Death and Night--A Star-Touched Novella Read online

  I smiled to myself before realizing that a critical part was missing from my plan:

  I needed a queen.

  * * *

  Gupta was hanging upside down in his favorite hallway, a bone-white corridor lined ceiling to floor with crackling tomes, glowing branches, and sweet-smelling parchments. He swung back and forth a little when he saw me.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said, glaring. “Sometimes I need a new perspective when I’m writing.”

  “I was not going to comment. I recognize a hopeless case when I see one.”

  Gupta frowned at me upside down. “What do you want?”

  “A bride.”

  “And I want dinner.”

  “I’m serious.” He fell to the floor. I kicked at his foot. “Shocked?”

  “Floored,” said Gupta, and then he cackled at his own joke.

  “This is no time for humor. I need a queen. Now.”

  “What brought this on?” asked Gupta, still not bothering to collect himself from the floor. “I believe I send you a list of prospective brides at least once a year. If memory serves, you burned each of those lists…”

  “Not true. With the last couple of lists, I tossed them into the air…”

  “You mean that tornado of paper that chased me down the hall?”

  “See? I don’t set fire to everything,” I said. “Now to answer your question, it’s become a necessity because I’ve seen it in the Tapestry.”

  Gupta paled. In a blink, he was upright, floating with his legs crossed and scribbling on parchment.

  “But what about the…” He trailed off, and I knew what word had made him stumble.

  “I found a way around the Shadow Wife’s curse.”

  “How?”

  “Simple,” I said. “I won’t fall in love.”

  Gupta raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

  “Now I need to find out what—”

  “Not what,” said Gupta. His gaze was unfocused, fixed somewhere on the cut of night sky through one of Naraka’s windows. “Where. And when.”

  * * *

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been dragged to the Night Bazaar. It was the riotous, pulsing center of the Otherworld. Here, merchants peddled all manner of strange wares—bones that told the truth, rare blooms that toyed with memories, harps that sang their players’ emotions, and even edible colors shorn off from a single rainbow. It was a place I avoided as often as I could. Far too noisy. Full of simpering beings eager to pay false homage.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked, ducking my chin to avoid making eye contact.

  He cut a path through the merchant kiosks. From the corner of my eye, I spied a kinnara woman with bright gold feathers laying out a series of small weapons—bows and arrows that shifted diaphanous and half-invisible in the light; an apsara adjusted her anklets and threw her henna-stained hair over one shoulder; a bhut with its feet pointed backward peddled a cursed cup of alms. After years of walking leisurely—what was the point of running to something or someone when they could never escape you anyway—I found myself walking briskly. Impatiently.

  And then, rising out from the crests of the merchant kiosks loomed a strange dais. Small birds carved of amber soared against a silk screen. Lotuses a violent shade of pink and purple released a drowsy perfume. I caught a whiff of it even where we stood and I drew my hood back. Desire. Heat coursed through me. Need gathered low and furious at the base of my skull. But I pushed back. When I chose a consort, those emotions would not drive me. If I had my way, we wouldn’t feel them at all.

  “This is where you will find your bride in two months’ time.”

  “What’s in two months?”

  “Do you never keep track of holidays?”

  “No.”

  “It’s going to be Teej in two months.”

  My eyes must have widened because Gupta’s grin stretched widely.

  “Not so brooding and hidden in the dark that you could forget what that means.”

  “Apparently not.”

  Teej was the time when the members of the Otherworld selected a consort. Lovers would often arrange to meet and declare their choice in a consort by placing a single red bloom in their beloved’s palm. But there was a strange rule to Teej. A heavy samite curtain separated them from each other’s sight. Lovers would have to identify one another by the sight of their palm. Some didn’t bother with choosing a lover beforehand. They would peruse the line of assorted hands and choose the one that called to their soul.

  Foolish.

  “You expect me to make this momentous decision by chance and simply show up at Teej and let someone choose me? Based on my hand?”

  “You could do that.”

  I waited, then caught the smug tilt of his grin.

  “Or?” I prompted through clenched teeth.

  “Or you could take the two months you have available and find someone. And arrange to meet them at Teej.”

  “What if the right one doesn’t come to Teej?”

  Gupta scoffed. “Every Otherworld maiden will be at Teej. Trust me.”

  2

  NIGHT

  “You could promise me a palace of spun sugar and I wouldn’t go,” I said.

  “What if I—”

  “You could hang me upside down and tickle me with lightning and I would not be persuaded.”

