The Star-Touched Queen Read online

  The tutor cleared his throat. “I have no intention to teach you history or letters or speech. I intend to teach you silence. Stillness.”

  This time I didn’t even try to hide my scowl. I did not like this replacement. Tutors generally left me alone. I never had to raise my voice. I never had to scowl. I didn’t even need words. What scared them most was much simpler and sweeter than that—a smile. The moment I smiled—not a real one, of course, but a slow, crocodile reveal of teeth and a practiced manic gleam—the tutor would make an excuse, edge along the wall and flee out of the archive rooms.

  Who wanted to be smiled at by the girl that trailed shadows like pets, conjured snakes and waited for Death, her bridegroom, to steal her from these walls? Never mind that none of it was true. Never mind that the closest I had come to real magic was making off with an entire tray of desserts without anyone noticing. The shadow of me always loomed larger than the person who cast it. And sometimes that had its benefits.

  This tutor, however, was not as easily cowed. I strained my ears, listening for the footfall of more courtiers, but it was silent. The meeting would start any minute now and here I was, stuck with some fool who wanted to teach me the virtue of silence.

  I grinned at him …

  … and he grinned back.

  “It is unseemly to smile at strangers, Princess.”

  He took a step closer to me. Shadows glommed around him, choking off the honey light of the room. He smelled wrong. Like he had borrowed the scent of another person. Sweat slicked his skin and when he walked closer, red shimmered in his eyes—like coal smoldering in each socket.

  “Let me teach you, lovely thing,” he said, taking another step closer. “Humans always get it wrong, don’t they? They think a bowl of rice at the front door is strong enough to keep a demon away. Wrong. What you know is a false promise of strength. Let me show you weakness.”

  The room had never felt this empty, like I was trapped between the space of an echo and a scream. I couldn’t hear anything. Not the parrots scuttling on their branches or the court notary droning his list of the afternoon’s agenda. Silence was a silhouette, something I could trace.

  The tutor’s voice transcended sound, muddying my thoughts. “Let me teach you the ways of demons and men.”

  My knees buckled. His voice echoed with all the desperation of someone who had not slaked his thirst in eons and had just spied a goblet of water sweating beads of condensation, thick as planets. His voice lulled me, coated me. I wanted to move, but found myself rooted to the spot. I glanced up, fighting the drowsiness, and saw his shadow smeared on the wall—horned, furred belly skating over the floor, shifting into man and beast and back. Devil. Raksha.

  Somewhere in my mind, I knew he wasn’t real. He couldn’t be. This was the court of Bharata, a city like a bone spur—tacked on like an afterthought. Its demons were different: harem wives with jewels in their hair and hate in their heart, courtiers with mouths full of lies, a father who knew me only as a colored stone around his neck. Those were the monsters I knew. My world didn’t have room for more.

  The drowsiness slipped off me. When I shook myself free of it, my smile was bitter smoke, my hackles raised until I thought my skin had given way to glass. Now, he seemed smaller. Or maybe I had grown bigger. My surroundings slid away, and all that was left was fire licking at the earth, the edge of a winter eclipse, stars whirling in a forest pool and the pulsing beat of something ancient running through my veins.

  “I don’t care for the ways of men and demons,” I hissed. “Your lessons are lost on me.”

  Whatever darkness my mind had imagined melted. Parrots singing. Fountains gurgling. The distant voice of a courtier droning about wars. Sound pushed up between those lost seconds, blossoming into fierce murmurs, hushed tones. What had I imagined? I searched for the tutor’s shadow splayed against the wall. I waited to see something slinking along the ground, darkness stretched long and thin over tomes and cracked tiles, but there was nothing.

  “You,” he hissed in an exhale that ended in a whimper. He backed into a corner. “It’s you. I thought…” He gulped down the rest of his words. He looked lost.

