“You cannot have him.”
“It is not up to you, oh Queen. You are not the first bride to be widowed before she is made a wife. You will not be the last.”
“I said youcannothave his soul.”
The messenger tilted her head to one side. A movement made all the more wrong on the creature for its borrowed features.
“How did you know?”
Now it was Gauri’s turn to go still.
Know…what?
Theyamadutasplayed her fingers like a king displaying a feast, and Gauri saw an image stretched out:
A Tapestry.
Some part of her knew it, but her immediate memory could not recall where. The Tapestry shifted and shimmered, recoiling from itself as if it were a living thing. And then the image sharpened, diving in unto itself and expanding upon a single thread. Gauri felt an answering tug in her heart.Vikram.
“The young emperor’s life thread was split. The Dread Queen decided one path. Her Pale Consort decided another path. Their divergence created a gap. When two lives diverge, there is a small enough space through which I might slip through and grab his soul. But rules are rules, and I am bound to them just as anyone else. Because his life could not be decided by immortals, it allows for the meddling of one who is far more acquainted with death—”
“A mortal,” breathed Gauri. She glanced into her own face. “A mortal can decide if Vikram’s soul is taken?”
The false Gauri’s hands fell at her side. The image vanished.
“In a way,”it said.
It smiled. And in this, Gauri found the creature’s flaw. Its smile was nothing like hers. It may have gotten nearly every detail of her face correct, but it had missed one thing. Her scar. Few knew the tale, and so most assumed that the scar was not a scar at all, but a dimple. A mark of beauty. Not a mark of a girl who had only found solace in sharp things. Gauri sensed the gap in the creature’s words. She sensed the taunt of more knowledge, the slippery silence it left behind as if its cleverness had a residue. But for all its cleverness, it did not know her grin.
And so Gauri raised her chin and emptied her eyes of any guile. The barest touch of triumph crimped the edges of the creature’s smile.
“The loop runs twofold,”said the creature.“You must steal your bridegroom’s last breath from the final gate before Death. He is an aberration—”
Gauri, now giddy with the chance that she might win him back, fought to keep a smile from her face. The creature would not want her life? Then it could have anything. Anything at all. She didn’t care. Because the moment the messenger of Death started speaking, she had startedimagining.She imagined like one starved of ideas, all of them tamped down so that she would not cause herself more grief. She could imagine Vikram leaning forward, elbows braced on his knees, all long limbs and sly grins and outrage at being called an “aberration.” She could imaginehim.
“—but take care, oh Queen.”
Gauri’s eyes snapped to the creature.
“I give you this single night to cross this land and go hence. But know now that the halls leading to the realm of Death are their own treachery.”The creature paused. It grinned with all its teeth. Moonlight broke through the room, and its eyes glistened in the way of predators.“You may find that you do not care to bring back your bridegroom’s last breath after all. You can always turn around.”
PRESENT
Hira had hardly blinked the whole time her grandmother spoke.
“Why would the messenger of Death say such a thing?” she asked. “Why wouldn’t the queen have wanted her bridegroom to return alive?”
Her grandmother did not look at Hira.
“Love changes,” she said. “First bloom is not last breath. That is not a good thing, but a truth.”
“So?”
“So, my little jewel, I pose the question to you. Imagine you had the most beautiful flower in all the world. Imagine that only you possessed such a wondrous thing. Now imagine that it has begun to wilt. Do you let it wilt? Do you let that stunning fragrance of freshness soften into rot? Do you let the petals fall one by one and know that you had loved it for as long as time gave you? Or do you drop itwhen the blooms are at their height into a preservation liquid? You may not be able to smell it anymore. But you can see the moment at which it is frozen, eternal. And perhaps, the longer that you cannot recall how it felt in your hand, how it made your very senses sing… perhaps in memory it becomes all the sweeter.”
Hira thought about it, and found herself rather furious when she realized that she did not know. She huffed. “But what’s the right answer?”
At this, her grandmother smiled.
