The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen #1)(78)

“Jaani,” he said, a shaky smile curling his lips.

Amar tapped his lips twice, one hand fluttering to his heart. And then he went still. I blinked back tears, and a scream wrenched from my throat. Grief cut me, separating me like a soul from its body. I was nothing more than a being of fury and heartbreak.

“Don’t worry, my friend,” said Nritti.

She yanked the dagger from Amar’s chest. It came away with a sickening, unclasping sound. Nausea roiled in my gut. Whatever magic Nritti used kept me pinned to the wall, but that didn’t stop my limbs from trembling.

“I won’t let you languish alone. Let me put you out of your mortal misery and finish my efforts,” said Nritti. “It’s an honor, truly. You will be the last person to die. After that, death is nothing.”





27

A TANGLE OF THREAD

Nritti flicked her wrist and this time I fell to the ground, my knees slamming into the packed earth. Blood thrummed in my ears. Pain radiated through my body. I looked at Amar, sprawled across the floor, his wrist flung out. The bracelet gleamed pale as moonstone against his skin. His eyes were fixed on the fathomless ceiling above us. He may have been immortal, but Nritti’s control had rendered him into a mere echo of himself. He was worse than dead.

Nritti’s shadow fell across the floor. She was coming for me. I began to crawl toward Amar, ready to fold him to me in my last moments, but I stopped. That was what she wanted. What she expected. But that was where she was wrong. She had mistaken my strength for weakness. I loved Amar. I loved him enough that it catapulted my fear into frenzy, my hurt into hope.

I didn’t run to him because I had loved and lost.

I ran from him because I loved him. And I would not lose him.

Nritti sent a sickening wave of magic my way. For a moment, I faltered. My legs nearly crumpled beneath me. Tongues of flame lit up the floor, turning everything around me ghastly and shadowed. But I didn’t stop. I didn’t turn. My gaze was fixed on the obsidian mirror glittering at one end of the room. In the portal’s reflection, Naraka’s stone halls twinkled.

My feet stamped into the ground, closer and closer. Heat seared my lungs. The moments between escaping Nritti and entering Naraka sprang out like thorns, each one pricking at me, each one sharper than the next, each one a knot of pain. Until—finally—my hands touched the mirror’s cool surface. My singed fingers skimmed something smooth as glass … and I pushed.

*

The stolen moment from entering one world to the next raised the hairs on the back of my neck and twisted my insides, but then, I was through. Behind me, the portal shivered, the surface curdling black.

I stood in one of Naraka’s pale halls. Lanterns sprang along the stones. Beside me, a carven niche in the wall held a small statue of a mynah bird. I grabbed it and, with all the strength I had left, pitched it straight into the mirror. The surface crackled, light seaming along the edges.

I didn’t know whether it would keep Nritti away long enough for me to do what needed to be done. But I had to try. Against her, I was powerless. I was mortal. She thought that was a weakness, but I knew better.

Being mortal meant that I had a thread hidden somewhere in that tapestry. Being mortal meant that I could free myself from the tapestry. It meant that I still had a chance to claim the powers that were once mine, to fight back against Nritti.

I blinked back tears, trying to forget how still Amar’s body looked on the floor. He wasn’t gone. He couldn’t be. I flew down the halls when I saw it—the throne room. A sieve of dust coated the floor. The air settled heavy and neglected around my shoulders. Outside, the sky of Naraka was a lurid yellow and ice spidered and crackled against the ledges.

The moment my feet hit the floor, a familiar tug in my gut wrenched my gaze away from the window. The tapestry. Its pull had not diminished; if anything its strange lull from before had turned into a pulsing, writhing frenzy. It twisted in and out of sight, shapes sinking and remolding the longer I looked at them. In one second, the threads became bleached as bone, bulging out from the surface until it turned into the beveled form of a white elephant who shook his head with sorrow and bent his trunk to collect a thunderstorm. Airavata.

Color burst prismatic into the threads, each piece of silk or worsted crewel sliding into the burnt landscape of a realm I knew so well—Bharata. Again and again, the tapestry changed: a horse with its ribs poking out of its sides, garnet eyes rolling back into its head; a young man clambering onto a throne; Gauri riding in the dark; the sea of cells beneath my feet in Naraka … each individual in its confines shivering, waiting, wondering. I even saw my father in those threads. His brow was creased, his fingers skimming over the mirrored walls of his prison, wondering when he would be released into the next life. And I saw myself. Not as a former queen who had once commanded the tapestry, but as a woman with her back bent in sorrow and age, still wearing the same saffron sadhvi robes, peddling tales to anyone who would listen.

Tears ran freely down my face. The tapestry was taunting me. Every single one of those images was an invitation to fall to my knees and admit that I couldn’t save them. That I couldn’t save myself. I steeled my heart’s frantic, veering beat.

The tapestry was testing me. It wasn’t prophetic. It could augur nothing from entrails of thread. It was a design. And designs could be altered.

Somewhere in that swirling thicket was my thread.