The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen #1)(66)

Sweet incense wafted from the temples. The afternoon sun of Bharata looked like thick yolk as it dribbled slowly into evening. The parched air had lifted. Insects practiced their enigmatic songs in stark bushes and wilted flowers.

The harem wife approached. I practiced how I would greet her. Should I bow? Should I do nothing?

“What’s your plan?” asked Kamala.

“I’m going to ask her to start a fire.”

Kamala’s eyes gleamed. “Oooh … I do love when they’re served up hot and piping and charred.”

“You and I will be gone by the time the fire starts. It’s just a distraction for Gauri.”

The harem wife was finally here.

“It is a great honor to meet you,” I began. “I am so pleased that the Princess Gauri has placed you in her confidence. It will make this next task much easier.”

The harem wife stopped, her fingers still tightly clasping the edge of her green sari. She removed it, slowly, from her face, peeling back the silk until it showed a chin that I knew wobbled when she screamed, thin lips now parched dry from repeated inhales at a water pipe, a smirk scalded into the sagging flesh of her left cheek, and eyes made for watching you burn and never once—not even to wipe away particles of dust and ash—blinking.

Mother Dhina.





23

A SHARED CONSTELLATION

All my words, whatever they wanted to be, fell out of me in a long whoosh.

“You,” I breathed.

I forgot that I was wearing the garb of a sadhvi. Mother Dhina glared and took a step back.

“How dare you speak to me in such a manner, beggar? I don’t know why Gauri placed our trust in you.”

Our trust? I had to be mishearing her. The Mother Dhina I knew had never helped a single person. I didn’t even know whether she cared about anyone beyond her daughters and they were probably married and long gone from the mirror-paneled foyers of Bharata’s harem.

I dug my heels into the ground, preparing for a slap that never came. And why should it? I wasn’t Maya anymore. That girl really had become a ghost. I was clinging only to the emotions she stirred in me—hate and anger. But also … regret. There were so many times I had waited outside the gossamer curtain of the court’s inner sanctum, waiting for them to notice that I was more than my horoscope. More than some girl they could tack all their half-remembered suspicions to.

I gathered my breath, and said something I didn’t expect:

“I apologize for insulting you and your—”

“My daughters died of the sweating sickness,” cut in Mother Dhina. “I am not Princess Gauri’s mother. In case that is what you thought.”

Parvati and Jaya dead?

I had no fondness for them. Yet I wouldn’t wish such an end to their lives either. Where had I been when the world was pulling up its roots and razing the places and people I knew? I wondered if they walked past my chambers while I slept, dreaming up nightmares and gardens that splintered underfoot.

“I am not anyone’s mother,” said Mother Dhina softly.

Her face was unguarded. Grief transformed her and for a moment, the Mother Dhina I knew sank away. I saw a woman with ruined beauty, kohl-dark eyes ringed with dryness. I saw a woman who had placed her faith in an era that had not treated her any differently, that had taken her children and left her with the double-edged sword of a long life.

“Broken-bone, broken-bone, smash her with a silver stone,” trilled Kamala in my ear. “Maybe-queen-maybe-liar, you share something with this crone. Is it blood? Is it sinew? Let me rend and taste her tissue.”

I shoved Kamala. “Why don’t you go graze?”

“Graze?” she retorted. “I do not graze.”

“Go stalk a peacock.”

“You are not very nice,” said Kamala, huffing and trotting away.

“Now you want to take away my last consolation in old age,” said Mother Dhina, her voice heavy with accusation. “You want to send Gauri into some no-man’s-land and you expect me to help.”

“She expects you to help, and if you didn’t agree with her yourself, I doubt you would have accepted,” I said. “Besides, I can assure you that it is not what either of us want.”

That much was true.

“What would you have me do?” asked Mother Dhina.

“The Raja Skanda is fond of his wives, yes?”

A cruel smile turned up the corners of Mother Dhina’s lips. “Oh yes. He adorns them with jewels and spends each night in their company. He gives them the largest rooms and drives out the old. He lets the wives stomp on those of us who had been there first, who had served the realm longest, who had yielded the palace children that didn’t live long enough to deserve names.”

Her voice had lost none of its smoke-rasp, but where it was once husky and sultry, it was now like dragged-over stones. The darkest sense of triumph snuck into my heart. Now she knew what I had known all those years.

But I felt something else too. Pity. The thought that it would even find its way to me was its own irony. Still, I felt it, a humming in my throat. A desire—though I tamped it down—to forgive her. I knew the future that had been before me, and I had escaped. Even if it felt like days since I had left Bharata, I always knew that my future there had been a lonely cage. Mother Dhina had only recently come to that conclusion.