rendered golden by Death’s secret alchemy.
Gauri gasped—
With one hand, she grabbed Death’s messenger. She gagged a little, for when she looked down—dressed in Vikram’s garmentsfrom the day—she saw a pearlescent arm sunk to the wrist in her own body. The arm snapped back, the hand empty and recoiling.
“What trickery is this?” demanded theyamaduta.
Gauri looked up. She stared. For this gleaning, theyamadutahad taken a cruel and beautiful form. In a way, she was humbled. Of course the one face that would lure Vikram to the afterlife was none other than her own.
Gauri stared at the creature that had stolen her face. It took a moment before she could remember that it was not human. She could stab it repeatedly with her weapons, but it could not die, for it was not alive. It was a command poured into the shape of that which would pull or punish the soul of that who it had come to retrieve.
“You… you are not the soul I am to take.”
The messenger glanced around the room. But Vikram was nowhere to be found. Before night had fallen, Gauri had him removed from the room and placed him in her own chambers. But not before she had taken his clothes—an act that had scandalized her courtiers—pricked his thumb, and smeared her lips with his blood.
The messengers of Death are said not to look too closely,Aasha had warned.It is said that they cannot bear to look into the face of a mortal lest they become too fascinated. They check only for the trace of someone’s soul lingering in their blood and the scent of their mortal bodies.
“You are correct,” said Gauri.
She dragged her arm across her mouth, but the taste of Vikram’s blood snuck onto her tongue anyway. His clothes were far too big on her, and the dangling sleeves and breadth in her shoulders made her feel like a child. Facing a being as old as time, shewasa child.
“Reveal him to me. His soul has been summoned.”
Gauri steeled herself. And then she looked into the creature’s eyes. Her own eyes. Stern and dark and inherited from a father she had always known at a distance.
