“No such thing, my little love,” she said. “The question is when you choose to let something go. And who can tell you the answer to that?”
“But what did the queen do?”
Her grandmother rubbed her glass hand. “She did what she thought was right.”
THE FIRST GATE
The messenger of Death stomped onto the marble floor. The ground trembled. A neat circle dissolving into the stone as easily as sugar stirred into steaming tea. Logic told her that the entirety of the kingdom should have been thrown out of their beds by the force of the trembling. But the kingdom stayed silent, caught in the jaws of their dreaming.
The hole in the ground was nearly lightless.
And yet, Gauri caught the glimmer of details. A staircase. A tiny, muted glow at the very end of the steps. Even from where she stood, she could tell how the quality of the light would be thin and watered down. As if someone had skimmed moonlight off a pond, and not bothered with replenishing the light’s luster for centuries. No stench of malice wafted from the ground. Not a whiff of decay could be detected, nor could she sense that hot iron perfume of old blood. Butshe did not sense any bliss either, for this was the space between the living and the dead.
To cross it took as long as an eon, and as short as a blink.
The land was as vast as an ocean, and as narrow as an alley.
The land had a name, but all who knew it promptly forgot.
“And where will you be?” asked Gauri.
The messenger of Death sat at the edge of the bed, its back unnaturally straight. But for Gauri, who had been a soldier for nearly as long as she had been a princess, the familiar posture needled her. The being looked around the room and then said:
“Here. I shall sleep in your bed and run my hand across your clothes. I will pace the floors you have paced and touch my hand to the walls. I may go wherever Death may go, and Death is everywhere. Even now, Queen, I see his shadow on you. The gray that will touch your hair. The veins that will cobble your skin into a landscape. The ache that will slow your limbs. I see.”
But if theyamadutameant to frighten her, it had failed.
Gauri was not frightened of that kind of death.
What she was frightened of was something far quieter. It was the death of being forgotten to the one who loves you. The death of being left behind in a place that will forever hold more grief than glee. The death of laughter.
Gauri turned to the stairs, grabbed the railing, and started her descent.
Where was Vikram now, she wondered? Surely, if his soul had fled past hers and already begun its journey to the realm of Naraka, then something in her would have answered?
The steps forming the staircase were disturbingly uneven. Through the fabric of her slippers, Gauri felt slopes… ridges.Things that might have once been a woman’s sharp clavicle or a child’s bicuspid now worn to the smoothness of a pearl.
Her eyes took an eternity to adjust. For here, darkness grew thickly when there was no one there to tend to it. At the bottom of the staircase, a long hall stretched forward. She looked behind her and saw an infinity of staircases, footsteps disappearing on the incline or descent. She realized then that she was not the first or the last mortal to visit this land. She was not the first to know grief so acutely that she would have fought Death. And for some reason, this offended her. It was arrogant, she knew, but then again perhaps all who had come here had felt the same fury at this realization. Every pain is its own world with its own language. None else could speak that unique dialect unless they had been born to it, or, as was more often the case, had borne it.
Around her, footfalls broke the silence, along with something else… the sound of something beingdragged.Gauri had been sent only to recover Vikram’s last breath.
What had the others been sent to gather?
The moment Gauri leapt down from the last step, hot breath ghosted against the back of her neck. She froze, one hand on a sword. It was the sword Vikram had practiced with when he fell down in the arena. Maybe it was no talisman, but anything else of his would have weighed her down with grief.
Something snorted behind her. A muzzle whuffed across her scalp, tugging at her hair.
“I know you,” said a rasping voice. “I carried you on my back, inedible thing. You never said thank you.”
Gauri turned and found herself staring face-to-face with a not-dead and not-alive white horse. Half of its body was in perfect health, its pearly white flanks shone, and muscles corded its body. But the other half? The other half was rotted and open, strips of flesh peeling off a giant rib cage, its garnet-dark heart beating at the shallow of its chest. Half of its face wore a permanent grin.
The sight of it summoned a memory that she had buried deep in her mind.
A not-dead and not-alive white horse racing across a barren landscape. A pale kingdom. A Tapestry on the wall that she could not bring herself to look at for too long.
“Thank you?” she said, uncertainly.
The horse tilted its head, examining her. It smacked its lips.
