“I could never hate you,” he said.
But he spoke the words dully, as one who had repeated something so many times that its meaning had thinned.
“Turn,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because you love me.”
Gauri found herself sitting upright. She could not look away from this scene of grief played out before her. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted in that moment, whether she would siphon off some secondhand victory if he did not turn.
But then, slowly, the man lifted his head. He turned slowly on his heel, his chest never once falling. As if all this time, he held in his breath. As if he were holding onto it just for her. Joy lit up his wife’s face. When he turned to her, they beheld each other. Gauri felt like an intruder, but she could not look away from them.
The moment they turned to each other, Gauri saw them as they might have been once. For a blink of an eye, the woman had gone from eerie to earthen, her iridescent skin flooding with russet color. The wisps of smoke coalescing to black hair now silvered with age. Crease-lines, of joy, flared against the man’s eyes. She held his face in her hands, crying as she smiled.
And then she disappeared.
The man stood there, his hands still raised in the air, molded to the shape of her. Desolation sucked the very air from the space around him. But he did not weep. Nor did he cross once more past the Gate of Grief. Slowly, he turned toward the land of the living. Slowly, he picked his way through the crowd, like one whose eyes are adjusting to the light. Slowly, he found the strength to leave her behind.
“You pity him,” rasped the horse. And it said it with something like disgust.
They were nearly at the gate. Gauri would have jumped off and ran the rest of the way, but the floor had changed. Now, the reflection of the bodies overhead rippled across the liquid floor. Kamala may have been able to trot across its surface. But what if Gauri simply drowned? She forced down her impatience.
“So what if I pity him?”
“It is cruel to laugh at one’s reflection.”
Gauri felt struck. This was what her life had come to… being scolded by a being half-dead. It wasn’t as though she was alone in pitying the man.
Everyone had recoiled. Part of her felt self-righteous. She wouldneverbe so beside herself with grief that she would waste her life dragging up the dead. Even the phantom of his own wife was exasperated.
But then again, wasn’t that what she was doing? Fetching Vikram’s last breath from hell’s gates? If she lost him again… would she dothis? Grate herself down to the marrow until she lost the very reason she had journeyed down to this bleak place?
“Grief is a land of its own, though here it squeezes itself into the shape of a gate,” said Kamala. “Be careful what kind of citizen you make, little bone.”
Kamala stopped trotting, and Gauri slid off its back. Vikram’s name was warm against her throat. She wished she could wrap her whole body in that warmth.
“His last breath is in there,” said the horse.
“And then what will happen?” asked Gauri. Her hand moved to the sword at her side. Would she have to fight for it? The way she had when they had fought in the Tournament of Wishes? She hoped she would have to fight for it. This place made her weak and useless.
“What will happen,” said the horse cryptically.
“Will it show me the future?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” said Kamala. “But this is no place for prophecy, it is a place for pain. And you will suffer the most for it.”
Gauri turned. But the wordsWhat do you mean?died on her lips. The horse had disappeared. And with it, everyone else who had once stood around her. She had walked through the Gate of Griefwithout knowing, and inside she found a place that she did not expect. It was not bleak and stern like the Gate of Names. It was… beautiful. Sharp.
Gauri was in a palace carved of white. Above her, the sky swelled with snow, its belly hanging low and trailing clouds as if daring the spires of this kingdom to pierce it. This was not a place she recognized in the land of Bharata-Ujijain. Yet it felt as familiar as home.
“Vikram?” she called.
A cloud snagged on a tower, and snow began to fall from the broken sky.
“Gauri?” he answered.
Something caught within her. She ran to the sound of him. Snow stuck to her skin and dusted her hair. Around her, enchantment fell away. Paper animals gathered themselves off the white walls and zoomed around her. She heard lyrics of ice that conjured twisted gardens encased in glass. Palaces of music unheard crumpling into fluted sighs of love. The air sounded as if it had been rummaged through, as if the fingers of some pale god had combed the atmosphere.
