The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen #1)(52)

“I want to lie beside you and know the weight of your dreams,” he said, brushing his lips against my knuckles. “I want to share whole worlds with you and write your name in the stars.” He moved closer and a chorus of songbirds twittered silver melodies. “I want to measure eternity with your laughter.” Now, he stood inches from me; his rough hands encircled my waist. “Be my queen and I promise you a life where you will never be bored. I promise you more power than a hundred kings. And I promise you that we will always be equals.”

I grinned. “Not my soul then, Dharma Raja?”

“Would you entrust me with something so precious?”

I was silent for a moment before reaching for my foot and slipping off the worn slipper. “Here, my love, the dowry of a sole.”

I began to laugh, giddily, drunkenly, before he swallowed my laughter in a kiss. I melted against him, arcing into the enclosure of his arms, my breath catching as his fingers entwined in the down of my hair. The music of the songbirds could not compare to the euphony billowing inside me, pressing against my bones and manifesting in a language of gentle touch.

In Naraka, he drew me into the small universe of his embrace, laying kisses at my neck, the inside of my wrists, the dip in my abdomen. Now, the hum had settled to a lustrous melody, ribboning us like silk. And when we clung together, we drank in the other’s gaze, reveling in the secret hope and happiness that blossomed in the space between our lips.

*

Amar wore many names. Samana, “the leveler”; Kala, “time”; Antaka, “he who puts an end to life.” But I had called him jaan, “my life,” and kissed the gloom from the tips of his fingers. Together we had sleeved souls in new bodies, slipped the soul’s crux into a golden-ruffed sunbear or a handsome prince or a troublesome gnat. Together, we danced a quiet happiness, fashioning a room for stars and skimming our palms across cities kept behind mirrors. We drank ambrosia from each other’s cupped palms and tended to our garden of glass. And on and on it went.


I remembered …

… how acrid heartbreak tastes. I remembered the walk to the edge of the reincarnation cycle—the chill of marble, my plumed breath, betrayal prizing apart my heart.

I remembered fury enthralling me body and bone. I remembered light lapping over my eyes and my soul unraveling, fracturing into prisms of amethyst, lapis, topaz. I remembered a needling twinge of regret and the secret, terrible knowledge that somewhere in Naraka my abandonment would leave behind a chasm of obsidian threads—a chronic rift.


I saw …

… Amar slumped onto his throne, refusing to look at the empty seat on his left. Gupta was at his side, his face pinched, skin sallow.

“Go over every birth record, every horoscope until we find her again. I want—” He stopped, jaw tightening. “I need her back. I made a mistake.”

“How will I know it’s her?”

“The stars will not lie,” said Amar. “A girl partnered with Death, a marriage that puts her on the brink of destruction and peace, horror and happiness, dark and light. Find her.”

“But even if you bring her back, how will she know—”

“I have taken care of that,” he said sharply.

In his hand was a small branch and a fledgling candle. “I have preserved every memory in the heart of Naraka.”

“A fitting place,” said Gupta in a small voice, but he frowned. “But then what? Mortals cannot receive such divine information. It destroys them. Not even you can break those sacred boundaries.”

“There is a way,” said Amar, breathing deeply. “I cannot tell them to a mortal. But if she becomes immortal…”

“Ah … clever,” said Gupta. “The Otherworld may stop you from divulging those secrets, but a mortal that does not pass through the halls of the dead would eventually be deathless.”

Amar nodded. “Sixty turns of the moon. A handful of weeks in our halls. And then I can reveal the memories of her past life. Her powers will be restored. She will be a queen once more. But until then, she needs protection. Nritti will no doubt try to find her. She knows she has gone missing. She can feel it, and it fuels her destructiveness. Nritti can never know where she is. Or who she was.”

*

I jolted backward, my breath knocked out in a rush. Spots of light appeared each time I blinked. I shut my eyes tightly, but the images wouldn’t relent. All the love and resignation of my former self, each memory of my past life drifted through me, fitting into my mind like lost pieces of a grand puzzle.

But it was short-lived.

The memories fled as quickly as they came, leaving only ghostly imprints. Like plunging into a vat of warmth before being thrown back into the cold. I shivered. My soul was nothing more than a patchwork of half-memory dipped in rime. Incomplete. And made worse by the knowledge of its own fragments.

Around me, there was nothing but the expanse of evening sky. Stars were beginning to shoulder their way for a place in the tapestry of night. Cold that had nothing to do with myself seeped around me. It was frigid. And yet, the air was full of smoke.

Naraka was gone. No marble met my feet, no splintered branches filled with burning memories fell across my ankles. There was no Amar, pulling my face to his—one last kiss before I damned him. There was no Nritti. My hands curled into fists. Now here I was. Exiled. I had no idea what Nritti had planned, but Amar’s words—save me—clung to me. My head was spinning with questions … why had I left Naraka? What happened?