The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen #1)(53)

A thousand questions gripped me, but no question cut me deeper than one:

What had I done?





PART TWO

THE FORGOTTEN QUEEN





19

THE SADHVI

At first, I didn’t know where I was. But then the landscape became familiar. I had seen this place, once, from the turrets of Bharata. The stench of smoke and charring bodies filled my lungs. All along the horizon stretched nothing but gray piles of ash, studded with bone. They unrolled toward the horizon, thick as sand dunes. No light penetrated those hillocks of the dead. Small fires wrapped around them, feasting on burning logs and pine. The over-sweet scent of flaming marigolds, tulsi and mint stamped the air.

Cremation grounds.

Why was I here?

I choked back my nausea until I saw that I was standing in my own grave. Around me, like the mementoes of the dead, were small objects covered in a fine sieve of dust. I knelt down, my fingers closing around the broken bracelet of my hair that had been around Amar’s wrist. Tears burned behind my eyes.

My hand closed around other things too. An onyx stone that was no bigger than my thumb. Its edges had been sawed off into slick rock. The color was the same velvet black of Amar’s eyes. I turned it over. Two glittering pinpricks of light shimmered beneath the surface of the onyx. I traced the light, something sharp burgeoning within me. They were memories. My memories. Against everything, a half-smile quirked at my lips.

And then there was my mother’s necklace … still dotted with rusted blood. The sapphire pendant dulled to a near navy-black. I clasped it around my neck, the barest ghost of strength warming me. By now, the sun was beginning to rise and a gray dawn ate away the night.

I knelt on the ground, my knees pressed against my chest. Ripped from Naraka, my soul was left grasping. All those memories had flown through me. For one peerless second, I was whole. I knew, only vaguely, who I had been. The Rani of Naraka. But it lacked all the real weight of knowledge. It was just something I had been told. There were other things, though, that I couldn’t forget. I knew that what was between me and Amar was real. And I had destroyed him, lulled by what Nritti had shown me. We had been friends. We had been sisters. What happened?

I was no apsara like Nritti. That day, what felt like a century ago, she had told me that I was a forest spirit, a yakshini. But I had seen me. I had recognized myself … sooty dark skin. Coated with stars. And I felt that she was wrong … that maybe, she had lied. It wasn’t arrogance, just a deep-seated instinct in my chest. But instinct, so far, had betrayed me. I had nothing to go on but what two people had shouted at me before a burning tree. Even now, even after everything Nritti did, I loved them.

I clambered out of the hole, gripping the two tokens I had of Naraka. Beside me, a silver puddle of water caught the light. I had not seen myself since my time in Naraka. My father had said I looked different. Changed. But leaving Naraka had changed me too. When I looked down, the sari of darkest sapphire was gone. No anklets adorned my feet. No bracelets cuffed at my wrist. I was wearing the torn, turmeric-yellow robes of an ascetic sadhvi woman.

In Bharata, sadhus and sadhvis were considered dead. They held no records. No land. No property to claim their own. Some were even known to attend their own funerals, to signify their separation from the mortal world. Somehow, being exiled by both Bharata and Naraka had turned me into one of them. A member of the living dead. My skin was gray, slicked in ash like rough, interlocking scales. I knelt over the pool, my heart hammering. What had I become?

Black hair coiled around my forehead, strung with porcelain beads. My skin was the same sooty, dusky complexion I had always known, but there was something more. My face had changed. I had finally grown into my nose. My forehead was high. Full lips curved downward in a grimace. Thick brows framed my eyes and my gaze was an angry, furious … heartbroken thing. But I was not unlovely. And, more than anything, I began to recognize a little of that woman from the memory. The woman who had pruned a crystal rose in a garden of glass. The woman whom Amar had looked at, as though she held the universe in her gaze, as if galaxies lined her smile, as though she were myths and love and song contained in one body.

Tears burned behind my eyes. Cursed impulse. Foolish decisions. I kicked ash and bone into the puddle, scattering my reflection before I turned once more to the bleak landscape. There was no one attending the fires. Family members or loved ones who had lit the pyres had since left.

There had to be communes for sadhvis. Places where people would allow them to enter their homes. I remembered from the archives in Bharata that they were at once revered as much as they were repulsed. No one would break bread with a sadhvi. But no one would turn her away either. It was best to throw money at her feet, bow and run away before she could ask for more.

Mother Dhina’s needling comments flickered in my head. “Sadhvis hold communes with ghostly bhuts, whisper to snakes and make their beds on funerary ash. Perhaps you should join them, Maya.”

I grimaced. She had been right.

Still, how would I get to Naraka? How would I find my way back to the Otherworld?

I was still turning over Amar’s words, trying to find some sliver of reason when the darkness rustled. Something tall and bestial rose on unsteady legs, unfolding itself from the shadows and pools of flame where a dead body had charred into something nearly unrecognizable. My heart thudded in my chest. What was that? I had nothing to defend myself. No weapon on hand except for the blunt end of my mother’s necklace and I knew that would do nothing.