Star Daughter(66)

The final notes of the dilruba trailed off, and Sheetal opened her eyes. She hadn’t even realized she’d closed them. She was panting, sweating. She let go of the bow and took a huge breath.

Charumati had pressed her slender hands to her heart. She watched Sheetal with wide, desolate eyes. “That song.”

Sheetal leaned back against the trellis, studying this woman who was at once so familiar and also a stranger, the ethereal star princess of wonder tales, sylphlike and made of magic. Her mother’s fey expression didn’t match the crack in her voice when she’d uttered the word song.

A small, ugly pleasure welled up, matching the small, ugly voice that whispered how Sheetal had known it would wound Charumati. How she’d wanted it to.

She’d wanted Charumati to hurt the way she’d hurt Sheetal. To make her sorry.

Her bow flew into motion, the dilruba’s strings and the astral melody asking the question she couldn’t. How could you leave me behind? You’re my mom!

The music was an ambush, an indictment, a plea. It smashed over Charumati like a tsunami.

Her mother scrubbed away a tear. It was such a human gesture that even though she was sitting right there, Sheetal missed her so dearly it felt like she would snap in half.

“I wanted you to have your life with your father.” Charumati unhooked the lotus from behind her ear and offered it to Sheetal. “I could not, I would not cheat you of that. Even if it meant I must watch you from afar.”

The starry melody rang out with her grief, raw and bare.

Holding the lotus close, Sheetal wondered who the stars turned to for wisdom. “But what about you?”

Charumati selected a blue rosebud from the trellis and stripped it of its petals, as if playing he loves me, he loves me not. “Sheetal, leaving you behind was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Your father always understood we were existing on borrowed time.” She tossed the petals into the air. “Yet how was I to tell you that? How could I ask you to choose?”

“What do you mean?” Sheetal asked cautiously, her palms burning, icy fear singing thin, high notes in her veins.

“I would never have left you, had I the choice. But I did not. Every star, whether of the royal houses or not, has an aspect that—” Charumati tapped Sheetal’s solar plexus. “Your core. You can feel it, yes?”

The area beneath her mother’s fingers flared, as though someone had ignited a silver sun there. “Yes.”

“That is the part of you that illuminates the darkness. We are always connected to our positions in the sky, even as we move around and talk and live.” Charumati broke the contact between them and gripped the pallu of her sari. “One cannot stay away from it as long as I did. I began to break.”

Dad had said something like that, Sheetal recalled. Her anger sputtered. “But—but—you never even came back to check on me!”

Charumati’s discomfort distorted the starsong. “I was a fool,” she said. “Your foi persuaded me you would never be able to blend in among the mortals if I constantly pestered you with my presence.”

Radhikafoi was the one who’d kept them apart? Sheetal clutched at her moonlight lotus, her fingernails carving crescents into its petals the same way her mother’s words hacked at her heart. “Gods! Why is she always interfering in everything? Can’t she just leave me alone?”

“She is no villain.” Charumati held up a hand to stave off Sheetal’s objections. “She wished to protect you, as did I. I do not fault her for that.”

“Yeah, well, I do,” Sheetal said. She was never going to forgive Radhikafoi. Never. “I could have had you all those years instead of . . .”

She trailed off. There were no words to explain what it had felt like, being abandoned. Unwanted. Alone, with no one to guide her.

Charumati lowered her head. “I will never stop regretting having left you. Never. It was the greatest mistake of my life.”

Sheetal’s eyes blurred with tears. She hadn’t known how hungry she’d been to hear that. “It wasn’t okay. You messed up, Mom, and maybe it’ll never be okay.”

Her mother went still. “Do you mean that?”

“No! I don’t know. I thought I was fine with it, but—I’m not. I mean, you say you’re not ashamed of me, but you left me.” Sheetal poked her ragged cuticle, shame warming her. “I . . . I needed you to be my mom.”

The distance between them was as vast as a galaxy and as microscopic as a photon. How could mere words possibly cross it?

“Ah.” Charumati toyed with a stray wisp of gleaming hair. “What if I could be there for you now?”

Sheetal was sorting through too many layers of anger and betrayal to answer, and underneath them all huddled a trembling thing she wouldn’t expose to anyone, let alone the person who’d hurt her.

She mulled over her mother’s words. It wasn’t a cure. It definitely wasn’t going to fix everything.

But maybe, said that trembling thing, that part that had never stopped missing her mother, it could be a start.

Charumati grasped Sheetal’s hands, the lotus a lantern between them. “I cannot make up for the past, yet perhaps I can assure our future.” She waited until Sheetal nodded. “You will return home with the blood. I am certain of this. But let us speak of a moment beyond that.”