The Library of Fates(24)

From the doorway, I could see the mango grove. I couldn’t stop to think of all the summers that Arjun and I had lazily wandered among those trees, picking mangoes and eating them with our bare hands.

Now this grove was the only chance we had at escape from our own home.

“Be safe,” Mala said to me as she cupped my face in her hand.

“What about you, Mala?” I asked.

“I’ll be just fine.”

“The dagger—the key—I don’t understand—”

But before I could finish asking my question, we heard the terrifying sound of wood splintering, the door cracking open.

“Amrita, it’s your duty to warn them,” Mala said.

“Warn whom?” I asked, but there was no time.

“The cartographer will tell you everything. RUN!”

When I saw the tears in her eyes, I knew: We would never see her again. But before I could even fully make sense of it, before I could register that this was our last goodbye, Arjun grabbed my hand and pulled me to the grounds.

I turned to look back, and I immediately wished I hadn’t. I saw Mala—squirming against the tight grip of a soldier, a knife against her throat. It was Nico.

My heart felt as though it stopped beating right in that moment.

“Let me go, you rascal! Who do you think you are?” she screamed.

“Arjun, we have to help her!” But he kept pulling me along.

“Don’t worry. Won’t hurt one bit,” I heard Nico say.

“No!” I shook my head in fear, but before I could even think, I saw a flash of silver, a thin line of red spreading into the shape of a smile across Mala’s neck. Terror in her eyes. She dropped to the ground just as I heard a scream, my own.

“Run, Amrita!” Arjun cried.

And I did. Branches and leaves scraping my face as we ran, harder and faster. My lungs burned, my feet ached, but I couldn’t bring myself to look back. Couldn’t bring myself to look at my beloved Mala, now gone too.

It was only once we arrived at the mouth of the Temple that I turned back to my home, the only home I had ever known. I knew for certain now: I would never see it again.

“Don’t look back!” Arjun’s voice snapped me back into focus. “Just go!”

I could hear the sounds of hundreds of feet marching through the grove, twigs and branches breaking. They were right behind us.

We descended those stairs that we had run down so many times as children, laughing and playing hide-and-seek, until finally, we were in the dark. I felt around the walls with my fingers until I unearthed a lantern and lit it with shaky fingers.

“The markings . . .” I shook my head. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

“Up there.” Arjun pointed to the ceiling, and there they were, right above us. Arrows. I had never seen them before.

“Don’t worry, Amrita. We’ll get out of here. We’ll be safe,” he said, but his voice was tense.

Safe. Just the word made me want to cry. Perhaps I would be, but what good was safe when my father was gone? And Mala! I couldn’t believe it. Even if Arjun and I survived this attack, nothing would ever be the same again. I quickly wiped away my tears.

“And the dagger—Arjun, what did she mean by that?”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “She probably gave it to you for self-defense.”

“She said to warn someone, that it was my duty—”

“We’ll figure it all out once we get out of here,” he said to me, his fingers slipping to the inside of my arm. “I know people beyond the palace walls. They’ll be able to help us.”

He was talking to soothe me. Arjun always knew how to calm me down when I was nervous or scared, but he must have been thinking about his own parents too, whether they were still alive, whether they had somehow managed to escape, whether they would be taken prisoner by Sikander. But if Sikander hadn’t spared my father, what hope was there for Shree and Bandaka?

Arjun craned his neck, frantically investigating the cavernous space. “This way,” he said, pulling us around a bend. He angled the lantern in his hand as he pointed to the ceiling.

“All those years that we played hide-and-seek here,” I said, “and we never bothered to look up.”

My eyes bounced from him to the carvings, disfigured bodies, eroded torsos, faces whose noses had been cut off. This whole place told a story, carried within it so many secrets, but we would never know exactly what those secrets were.

And what were the secrets around my life? Around my mother? Around the conditions of my parents’ meeting, their separation? What would make Sikander hate my father so much that he would simply . . . I couldn’t even think of what had happened.

Another thought occurred to me: If there was a secret escape plan in case of an emergency that I had never known about, what other truths had been kept from me?

What had I failed to observe?

There was so much I was ignorant of that it terrified me.

Like these hieroglyphs, these arrows above us—if I hadn’t been told to look for them I might have simply mistaken them for scratches in the rock, but there was a pattern to them, a chain of hints that led out of the Temple of Rain and into the kingdom of Shalingar.

What was the pattern to my life that I couldn’t yet see?