  “Rather vicious, don’t you think?” asked Nritti. She shook her head, and the small golden ornaments strung through her hair chimed sorrowfully. Three chimes. That never boded well.

  I had lost count of how many times I had heard the chiming of Nritti’s golden bells. To everyone else, the bells distinguished her as the chief apsara of the heavenly courts. Everyone else heard the bells and saw the cosmetic appeal—the glint of gold against the black fall of her hair, a trill of precious metal to silver her immaculate dance, a glittering crown that belonged to none else in the court of Svargaloka.

  To me, the chimes were something to be translated. One chime meant: Here we go again. Two chimes meant: I am questioning our friendship. Three chimes meant: Once more, I must rescue her from the depths of bad choices.

  Three chimes.

  I shook my head. She sighed, and resumed kicking her feet in the pale blue river before us. At this hour, the river looked like a shard of sky. The reflection of rose-colored clouds floated down the still water. Soon, indigo would stain their edges. Like bruises. For a handful of moments, the sky would turn monstrous, purpled and marbled as if someone had beaten it senseless. One might call it cruel. And yet without it you’d never notice the stars.

  Maybe the horror of dusk made the stars beautiful. You had to prize apart and flay the sky just to notice them. And for that cruelty, they bared their cold and unflinching beauty, their fixed and fervid glory. That beauty held truth—destiny and doom listed in the space between those burning silver infernos.

  Nritti hugged her knees to her chest and followed my gaze. “You were the first person to tell me there was nothing violent about the night.”

  I smiled. “And you believed me because there was nothing violent about me.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Not entirely violent,” I allowed.

  “Not entirely scary.”

  We turned our gaze to the heavens and waited. There was beauty in the night, if you chose to see it. Some did. Some didn’t. For some, night was the time of dreams and rest, of balance reasserting itself. For others, the hours crowded between dusk and dawn belonged to the ghosts. I knew what they feared: the uncertainty of nighttime, the lightlessness of those hours that were not the black comfort of sleep but the shadows at the bottom of a monster’s throat. I glanced at my reflection and saw their fear staring right at me. Why could I not be dreams and nightmares both?

  Nritti reached for my hand. I looked down to see our knitted fingers. Even though we had known each other all our lives, sometimes I never recognized myself beside her. Her skin—a lustrous gold—paled next to my o
wn violent shades. Almost time, I thought. Vespertine ink bloomed across my skin, spelling the calligraphy of dusk and near-night. Stars winked in the crook of my elbow and a constellation curved around the bend of my thumb.

  “Already?” asked Nritti.

  “Shorter days.”

  “And longer nights.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Of course you don’t,” laughed Nritti. “Self-loathing would not become you.”

  Behind me, the strange silver trees of the ashram stretched longingly toward the sky. I understood how they felt. It was only natural to want to feel part of something bigger than yourself. I glanced at my arm. Violet clouds shivered to life on my skin. A storm cloud kissed my wrist. And yet for all that I wore dusk and night … I was not part of the story. It is the price of immortality and eternal youth to never recognize your own fate in the stars. If we must live forever, then we must live blind.

  I guarded the stars with my body. I let the constellations dance across my skin as if they could draw sustenance from the air I breathed. I coaxed nighttime into the world and guarded that sacred cusp of time before the world slipped once more into a tomorrow. I kept the past and present divided by a dance.

  But it didn’t matter how many days and nights or dusks and dawns passed. The truth was that no one could do what I did. And yet the entire world was as blind to me as the stars were blind to us all. As much as I loved the night, I wanted to break free of it as well. I wanted to be more than a canvas for stars and stories. I wanted to make my own.

  Nritti looked behind me to the ashram. “Everyone wants to know where this place is. I bet there’s already a crowd waiting for those dream fruits.”

  I followed her gaze to the orchard behind us. When I came here, the ashram became renowned for the strange fruit that sprang from the earth—slender, silver trees where fat purple fruit dragged the boughs to the earth like soul mates inexorably pulled to one another. The fruit always tasted cold, no matter how hot the day. All day I labored on those dreams, on what snippet of reality would be stretched thin and packed inside that fruit. When midnight fell, I came to the Night Bazaar and sold them for the price of someone recounting their day. I learned and listened, and they ate and dreamed.

  “Your point?” I asked.

  “You know, in my despair of you not joining me for Teej, I may accidentally let the location of this ashram and your famous orchard slip…”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would never!” she said, feigning hurt. “But maybe I would.”

  “And you call me manipulative.”

