The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen #1)(69)
In the end, I did whatever I could to stave off her nightmares.
“She is happy. She fell in love and ran away, but she misses you very much. Her husband is a kind man with a large smile, who treats her as an equal and never shares his bed with anyone but her.”
Gauri laughed, more tears falling from her eyes.
“I passed through her land not too long ago, and she asked me to bring this to you and tell you this: in the Night Bazaar, trees bear fruit of edible gems and the naga women enviously stare at one another’s scales. She told me to tell that she loves you, thinks of you often and will always be proud of you. She asks that you stay safe. Always.”
Gauri pressed the necklace to her lips before tying it securely around her neck. She checked the straps of her horse before smiling at me.
“Thank you, sadhvi. I wish you well on your journey. If you see her again, please tell her that I love her and that I think of her often. Tell her that I will come back alive. For her.”
Tears blistered in my eyes, but I would not cry. I had done what I came here to do and for that I was happy. Kamala pawed the ground. There was no time to share my stories with Gauri or explain all that had happened since the last time we met. “And thank you for everything you have done for us today,” said Gauri. “I have every intention to return alive, and when I do, I will make sure people will remember you and sing your praises. Tell me how I can reward you. Where can I find you?”
I smiled. “Don’t you remember? We can always find each other in our same constellation. The Solitary Star.”
Gauri’s gaze widened, glittering with the promise of tears. I dug my heels into Kamala’s side and as we leapt into the forest, I looked back only once, to see Gauri grinning and waving, just as a veil of trees stole her from view.
24
THE LADY OF THE FOREST
Arrow-sharp tree limbs cut the path ahead of us. Darkness draped across polished jet trees and shadows shivered into existence—slow as a turning head. Only daubs of moonlight marked where the trees stopped and the sky began.
We moved quickly over the hills and scrubland. I kept my face close to Kamala’s back, taking comfort in her heavy breaths and the muscles of her flanks gaining thickness and life with each passing step. Now that Bharata was behind us, my thoughts lurked once more like monsters. I kept thinking of Amar, and a pain more real than all the scrapes along my body clawed into my skin, sinking nails deep as years.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him next to me, his hands in my hair, his lips against mine. But each time they opened, all I saw was dark. I had no idea where he was, what he was doing. My last glimpse of him remained seared into me, until my thoughts were clouded with his eyes dulling in pain and unlocking all those memories buried deep within me.
The world I had known now loomed sunless and lurid. Trees were dying. People were wilting. Cities were crumbling. And I knew that this downward spiral had something to do with the ruined balance of the Otherworld. I had to get there. Even if it turned out that everything I did would be as useful as pitting a broken leaf against a buffet of wind, I had to try.
Kamala slowed to a trot before a copse of trees that crouched over foul-smelling warrens. A hundred mushrooms pale as bodies bloomed out, teeming over the roots of trees so that at first everything seemed blanketed in flesh.
“This is where the Dharma Raja’s representatives are?”
Kamala pawed the ground, “Yes, oh yes. Can you not feel them, maybe-queen?”
“No.”
“That is because you are not trying!” scolded Kamala. “You must let yourself go. You must let yourself be dead. Imagine you are their succor and absolution, imagine their bloodlust, their eyes…”
I closed my eyes, forcing myself into stillness, into quiet. I tried to find a hole in the silence around me, some place where noise was a tangible thing, something I could cut through and cloak around me … I imagined myself as the pale mushrooms, flung out and life-leeched … I imagined myself wanted, like a thread untamed, something that needed to be resolved and tucked back in, something that needed to be hunted …
… and then I heard them, saw them, smelled them. Their paw prints, meaty stamps of blood dampening the forest floor lit up like puddles of light, and I leaned close to Kamala.
“Follow it.”
Kamala cackled and laughed, her body swelling beneath me, veins like rivulets of sapphire bulging with life, her mane a dense tangle of opaque frost that I wrapped around my wrist, holding tight as we sped through another mass of trees.
There. Waiting just outside the shadows, three massive hounds napped, heavy as boulders. In the distance, a sound lit up the dark, soft as a dream. It was a glorious and syrupy sound, something I wanted to drench myself in forever. I swung my leg around Kamala, intent on following it, when she growled in warning.
“Don’t,” she hissed, jerking her head to the dogs.
They were beginning to stir awake. Their paws twitched beneath them, muzzles trembling with some invisible scent.
I pulled Kamala behind another tree, safely at a distance from whatever was making its way toward us. I wasn’t sure what I had expected the moment we got here. I thought the hounds would be circling something or on the verge of leaving, but someone had commanded them to stay and sleep, to lie in wait.
The voice became louder and louder and then I saw her. Nritti. She was singing, summoning. She walked slowly through the moonlight and I saw her, for an instant, as if through prisms.