  I blinked at him, shaking off the final remnants of that drowsiness. I felt groggy, but not with sleep. A moment ago, I thought I had seen horns limned in shadow. I thought something had coursed through me in defense—a low note of music, the bass of a thunderclap, a pleat of light glinting through a bruised storm cloud. But that couldn’t be right. The person before me was just … a person. And if I had heard him say something else, saw him morph into something else, it was all distant and the fingers of my memory could do nothing but rummage through images, hold them to the light and wonder if I hadn’t slipped into a waking nightmare.

  The tutor trembled. Gone was the blocky figure choking out the light and lecturing me on silence. Or had he said something else in those lost moments? Something about weakness and demons. I couldn’t remember. I clutched a table, my knuckles white.

  “I must go,” he said, his face pale, like blood had drained from him. “I didn’t know. Truly. I didn’t. I thought you were someone else.”

  I stared at him. What did he mean? How could he not know who I was? Someone must have told him that I was the princess he would be tutoring this afternoon. But I was wasting time. He was just another tutor scared by a reputation pronounced by faraway lights in the sky. Curse the stars.

  “Leave,” I said. “Inform the court that we completed a full session, but that other commitments prevent you from teaching me again. Do you understand?”

  He nodded, his hands still raised to his face like he thought I would hit him at any moment. Then, he bowed, stumbling backward. He stood in the arch of the doorway, body cast in shadow, face an inscrutable inkblot. He bowed once more before I blinked and realized he was gone. Nothing. Not even that telltale seep of cold that invaded a room when another body had just left.

  I kneaded my hands against my forehead, rubbing out the shadows of horned silhouettes and flashing eyes. I couldn’t shake the sense that the world had split for a moment, separating like oil and water.

  A moment passed before I shook myself of that strange grogginess with a horrifying jolt.

  The announcement.

  My heart lurched. How much had I missed? I spared one last glance at the arch of light where the tutor had disappeared. Perhaps he was just more superstitious than normal. There had been a funeral, after all. That was all. That was all. I repeated the words in my head, bright as talismans, until I had all but forgotten the feeling of two worlds converging across my eyes—dazzling and prismatic.

  I pulled myself up the ladder propped against the shelves that led directly to the hollowed roof and rafters of my father’s inner sanctum.

  The wood beneath my palms was rough and scratchy. I gripped the rungs tighter, smiling when splinters slid into my hands. I am here. I am no ghost. Ghosts don’t get splinters. Heart calm, hands still, I slid through the loose space in the rafters, kicked my feet behind me and disappeared into the ceiling.

  The first time I had snuck up the rafters, my heart raced so fast, I almost didn’t hear all the debates between the courtiers, the advisers and my father. Women weren’t allowed in the inner court sanctum and getting caught would mean severe punishment.

  Over time, sneaking above the sanctum became easy. Now, I could wriggle my way through the empty space like a blind lizard. Safely perched in the rafters, I curled my knees beneath me and snuggled into my hiding spot. I didn’t know how many hours I had spent perched in this corner, listening to them. Up here, I could pretend that I ruled over them all, silent and mythic. From here, I could learn what no tutor could teach—the way power settles over people in a room, the way language curls around ankles like a sated cat or flicks a forked tongue in caution, the way to enthrall an audience. And I could understand, almost, the lives and histories scrawled into the lines and lines of the records stowed away in the archival building. The inner sanctum was
where my father met foreign dignitaries, it was where the war meetings were held, where crops were discussed and decisions were made. It was the heart of the kingdom and at its throne, my father. According to the archives, he had ruled since the age of ten. If he had siblings, the records never mentioned them.

  I flattened myself against the wall and settled in to listen. Whatever I had missed from the beginning had taken its toll on the courtiers. Even from my hiding spot, some faces gleamed white and the air was thick and sour with anxiety.

  The inner sanctum held every reminder of the war that had raged on for at least six years. Dented helmets lined the walls like iron skulls. It unnerved the courtiers. Some of them refused to sit beside the armor of the dead, but father had insisted. “We must never forget those who served us.”

  Each time I clambered into the rafters, the helmets seemed to grow in size and number. Now, they covered the walls from floor to ceiling. Even though they had been cleaned and scraped of blood, their presence haunted the sanctum. Sunlight glinted off the metal, haloing the helmets so that it looked like my father held court before ghosts.