  “I’m just trying to—”

  “—look out for me, do what’s best for me, instruct me on all the ways of living and point out the sun in case I mistook it for an orange.”

  She considered this. “Yes.”

  “I’m not hopeless.”

  “But you are sheltered. And stubborn as a mule.”

  “It could be worse. I could have the face of a mule too. I’m counting my blessings.”

  “Or you could have my face,” she said. “Count your blessings that you don’t.”

  In the fading dusk, Nritti looked silvered. Apsaras were always beautiful, but she was a gem even among them. It didn’t matter that her hair had fallen out of its braid or that her clothes were crumpled. She looked more polished than a gemstone that had gulped down the moon.

  For as long as I had known her, Nritti had the kind of beauty that earned her a place among the stars. When she entered a room, light clung to her. When she left a room, light seemed a mere legend. No radiance compared. But it came with a price. One that wore on her. I nudged her arm.

  “How many marriage proposals this time?” I asked.

  “The usual.”

  “About a hundred?”

  “Give or take.”

  “Any entertaining acts of idiocy amongst all your besotted suitors?”

  She smacked my arm, laughing in spite of herself. “Don’t mock their love.”

  “Why not? They mock you with the assumption that you’d say yes.” I rolled my eyes. “More than that, they mock you by assuming there’s nothing more than your beauty and dancing.”

  “Isn’t there?”

  “You sing too.”

  Another smack. Another laugh. But this one a little more hollow.

  “One of them said he’d write my name in the stars,” said Nritti. “He was a mortal king, invited to the court of the heavens for a great yagna he held honoring the gods.”

  “And so…”

  “And so he fell off a balcony with a sword in his hand. I think he intended to cut a path through the stars.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh.

  “Did you catch him?”

  “Oh yes. Eventually. But I did let him fall a great deal before I stood up.”

  We laughed for a long while, stealing seconds before my evening duties called me from her side.

  “Is that why you want to attend Teej? To find a consort and hopefully put an end to all these unwelcome marriage proposals?”

  She shrugged, and her hair ornaments chimed delicately.

  “I don’t want simply to find someone. I could’ve done that years ago.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You want love.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Of course not. I want that too.”

  It’d been something we’d talked of since we first met. She’d been asked to perform a solo dance for the grand Festival of Lights. I’d barely started making dream fruit, and the night was so new that it was hardly flecked with stars. She was nervous about practicing in the light, so I conjured shadows for her and we became friends.

  “Then I want love,” she said simply. “And I’m willing to believe that I can find it. I’m willing to be brave enough to search for it, even if that means failing.”

  “Are you hoping the God of Love will be at Teej? Crouching behind the curtains and stringing his sugarcane bow and arrow of honeybees?”

  She laughed. “Will you let me know if you see him?”

  “Certainly. I’ll be the one bribing him to make you fall in love with a cow.”

  “Not a bull?”

  “I prefer the scandal.”

  Just then, the clouds in the river began to break apart. The silver trees behind us shivered in wait. The crossover from day to night was complete. I glanced up and saw the faint impression of hoofmarks against the clouds. Ushas—the goddess of dawn—had already driven away her chariot, and magic had eagerly poured back into the world.

  We were in the human world, but just barely. Night thinned the boundaries of the mortal and Otherworld. Small amber lanterns no bigger than a thumbnail danced across the river. A handful of scarlet kinnara feathers drifted down the stream, releasing smoke and sparks of gold into the air. The gunghroo bells of apsaras ignited the silence. Nritti heard it too and stiffened as her own bells began to chime and keen.

  But not all the magic that poured out at night was full of light and feathers and music. In the distance, I heard rough hands pounding on a stone drum, and the hollow knocking of skulls garlanded around a raksha’s belly.

  “I have to go,” said Nritti, standing.

  “I know. So do I.”

  Soon, I’d have to shuck off this sari. Someone would notice if a disembodied dress started dancing and floating around. Nritti thought it was scandalous to run around naked. Technically, I was not running around naked. I was dancing around naked. Which sounded worse. But was it scandalous if no one could even tell?

  “I’ll see you afterward?” asked Nritti, breaking my thoughts and nodding to the orchard.

  “Always.”

  “Prepare yourself for a crowd, sister. Tonight, we are entertaining a princeling.”

  From time to time, mortal rulers were invited as personal guests to the Otherworld to reward them for certain prayers, offerings, or even aid in battle against demon spirits. And from time to time, some of them returned with an apsara
for a wife. Their first wives were rarely pleased.

  “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 curious naga girl 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 had neither 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.