The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen #1)(82)

And then I stopped. Those moments were mine, but they didn’t define me anymore. I wouldn’t let my doubts cripple me. I had to accept who I was, what I had done and, more important, who I could be. Amar’s voice wrapped around me. Trust yourself. Trust who you are. I hadn’t listened to him then, but I would now. I stared down the tapestry. I knew, now, why it had refused my touch. It didn’t know me because I didn’t know myself. And so I spoke as if in greeting:

“I am Maya and Yamuna and Yamini. I am a frightened girl, a roaring river and night incarnate,” I said. My voice was strong and clear. Around me, the tapestry shrank back, like a scolded animal. “I have been a forgotten princess, a stubborn queen and a false sadhvi. And I will not be tethered.”

Calm spiraled around me. I no longer saw Naraka’s livid sky, nor heard the scrape of glass along the halls. I had slipped into a moment of lost time, a moment for me alone, something sacred and inviolate—as precious as self. I grasped hold of my thread, untwisting it slowly from Nritti’s.

“My life belongs to me,” I said.

And then I pulled.





29

AN END. A BEGINNING.

Light seeped through my skin like water. Light pressed its fingers against the cracks in my being, patched the rifts and ravines with memory until I was drenched in color, in sound, in life. When I stepped away from the tapestry, I felt … heavier. As if all this time, my existence was an ethereal thing spent searching for myself.

It was time. Time to leave this limbo. Time to embrace the light that was neither banished nor tainted, but buried deep within me, waiting until I could claim it once more. The tapestry shivered. I thought I heard a sigh of relief echo in the halls. Before me, the threads convulsed, weaving an entirely different image—Amar. His eyes were still open and unseeing, but I knew he wasn’t lost. The tapestry was trying to tell me something. I thought about his last moments, his last actions … he had called me jaani and tapped his lips twice before his hands fluttered to his heart.

And then I understood. I knew why Nritti couldn’t destroy him.

I was his jaan. His life. Kill me, and he would be rendered useless, an echo of himself.

“I will save you,” I whispered to his image.

The tapestry sank away, shimmering into a mirror-portal where I could see the Otherworld’s reflection glittering in the distance. I could see Amar’s body sprawled out, waiting for me. I was about to push through the portal when the sound of a blade dragging through dust stopped me.

“Found you,” sneered Nritti.

I didn’t turn immediately. Her voice rippled in my head. Despite everything, I mourned her. I mourned us. I mourned for the girls that had crouched beside a riverbank and fished out tortoises and pearls. I gathered all that sorrow … and then I let it go.

“I was not hiding,” I said, turning to face her.

Her face blanched. “You’ve … you’ve changed.”

I looked down. I had changed. But not in looks. I was not splendidly clothed like Nritti and neither bangles adorned my wrists nor did tiaras sparkle at my temples. Instead, inky clouds scooted across my skin before fading softly into rose-gold and plum-velvet. Warm stars dusted my palms and storm clouds danced about my ankles. I was wreathed in light.

“So did you,” I said softly. “Is this what Vanaj wanted? He loved you.”

Nritti stepped back, flinching. “He did. And you wouldn’t save him. You were too weak to do anything for me.”

“No, my friend. It was you who was weak.”

I looked past her, to the ruined Night Bazaar in the portal. The sky should have shown the sun and moon dancing above. Instead, there was only clammy dark. And I was tired of the dark. I closed my eyes. In my mind, I pictured the mango grove outside my room in the harem. I pictured the sweetness of Amar’s kiss, the fierce look in Gauri’s eyes, Kamala’s blood-curdling laugh. Those moments were parsed pieces of myself and they held a power more potent than chaos—it was life, strong and pulsating.

I stretched out my fingertips, letting their strength leak onto the ground, pooling into golden puddles that sent a force of light between me and Nritti. She screamed, throwing her hands to shield herself. And as she did, Amar’s noose was thrown out of her hands and soared into the air. I reached out—

—and caught it.

I grinned. This time, I didn’t look back to see what I had lost. I felt the mirror-portal against my hands, let hope swell between my ribs, and then I pushed.

*

I stumbled through the portal. The sounds were deafening. Outside the small room where Amar lay, voices hollered for war, for blood. Nritti’s enchantment of hunger hadn’t ceased. If anything, it had only grown. Within seconds, they could storm through the barriers of the Otherworld and sink their teeth into the human realms. I couldn’t let that happen. But I couldn’t stop them alone.

I gathered Amar in my arms. For the first time, there was no nagging absence in the seams of my soul. I was whole. All the frayed patches of my spirit mended. The tapestry’s glittering threads had climbed through the fissures of memory and half-dreams and filled them with color. I looked at him and love filled me. I loved him with the force of a thousand lifetimes, made greater by the fact that my love was returned.

I clasped his hands around the noose. A touch of color returned to his cheeks.