  “Sire, we cannot abide by this decision. There must be a different way to end the war,” said Ajeet, a baby-faced councilor with a receding hairline he hid beneath a massive pagri. He trembled where he stood, small hands knotted at the base of his ribs like he’d sunk a dagger to its hilt far into his belly. Given the flash of anger on the Raja’s face, he might as well have.

  “We still have enough soldiers,” he cried. “The medics have become more skilled. We might even win this war and sacrifice only a few hundred more.”

  I frowned. Couldn’t Ajeet see the helmets on the walls? People had filled that armor. Heads, once brimming with their own hopes and joys and miseries, had worn those helmets. What was only a “few hundred more” to the kingdom could be someone else’s lover, brother or son. It wasn’t right to honor the dead with inaction.

  “You can and you will abide by my decision,” said the Raja, his voice hard. He looked careworn, dark eyes sunken so that for a moment they looked like the depthless hollows of a skull.

  “But the rebel kingdoms—”

  “The rebel kingdoms want the same thing that we do,” said my father harshly. “They want food in their bellies. Warmth in their hearths. They want their children to live long enough to possess a name. They fight us out of desperation. Who else will hear their pleas? A decade-long drought? Failing crops? Sweating sicknesses?”

  “But, Your Majesty, they turned on the capital.”

  “Exactly. Their desperation means they have nothing to lose. We are the only losers in this war,” he said. “We cannot fight from the fringes. We need to bring them here. Now, do as I say and arrange the swayamvara.”

  A wedding? His tone sent a frisson of ice down my spine. But all of my half-sisters of marriageable age are already betrothed. The only one who isn’t is—

  “—the moment the rebel kingdoms hear about Princess Mayavati’s horoscope, they will not go through with the wedding,” said another of my father’s advisers. Jayesh.

  On any other day, I liked him. His voice was soft-spoken, his perspective far more liberal than the rest of the court. But in that moment I hated him, hated him for the words that leapt out of his mouth and chained me to the spot.

  Everyone, including me, had thought my horoscope was enough to ward off any proposals. In seventeen years, it hadn’t failed me. But now the possibility of a life lived in unwed freedom disappeared, pulled out from under my feet in a matter of seconds.

  “Your Majesty, I mean no disrespect, but the princess’s horoscope is reputed to have foretold a rather disturbing marriage. One that would partner her with death and destruction. We could offend the—”

  The Raja raised his hand. “Hearsay has no place in diplomacy. Our duty is to our people and I will not see them harmed because of superstition. We need to bring the enemy to our court. We need to end this war.”

  End the war. I knew he was right. Even from the sidelines of the court, death pressed all around us. Jayesh bowed and sat down. I knew they were saying other things. Exchanging details and days, parsing out my life between them like it was ribbon fit for tearing. It was a miracle I didn’t stumble through the gap in the rafters. I knew my father better than most did. I had watched him for years. Beneath one plan was always ten. Usually I could find the cracks in his words, pry them open and see what lay beneath the layers of diplomacy, sweet talk and vengeance. But not now. His voice was monotone. Pained, almost. He spoke with the finality of stone and my heart broke beneath it.

  “The swayamvara will be in a few days’ time,” continued the Raja. “The rebel leaders will be welcomed as guests and suitors for my daughter’s hand. Draw up a new horoscope and hide any evidence of the original. Make it convincing.”

  A tremor snaked from my head to my toes. Distantly, the clang of the court notary’s bell echoed through the walls. Feet shuffled. Voices, sonorous and hard, yielded and blended into one another until only silence remained in the sanctum. I pulled my knees to my chin, back pressed against the wall. Marriage. All I knew of marriage was what I saw in the harem wives—pettiness and boredom with only the comfort of silk and gossip.

