The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen #1)(38)

The door closed with a soft thud and I stood still, letting the silence twist around me. The tapestry hummed. I turned my back to it, letting it guide my hands as my fingers hovered over the thread. The words of my horoscope needled in the back of my conscience. A marriage that only brings death and destruction. Destruction was letting Vikram become a ruthless warrior who would raze villages to the ground and hoard power in the name of “peace.” I wouldn’t let that happen. I gathered my strength and held on to my breath as though it were an anchor linking me to a thousand places at once.

And then … I pulled.

Nothing.

I opened my eyes. The thread wouldn’t budge. Like someone digging his heels into the ground. I focused on the thread and yanked again, trying to wrap around its root, its length—but it would not yield.

My heart slammed. It wasn’t the thread … it was me. I wasn’t strong enough. The tapestry and the palace had judged and deemed me unworthy. Weak.

Amar had said to trust myself. I had, hadn’t I? But other thoughts had crowded my mind. Thoughts of Bharata, thoughts of what I was doing. Where I was … who I was. All my doubts and insecurities. I dropped the thread and it fluttered softly against the others. I spread my fingers across the tapestry, as if I could will it to listen. To give me another chance. Or, barring that, the strength just to move one of its pieces.

In response, the tapestry quivered, a glistening ichor seeping through the threads, dampening them. Light wavered from the dangling thread and a high-pitched hum settled over the tapestry. I stepped back, heart racing. What was happening? Had the fact that I couldn’t even move a single thread broken the whole thing?

Light burst through the threads, dazzling me with a thousand streams of color so vivid that I could feel it seeping warmly across my fingers—shards of evening sky, the cool frost of lonely mornings, drenching nectar-sticky heat. I could feel the color as if it were a dimension of time and space, heavy and solid, full of flavor, of life. It snuck under my tongue like a bright candy, and voices—loud and soft, whispers and howls, of passion so grand that it tottered on the edge of mythic and sorrows so plangent they trailed their own shadows. I couldn’t take it. I stumbled backward.

The light draped around me, murmuring, muttering. It pushed against my closed eyes, like it was trying to pry my sight open, to show me something. But I already guessed what it would show and I hated it. No matter how badly I wanted to belong, how dearly I wanted to draw breath beneath split skies leaking magic and pretend like I had some claim to it, it wasn’t for me.

I didn’t belong here.

In a blink, the pull of the tapestry was gone, like it had withheld all of its magic and transformed into an ordinary skein of silk. The threads fell flat, all their enigmatic song sewn silent. I dropped my hands uselessly, watching dull light from the window spill onto the floor. The weight of the decision settled across my shoulders like a thorny mantle. My hands clenched, frustration gathering steam and fury inside me.

What would I tell Amar? That no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t do the one thing he asked? I felt so caged and foolish that I slammed my palms into the tapestry.

A clap of thunder rattled the sky. I jerked my head up. Thunder? It was hardly overcast a moment ago. As if answering my thoughts, the bruise-colored storm clouds melted away.

I stepped back, cold clattering over my skin. The change in the clouds felt … deliberate, as if in response to me. That couldn’t be right. Nature didn’t hear thoughts and adjust itself accordingly. Did it?

Facing the open sky, I thought of rain, and a drizzle started to fall softly. I imagined a blazing hot sun, and rays fractured the sheets of lightning. I gasped, stumbling backward.

What was happening?

The weather was becoming more erratic by the second, fumbling from storm to sunshine, from clear to chaos. Outside, the sky swelled, looming and crackling like some disjointed beast, melding against the palace, spreading blackened veins across the marble in an attempt to reach me.

My skin prickled. The air was clammy and heavy, suffused with magic. Alive. Possessive. I felt like all of the palace’s watchfulness had ended and now it was turning on me, eager to swallow me whole within its walls.

My heartbeat quickened and I ran from the throne room. But the magic followed, unrelenting. The floor gathered around me, shifting beneath my feet into small hillocks, slick puddles. The balustrades of the palace creaked into life, bending and snapping into trees of ivory and alabaster.

All around me, the doors swung open. Doors that had never once budged when I had tried to open them. Doors that revealed human and animal skins hanging from glinting hooks in the wall. Doors that had nothing behind them but fire unending.

I ran so fast, I almost careened straight into the double doors of the glass garden. Pushing them open, I ran through the crystalline plants until I got to the banyan tree. I tried to clear my head, but my thoughts were no clearer than wisps of smoke.

“Maya—” called a voice in the distance.

The voice was distorted. I flattened myself against the banyan tree. A figure approached me, its edges blurred. I screamed, tripping over a quartet of glass roses, shattering them. Spikes of glass dug into my heels, and a howl ripped from my throat. Hands reached for me, but I fought them off. Desperate. Clawing against the stranger, but the hold was firm. And soon, my vision faded to black.

*

Voices broke through my foggy dreams.