The Tiger at Midnight (The Tiger at Midnight Trilogy #1)(18)

Kunal froze, his hand hovering over his pack, not realizing he was holding the knife in his hand the wrong way. He looked down—a sliver of blood cut across his palm.

Alok chuckled and continued, oblivious. “Clearly he couldn’t handle his wine. I wish there had been girls around last night.” An ungainly snort escaped from Alok. “It’s like he wants us to think he’s lost his mind.”

It was preposterous. The mythical Viper, slayer of soldiers, warrior of the rebels.

A girl?

Those chestnut eyes stabbing a knife into the general’s heart?

He tried, but he couldn’t paint that picture in his mind. She was a trader girl from Jansa, here to deliver poppy seeds and gone just as soon. If Kunal had thought any more, he would’ve been more careful, more alert. Kunal laughed along with him, brushing aside the thoughts. The guard had seen what he wanted to see.

“Alok, get off your fat ass and help me finish packing. I need to leave with the rest before sundown.” Alok smirked at the insult but moved to help him, tossing Kunal’s sheathed weapons onto his bed.

“Looks like I’ve finally rubbed off on you.”

Kunal kept up the banter with Alok, glad to have his mind occupied with anything other than the girl.





Chapter 10


Esha looked up at the sky as the last purple of the sunset faded.

Back home in Dharka, it was monsoon season, and she checked the sky out of habit, despite knowing there would be no rain in Jansa. She settled into the small nook of the tree she had climbed, broad enough to hide her small form. The Tej rain forest was lush and thicketed with banyan trees, the perfect cover for her.

It was too risky to camp on the ground, another side effect of the broken janma bond. Strange things had been reported over the last two years: animals turning to blood when berries would’ve been their choice before, twisting tree roots that clawed at passersby in the night. Almost as if the land itself was angry.

Esha tugged out a small blanket to cover herself from bugs, pulling out the stolen report scrolls as well. She had glanced at them earlier but needed a private place to look through them. The sounds that enveloped her, the chirping and hissing animals, the breeze on the leaves of the canopy above her, all buffeted her. This was the only privacy she would find while on the run.

She squinted at the scroll in her hand, trying to take in the sloping scrawl as the last of the sunlight vanished. Already a difficult task, but someone had decided to write the cursed reports in Old Jansan, which she wasn’t familiar with. There was a part of her that was hoping her years of tutelage in Old Dharkan would help, but despite sharing a script, the two languages were different enough that it made her head ache.

Esha resisted the urge to crumple up the scroll and toss it to the family of monkeys a couple of trees down. Instead, she rubbed her eyes and rolled the scroll back up, deciding to give it another shot in the morning when she reached the next town before Faor.

Night descended and all around her the trees began to emit a faint glow. Esha took a minute to marvel as the rain forest slowly came to eerily colored life. She had heard tales of the Tej since she was a child, the glowing forest, but seeing it in person always made her breath catch. It was as if the whole of the Tej had been dipped in bright green paint.

Even as the land south was stricken with drought, the luminescence of the forest continued on, though the lights were dimmer than the last time she had been here. The scholars from the college in Mathur said that the pockets of land where magic was deeper, like the Tej, wouldn’t succumb as easily to the drought. Esha was just happy the janma bond hadn’t completely died here—it comforted her. It meant hope.

The Tej always made Esha think of nights curled up in her father’s lap, listening to tales of Dharka and Jansa—of how Naran and Naria had helped the gods churn the sea, how they’d pulled up the double peninsula that formed the Southern Lands from the water and had been blessed by the sun and moon with shape-shifting blood—a gift from the gods to bind together the land and their own people for eons.

A glint of silvery water caught her eye as Esha shifted in the tree, making her think of her favorite part of the story.

The sun and moon had lassoed the celestial river and gently poured it onto the land for Naran and Naria. The twins’ blood, cut from the palm of each twin and intermingled, had anchored the Bhagya River to the land, guiding its tributaries to give life to the west and east of the peninsula, to Jansa and Dharka. And so the janma bond had been set, renewed each year on Mount Bangaar on the winter solstice with a blood offering from the direct descendants of the twins. It was a ritual shrouded in mystery, its secrets protected by the ruling families—the only non-royals privy were the scholars of arcana in each nation’s college. It was hard to know what was myth and what was real anymore.

Still, the tale made her shiver even in the warmth of the night. They had taken the janma bond for granted, and look where they were now. Without the anchoring blood of both the royal families, Jansa was dying. And according to the scholars, Dharka was next. The next renewal ritual would be the last. It was six moons away, but they still had no solution.

Esha rubbed her eyes. It was a problem of the worst kind.

She sighed into the night, allowing its vastness to engulf her, calm her. She closed her eyes and settled back into the tree trunk, determined to get some sleep. It came for her swiftly, warm and inviting.