“What did this one do for the honor?”
Nritti shrugged. “I think he helped in some battle or another.”
“Poor thing. I don’t envy the attention he’ll get.”
The Otherworld had a bizarre fascination with humans. But they often expressed it with zero decorum. I’d once seen a curiousnagagirl tugging at a human boy’s neck, bemused because he hid no cobra hood behind his ears.
“It seems like fitting punishment for dragging me from your side,” said Nritti. “I hope he leaves with nothing short of four hundred proposals of marriage and a cursed sandal that causes him to stub his toe every day. But I’m glad, at least, that you get something out of that crowd.”
She stared past me to the silver trees heavy with fruit.
A human prince meant a huge Otherworld crowd. And a huge crowd meant more people to buy dream fruit. Maybe I’d buy some new trinkets after they bartered. An amphora of honey from moon-bees. Or a bolt of silk culled from sea roses.
***
As soon as Nritti left, I began.
Night heralded sleep and shadows, demons and dreams.
But I heralded night.
Sometimes I wondered whether that made me worse than a demon. But I supposed no one berated a door for allowing a robber to cross the threshold. Then again, people could be unforgivably stupid.
The sky broke. Black, starless waves poured into the ether, hovering over the world like a blanket that refused to fall. This was the very essence of night. The eerie scent of shadows perfumed the world. It smelled like fear at an unexpected bloom of cold between your shoulder blades; like the prickling of ice at feeling inexplicably watched; like a breath yanked from your lungs when you had run out of stairs on a staircase and couldn’t figure out how. But the dark didn’t scare me.
Quite the opposite.
I rose into the air, letting the wind whip my hair around my face. Where did the sky end and I start? I never wanted to find out. I let myself sink into that feeling of being infinite. For a moment, I hadneither edges nor emptiness. I was everywhere. Everything. A cut of stars. The shadow of a crescent moon. The satin sand beneath the wave. The bistre loam beneath the land.
I reached out and snatched the darkness, dragging it down to earth with me. It needed to be sewn into the world, tucked beneath every leaf and stone, hewn to every mountain crest and sculpted into the bowl of every lush valley. But the only way to make the night stick to the world was to dance it into place.
And so I did.
Unlike Nritti, I had nogunghroobells to transfix my audience. But the sound of my feet hitting the forest floor caused the birds in the trees to tuck their heads beneath their wings. When I pressed my fingers intomudras,no crowd roared with applause. But the earth sighed, as if it had finally accepted the weight of darkness and chose to sleep rather than spar. I bent, ready to unfurl the last shadow when I heard twigs snapping underfoot.
Cold pierced my spine.
Whenever I danced, every mortal thing that may have been able to see me would instantly fall asleep. In the mortal realms, everything could die. Not even the trees watched.
Yet, something…someone… was doing the impossible.
I spun around. “Who’s there?”
From beneath the heart-shaped leaves of apeepaltree, something rustled. And a voice, so lush it made ambrosia acrid, answered me.
“Only the lowly painter who tries each night, in vain, to capture evening herself.”
“What do you want? Show yourself.”
The stranger stepped out of thepeepaltree. He was broad-shouldered, his features as severely beautiful as a strike of lightning.He wore a crown of blackbuck horns that arced in graceful whorls of onyx, catching the light. But it was his gaze that robbed the clamoring rhythm in my chest.
His stare slipped beneath my skin. And when he saw my eyes widen, he smiled. And in that moment, his smile banished my loneliness. He moved toward me, grasping my hand, and his touch hummed in my bones like an aria. A song to my dance. The beginning of a promise.
Which is just about when I realized that I was wearing nothing.
And also when I realized that he didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t wearing anything.
I yanked my hand away in the same instant that shadows rushed out of the ground to hug my body. Granted, it was hard to tell what was what when the sky and I looked the same. You had to look close. But this stranger had looked at me the way no one had before, and I wasn’t taking any chances.
