The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen #1)(70)
I saw her on a sunny day, her arm linked in mine, laughing about something incoherent and fuzzy with memory. I saw her by the banks of a river, crooning to a sea of fish that swam silver and gold to drop pearls at her feet. Though they lasted no more than a blink, I clutched at my chest, feeling for some invisible slash inside me, some strange wound where all those memories had escaped. When I looked at her, my heart thrummed to a bruised and mournful beat, but I didn’t know why. In my head, she was a shining apsara, beloved and dear as Gauri, if not more. How could she be evil?
Nritti was still singing. Her hair was pinned back with butterflies whose wings shimmered like stained glass. She wore a salwar kameez of green silk, ringed round and round with opal gems so that the light caught and stayed with her. Her arms were outstretched, beckoning something unseen toward the napping hounds. Golden beetles darted in and out of her hair and her smile was soft, generous. Her expression so heart-stoppingly sweet that my legs twitched to run to her, to tell her my secrets.
“Stop that,” grunted Kamala, unmoved.
“Why? She’s … perfect.”
“Hmpf. She smells like blood.”
I grinned, and my head was dizzy and cottony, drunk on her singing.
“Are you jealous?”
Kamala bared her teeth at me.
The beings following Nritti soon came into view and all of my drunken thoughts stopped abruptly.
Children.
There were at least ten in the clearing, and the chatter of voices and laughter hinted at more. The hounds stood up, shaking their brindled coats, watching the crowd of children carefully. Their haunches twitched and drool puddled around them. They were hungry. Every now and then, their eyes darted back to Nritti and a sickening realization went through me: they were waiting for a signal. Waiting, I realized, to take the children.
But that couldn’t be possible. That was not how the balance worked. That was not how the threads operated. They were overlaid and knitted in their own patterns. They could never be lulled into a situation and deliberately broken. It violated the careful balance of the tapestry.
A young girl with braids that hung to her wrists stepped forward, wrapping her arms around Nritti in an embrace that tugged at my heart. Gauri had once hugged me like that. The girl was lulled by Nritti’s voice and who could blame her? It was a voice heavy with loveliness. Nritti’s song was unlike anything I had ever heard. It had no words. Instead, the sounds conjured clear images in my head. She sang of warm warrens in the ground, slick caves behind waterfalls and the stillness of water. But it was more than a melody; it was an offer of friendship, it was a … request. Nritti’s song grew faster, the tone shifting. Now she sang of the acceptance of changes, and her melody summoned images of ripe pomegranates bursting with ruby seeds and lightning slicing through the sky.
Kamala hissed and tendrils of steam rose from her flared nostrils.
I watched as the girl nodded, smiling. Her expression was clear: Take what you want.
Nritti stopped singing. Around her, the children froze, smiles slicked onto their faces, their cheeks coated with sweat. They were so entranced they probably didn’t even notice their feet torn, brambles and burrs and thorns piercing their ankles.
The butterflies in Nritti’s hair dipped in and out of sight. They were nothing more than illusions.
The golden beetles stopped moving, shimmery chitin flashing black and matte as coals. Beady eyes wriggling themselves free of magic until they took on the hunched, feathered shape of cormorants. Even Nritti’s dress began to change color … from emerald to nothing more than ash and a translucent black cowl. Her skin and face, so lovely and bright, faded. She was color-sapped, bleached white as a bone. Her hair turned stringy. The voice that had lulled all the children to this one spot lengthened into a croak. Nritti’s lips pulled back into a smile of spite. Jagged teeth peered out from the ruin of her lips and she screamed her song. But this was no song of asking, it was a song of taking, and the louder her words became, the more I saw what it was she wanted.
The moment the girl with the shining plaits nodded, Nritti leaned forward, bending as though to kiss the girl on the brow … slowly, breath teased out of the girl. Nritti laughed and that’s when I heard it. The voice of the woman from my room. It had been her. Maybe my mind couldn’t believe it before, convinced that my instincts were a broken thing. But I was right. The proof of it filled my ears, fury snaking through me.
I jumped off Kamala, about to run forward and get the girl out of harm’s way, when I felt the drag of teeth at the nape of my neck pulling me back.
“Can’t you see what she’s doing to that girl? If she won’t hesitate to do it to a child, she certainly won’t blink twice to do the same thing to you!”
“Let me go!” I said, fighting against her, but her teeth had latched on to me and I had no choice but to watch, dangling from the incisors of a demon as the little girl’s eyes widened.
I thought Nritti meant to kill her. But life wasn’t what she was taking. It was youth. The more she inhaled, the less of the girl’s ethereal sparkle was left. Her skin paled. Hair grayed. Honey voice sharpened.
Nritti pulled away, dragging her arm across her mouth like she had just finished a meal.
“Thank you,” she said, and her voice was all sweetness.
Next, she approached a boy with nut-brown and golden skin who had stood transfixed the whole time, his eyes glassy with magic. She trailed her fingers against his jaw, first softly, then—her lips curled up in a weird smile—harder, until she was scrubbing away at the color of him. The boy winced, his skin flushing crimson with the promise of blood, when Nritti finally pulled away from him. Gone was the paleness of her skin. She was shining and auric, the image of the sun as seen through cut topaz. Glorious.