The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen #1)(72)

In a flash they were gone. Nothing remained of where they stood except for a burnt ring in the ground. Within seconds, oily black mushrooms sprouted through the ground, unpeeling into blackened rings. Where the children stood, poisonous plants pushed themselves from the soil—violet petals of monkshood, horse-chestnut branches with pale blossoming heads, purple columbine and sorrowful betel palms.

My throat was thick with pain and I blinked wildly, trying to restrain the tears prickling behind my eyes. Anger had gouged a pit inside me. I tamped down my doubt. Whatever the reason behind why I left Naraka, Nritti and Amar together wasn’t it. I wouldn’t let my insecurities drape a noose around my mind. I was done with that.

Wordlessly, Kamala stepped forward, and she was thin, thin as false hope. But still, she swung her neck, bringing me to her until my tear-stained cheeks were dampening her bony neck.

“There, there,” she crooned, “would that I could eat anyone that made you unhappy.”

I laughed despite myself.

“Perhaps not so much a maybe-false-queen after all,” said Kamala.

I looked down at my skin, still sooty and tracked with brambles. I could feel my shorn hair move against the nape of my neck and my robes were as tattered as before.

“What makes you say that?”

“It is in your eyes,” said Kamala. “You do not look for yourself. You look for them. A true queen knows that doubt is as unwieldy and powerful as a forest fire. It is good, good, good. Good as mangoes during summer. Better than the flesh of new brides.” She smacked her lips. “If you do not doubt, you do not see.”

“I doubted too much,” I said, walking to the scorched earth where Nritti and Amar had disappeared. “I need to get to the Otherworld. You saw her, she was taking children from the human world, who had no business going to that blasted realm, let alone dying before their time.”

Kamala nodded. “Her hunger is worse than mine.”

At this, I looked sharply at her. “What is she hungry for?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe bones, like me. But I doubt it. It’s only those that deserve nothing that want everything.”

“It’s not right.”

“What is right? What is wrong? Too complicated,” said Kamala with a huff. “Better to do as I do and not think about those things. Live eternal damnation with the utmost simplicity: Stay on your own cremation grounds and eat only the bones that you find yourself.”

“As ever, brilliant advice.”

“I try.”

“Is our questing done now?” asked Kamala, trotting up beside me. “Will you nurse your broken heart and moan over it forever? May I now take a bite of that lush-lush arm?”

I snapped my arm back. “No.”

“Good,” said Kamala. “Because I hate the taste of cowardice.”

“There’s no way we can get back to the Otherworld.”

Kamala cocked her head. “Yes, we can.”

“What, do you have a bellyful of sapphires and a double-rainbow?”

“No. But you have something that will make the world open,” said Kamala. “A sacrifice.”

That other way.

“I have nothing to give.”

“Everyone always has something to give. Always. It does not matter whether it’s worth something to anyone but you; all that matters is that it is cherished.”

Her gaze leapt to my pocket, where the last memory lay buried in the cold onyx stone. The last full memory I had. I held it close to me. Aside from the bracelet of my own hair, this was all I had left of Naraka. It had guided me to the Chakara Forest, left me with a single burning hope that I wasn’t foolish for coming here, that I had some place in all of this. This was the last claim I had to a life I could only remember in wisps. A life that, while I acknowledged, I couldn’t reconcile.

“Why couldn’t we do this earlier?”

Kamala looked at me shrewdly, one eye dark as dried blood.

“Could you have done this earlier?”

I knew what she meant. Before seeing Bharata and Gauri, I had been lugging along the ghosts of my past. But not anymore. Still, something stung me, like tiny insect bites of regret.

“What is the matter?” asked Kamala.

I pulled the stone from the makeshift pocket in my robes. “I feel like I’m losing a piece of myself.”

“Oh, nonsense.”

I glared at her. “You don’t know what happened back there. You don’t know what it’s like to feel like for a moment you were entirely whole. Like you finally knew yourself and then to have that ripped from you.”

Kamala regarded me for a moment. “Yes, actually, I do. That is the whole purpose of a curse. To remind you that you are lacking, but never know what that hollow is.”

I stepped away from her, chastened. “I’m sorry.”

“Do not be. Do not be anything. Do not mourn a life you do not know. It is done, it has happened. It is a riven bone, without meat or memory.”

“But it was me, Kamala.”

“You have more than one self.”

“But—”

“But nothing. It is foolish to cling to ghosts or spent bones. It is better to forge ahead. It is better to leave what you do not know and make yourself anew. I have slung the ghosts of memories across my back for years and it has done me no good and earned me no victuals.”