Star Daughter(8)

Why couldn’t she show the world what she could do the same way Dev or Minal or anyone else got to?

The harp, she decided, trading the journal for her tuning key.

Finally, seated on the silk-sheathed daybed, the harp’s carved wooden frame resting against her shoulder and thigh, she started to play.

The air tasted sharp and crisp, sweet with moonlight. Another breath, and music flowed out, tunneling through her fingers, rushing into the strings. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t played in months; her fingers always knew just where to go. She plucked and damped, flipping levers up and down, up and down, melodies swirling through her. Octaves and open fifths, D-sevenths and delicate trills all reverberated through the room and glided out the window, borne aloft on intangible wings.

The music wound itself into her heart, unlocking its passageways, searing away her defenses. It stung, but she refused to stop. She didn’t want to. It felt like miracles, mercury, mysteries—all soaring higher and higher, swallowing everything but her.

She played through the crystalline haze, faster and faster, the strings cutting grooves into her skin. Each new memory was a note, each note a wealth of sound and light. Cooling wonder blossomed from the pain, from her body, until the room was tinted silver.

Her voice, too, rippled forth, first halting, tripping over itself, then finding its rhythm. It dissolved the lump in her throat into words, dissolved her doubts into chords. She played, and she sang.

Sheetal hated how the stars, the sky, owned this part of her. How every time she played or sang, their own melody entwined with hers, underlying it, flavoring it. But she could never hate the music, this power that let her express all the things blazing within.

There was something she hadn’t figured out how to say, about Charumati, about Dad, about herself. There was a story she had to tell, one no one else could.

Someday soon, Sheetal swore, playing even faster, she would keep it from shape-shifting long enough to pin it down.





3


The late-morning sunlight, which had made a furnace of her bed, now batted at Sheetal like a kitten’s paw, poking and pestering until she forced her eyes open. Her fingers hurt, the pads sore.

Yawning, she stretched and blinked in the unforgiving sunshine. A splash of black caught her eye. Weird. She twisted to see it better.

Something was wrong with her bed. Ink?

She rubbed her bleary eyes and checked again.

No, not ink.

Her pillowcase looked like a crime scene, if the victim were a can of shoe polish. Black gore splattered everywhere.

This was two-day-old dye, dye that had soaked into her hair and dried, but now stained her pillow, her sheets. Even though there was no way it could be.

Just like her roots couldn’t have been silver last night—but were.

No one can ever know what you are.

Sheetal wobbled into the bathroom and looked right at the mirror. Her stomach clenched.

Every dark, inky drop of the dye was gone, from her roots down to her hip-length, blunt-cut ends. Unlike the diamond flower in her nose, which only glittered when it caught the light, the thick, tangled waves spilling down her back gleamed and dazzled all by themselves. She might have her dad’s skin with its tendency toward blemishes, but this was one hundred percent her mother’s hair.

And it was shining bright for the whole world to see. Alien. Inhuman. Not of this earth. Just like the hair that had once had to be disguised by an expensive wig because it refused to accept dye. The hair that had flashed and flowed when Charumati had cast off the wig and returned to the heavens.

Like mother, like daughter.

Except Sheetal was still here.

Minal held up a lock of Sheetal’s shimmering hair, turning it so silver light scattered across the blue tile of the bathtub, then looked regretfully at her own dye-spattered, plastic-gloved hands. “Are you sure we have to do this? It’s so gorgeous.”

Perched precariously on the side of the tub, Sheetal moaned. Her head hurt. The ratty old towel around her shoulders made her neck itch. Everything smelled—all sharp, corrosive chemicals that burned her nose every time she went through this ritual. No one wanted to skip it more than she did. “Can we please just finish? I’m so tired.”

She didn’t add that it had to work. It had to.

“Sure,” Minal said, reaching for the bowl of raven dye she’d just mixed. “Even though it’s a crime to cover up fairy-tale hair. You’re making me commit a crime, you know. I hope you’re happy.”

Sheetal gave Minal her best side-eye.

“Hey, hold still, unless you want a black ear.” Minal started working in the dye. “I never really saw you like this before, you know. It was always dyed.” She came around to study Sheetal from the side. “Not going to lie; if my hair looked like this, I’d never cover it up.”

Sheetal had never really seen herself like this before, either. She did look pretty. Her mouth turned up in a tiny smile. Dev would love it.

Her smile collapsed in on itself. Except he’d never see it. No one would.

“So,” Minal said, going back to the bowl. “Last night in the bathroom. Care to explain what that was about?”

Busted. Sheetal focused on the butterfly-patterned shower curtain. She should have known Minal wouldn’t let her off the hook.

“You looked like you were about to fly away. What’s going on?”