The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen #1)(34)

I shivered at the thought of yanking the threads. I was in no rush to condemn someone. Amar stepped toward a door I hadn’t noticed until now, inky black and studded with pearls and moonstone. He pushed it open and a chilly gust kissed my face.

“I promised you the moon for your throne and stars to wear in your hair,” said Amar, gesturing inside. “And I always keep my promises.”

*

Infinite. That’s how it felt to stand there in a realm, a field … a marvel … of stars. Cold light spangled the space around us. Darkness so old that the shadows felt like relics twisted between the lights. The air was scentless, laced with frost. We stood on nothing but air and yet it was solid. In the half-light, Amar’s face glittered and starlight clung to his hair. I stared around me, my heart skidding. The things I had called bright and blind enemies shimmered all around me. How many times had I cursed them? And now I was in their world.

Amar reached for my hand and put something in my palm. I looked down: string.

“For conquering,” he said.

I stretched the string into a taut line.

“Conquering what? Insects?”

“No. Your enemies.”

The stars. Fate.

The string drooped in my fingers.

“Why do you hate them?” he asked.

“If Akaran has its eyes and ears in Bharata, then you already know,” I said darkly, thinking of the horoscope that had shadowed the past seventeen years.

“Do you believe the horoscope?”

“No.”

I meant it. There was no proof. Sometimes, I still thought it was a hateful rumor born of Mother Dhina’s jealousy.

“Then why hate the stars?”

“For what they did. Or, I guess, what they made other people do,” I said softly. “For making me hated without reason and without evidence. Wouldn’t you hate distant jailers?”

“I don’t believe they’re jailers. I believe the stars.”

“Then you’re a fool to marry me.”

He laughed. “I believe them, but I choose to read them differently.”

“I don’t see any happy way to explain death and destruction.”

“Doesn’t death make room for life? Autumn trees die to make room for new shoots. And destruction is part of that cycle. After all, a devastating forest fire lets the ground start anew.”

I stared at him. No one had ever said anything like that in Bharata. No one had ever challenged the stars. And yet, the light contoured him, clung to him, like the stars knew and believed everything he said. Maybe I believed him too. All I had done was curse the stars from a distance. I’d never thought to reinterpret what they meant. I turned around, as if seeing the night sky for the first time.

Gently, Amar placed the string back in my hand. He pointed at three stars: one on my right, one in front and one on my left.

“Bind them. Conquer them.”

The stars were on completely different sides of the room. One, with blue edges, dangled above me; the other had a core of fire and the last was nothing more than tendrils of bright smoke.

“They’re too far apart,” I said, holding up the small piece of string. “That’s impossible.”

“Then make it possible. Reinterpret them. The room will answer.”

“It’s not even a room—” I started, gesturing across the vast expanse of sky.

And then I stopped.

It wasn’t a room.

… yet.

As if answering my thoughts, the space around us shrank, dragging the stars together so that their celestial glimmer was lost and they looked like little more than shining cuts. Light still seeped out, but the room felt brighter. The three stars were closer, but still not close enough to tie with a foot of string.

I reached out, my thoughts whirring. Reinterpret them. I used to think of the stars as cruel and fixed ornaments, but what about the sky that held them aloft? Could I … touch it? Push past it?

My fingers grazed the night—cool and sweet-smelling, perfumed with the scent of vespertine flowers that only opened their blossoms to the moon. And then I stepped forward. I gasped. I could move in the night gaps, like they were hallways themselves. Quickly, I slid into the rifts between stars. I imagined the space as a sphere bedizened with little astral ornaments, and soon those heavy celestial bodies became small as candies held in one’s palms. The thread easily looped them together.

I grinned, turning to Amar. Between us was a sphere thick with stars and around us twined soft shadows like cats weaving between ankles.

“Magnificent,” he said.

His gaze was full of awe, but I saw something else in his eyes. Longing. Then, he reached into the sphere, drawing out the string with the three stars. He twisted them between his hands, fashioning a constellation no larger than a sparrow. Amar stepped forward, sliding the stars above my ear. It cast a glow that turned his face silvery and beautiful.

“There, my queen,” he said. “A constellation to wear in your hair.”

*

We spent the rest of the day lost in that room of old planets and forgotten meteors. I stepped across flattened comets and spilled haloes of things that may have burned for centuries or may have always been illusions. It didn’t matter. For the first time, I felt like I was seeing things differently. Amar kept testing my perspective. He clasped nebulas in my hands and told me to think of them as fate.