  There were times when I saw my betrothed half-sisters lost in thought, their faces aglow with hope and wonder. Maybe they thought they would be leaving Bharata behind for a new city that would welcome them with sweet-smelling arms and a husband waiting with a smile fashioned just for them. But I had listened to the stories of the wives and I saw what lay ahead. Another harem. Another husband. Another woman scurried away behind a lattice of elephant bone, staring out to a scene forever marred by the patterns of a gilded cage.

  I glanced below me at the empty sanctum. In every tomorrow I had imagined, this was never one of them. There were never any prospects beyond the life of a scholarly old maid, but that was a fate I had looked forward to—to live among parchments and sink into the compressed universes stitched into lines and lines of writing. To answer to no one.

  There was another sorrow, tucked beneath my surprise. Although I had never envisioned marriage, I had thought of love. Not the furtive love I heard muffled in the corners or rooms of some of the harem wives. What I wanted was a connection, a shared heartbeat that kept rhythm across oceans and worlds. Not some alliance cobbled out of war. I didn’t want the prince from the folktales or some milk-skinned, honey-eyed youth who said his greetings and proclaimed his love in the same breath. I wanted a love thick with time, as inscrutable as if a lathe had carved it from night and as familiar as the marrow in my bones. I wanted the impossible, which made it that much easier to push out of my mind.

  3

  FAVORED DAUGHTERS

  Somehow I left behind the rafters and climbed down the rungs and left the honeycombs of Bharata’s archives. I didn’t care if anyone saw me or asked questions. Bharata had already discarded me. I was no more than a guest in my father’s home, whittling away the time until a palanquin bore me away to a different cage.

  I was halfway to the harem when I heard feet pounding the walkway behind me.

  “Princess Mayavati, the Raja Ramchandra of Bharata requests your immediate presence in the gardens.”

  I drew my veil over my head before turning. Why did every guard always say the “Raja Ramchandra”? As if I didn’t know my father’s name. Oh, that Raja. I thought you meant one of the other rulers. Fools.

  “Now?”

  The guard blinked. He was young and handsome in a vague, unmemorable way. I had half a mind to ask if he was going to throw in his name with the pack of wolves that would come to Bharata and claim my hand in the swayamvara. I must have unknowingly grinned because the young guard masked a flinch. He probably thought I had unleashed some curse on him.

  “Yes, Princess. He’s waiting for you in the gardens.”

  That was new. My father never waited for anyone.

  “And if I say no?”

  The guard stepped back.
“I—”

  “Don’t worry, it was only a question.”

  “Does that mean—”

  “—which is to say,” I said slowly, “that I will come with you. Lead the way.”

  He turned on his heel and, after a moment’s hesitation, began marching back down the path. Guilt twinged inside me. He was only doing his duty. He hadn’t even done anything openly insulting, like some of the harem wives who would spit on my shadow.

  I toyed with the idea of apologizing, but thought better of it. My words were out and that was that. Around us, my father’s court shimmered in the early evening. Even though the sun had gone, the sky remained a rich turmeric yellow. A bright vermillion peeled at the edges of the clouds, fading somewhere into the tangle of trees. Around me, the silver reflection pools lapped up the last light and in its waters burned flat flames.

  The entrance to the gardens of Bharata was cleverly constructed so that the gates marking it looked like a snarl of roses at first glance. On closer inspection, wrought iron bloomed beneath the petals before snaking upward to bolster the trees—fig and neem, sweet almond and tart lime—into living pergolas. My father’s guards circled the gardens. In their scarlet robes, they looked like vicious trees poised to spear the sun should it fall.

  “One moment, Princess,” said the guard quickly. “I believe His Highness is concluding a discussion on matters of state with the crown prince.”

  Beneath my veil, I arched an eyebrow. If my father was discussing anything with the crown prince, it would be his extravagant ledger. Without waiting for an answer, the guard bowed awkwardly and left. The moment I knew I was alone, I left the path, following the harsh voice of the Raja to a secluded copse of trees. In the middle of the clearing, my half-brother cowered in the Raja’s shadow, his head bent as he toyed with the sleeves of his jacket.

  “How dare you embarrass us?” the Raja thundered.