She nodded.
“On any other day, that might have been proof enough that you love me,” said Vikram. But even as he joked, he sounded resigned. As if this was all he might truly expect from her.
Gauri took a deep breath. Her heart pounded. She felt rather ill, to be honest.
“I have better proof,” she said in a small voice.
And then, not waiting for him to answer, Gauri turned on her heel and padded down the hall. She led him through a labyrinth of their rooms—past the columbarium and the messenger doves with their heads buried in their wings, past the receptacle that held the royal insignia and the sovereign jewels, and finally past the secret courtyard and her Garden of Swords and Sweets. Vikram kept a study there, a massive room cramped with books, where an artful architectural contrivance filled the room with light without allowing sunlight to spoil the pages.
Sometimes, it seemed to Gauri that Vikram’s scrolls and books and treatisesroosted.As if they were birds with heads tucked under their wings, nestled deep inside their alcoves and sleeping. She had told him this once, and he had laughed.
“I guess that’s fitting,” he had said. “Stories, knowledge… they set the mind alight.”
That idea: levity brought on by the wings of a good book and a better story. That was what she had tried to show him.
When they entered the study, a flock of stories in mid-flight was there to greet him. Suspended from the arched ceilings by the finest gossamer thread were pieces of blank paper folded into extraordinary shapes. A winged lion, paper teeth cut to points. A peacock strutting across a bookcase, its tail fanned out and nearly sweeping the floor. A makara swimming across a ceiling newly painted with stars.
This was what he was to her.
To her, he was the tipping point of wonder to awe.
He made her see the world as pieces of unfinished magic, waiting to be transformed.
She knew she was… unyielding. She could not melt into humor the way he could. She didn’t shout open declarations of love, but that did not mean that she did not feel.
Beside her, Vikram’s eyes were wide. He walked beneath this sea of paper transformations, blank pages that looked like the beginning of a tale. The painted stars didn’t shine, but Vikram regarded them as if they were real and somehow, the light changed. The force of his wonder was its own illumination.
“Vikram…” she started, the words knotting together.
He was standing at the far end of the room. If it had not been so silent, he might not have heard her. But he did, and he turned.
Last week, they had faced each other across a small room that felt as wide as a country. Today, they faced each other across a greater distance and yet they felt so tightly knit that the simple act of breathing in and out, of blinking slowly and regarding the other, of waiting, was like reaching out and drawing a line across the other’s soul.
He smiled.
He crossed the study’s distance in a matter of strides, and stood before her. Gone was his sly smile. There was something raw and unguarded in his eyes. And Gauri knew that if he looked closely, he would see that expression mirrored in her own. She tried to look elsewhere before he saw, but he caught her chin in his hand.
“I know you find these things hard to say,” he said. “So at least allow me to see the truth of it in your eyes.”
She relented. For long, horrible moments, Vikram’s eyes held her in thrall.They searched her thoroughly until it wasn’t enough just to look at each other. Somehow, her hands went to the buttons of his silk jacket. Somehow, his fingers left her chin to travel down the bare slope of her neck, to the flimsy clasps of her nightsilk. Somehow, she pulled him or he pulled her, and now she was seated on top of the long, wooden table strewn with plans and papers.
“You never said sorry, you know,” he murmured.
“And I never will,” she retorted.
“Here’s an idea. Perhaps you don’t have to say it at all,” he said against the hollow of her neck. “You could always show it instead.”
“And why do I have to be the one doing all the apologizing? You have nothing to be sorry for?”
“I do,” he said, toying with the ends of her hair.
“Then why don’t you start.”
Vikram’s gaze flicked up to hers abruptly. There was no apology there. But something akin to… daring. Or hunger.
“That’s only fair, my queen,” he said. His voice seemed to borrow some of the darkness around them, and Gauri’s heartbeat started to race, tangling together in anticipation. “I’ll do my utmost to convey the very depths of my sorrow.” He dropped his head to the slope where her neck met her shoulders and kissed her there. “Though I must warn you, it will be a long apology.”
PRESENT
