The Library of Fates(28)
I didn’t deserve to live.
Finally, I heard Thala’s voice. She spoke in careful Shalingarsh. “You can cry for another five minutes. And you can grieve. But then we have to go. We have to keep moving. We’re not safe.”
But where would I go without Arjun? I’ve traveled the world. I can show it to you, he had said to me. I know people who can help us, he’d told me.
Who did I know in this unfamiliar world? Where would I go now?
I watched as Thala closed the hatch door to the tunnel, and the moment she did, all evidence of it disappeared. The earth swallowed it up as though it had never existed. The only thing that remained was a row of cobblestones in the small covered alleyway where we had found ourselves.
There was a finality to it that made me want to claw at the ground with my fingernails, go back in time, go back to my father and Mala and Arjun, to the familiarity of my old life. I felt an ache so intense that it felt as though I had been gutted. I had been cut clean of my entire past, like a fish flailing on land, desperate for the safety of cold blue water.
But that same terminality appeared to put Thala in a completely different mindset.
“I’m free,” she murmured, laughing, though it sounded like a cough.
I resented the giddy relief in her tone, and then I remembered the box, the chains, the rope. I couldn’t fault her for feeling euphoric.
Her voice was softer when she spoke again. “Please. If anyone knows what it feels like to lose . . . everything, it’s me,” she said, touching my arm. I finally looked up at her face. She was covered in mud, just like me, but under all the dirt, I could see her russet hair, her delicate features. A sharp nose, fine cheekbones.
“I know how difficult it is,” she said, crouching down next to me. For a moment, there was compassion in her eyes. “But it gets easier.”
“Does it?”
Her voice was gruff when she responded, as though it was difficult for her to soften, even for a minute. “The truth is, it doesn’t get easier for a long time. No one tells you that. It aches less and less every day, but it never completely goes away. But we have to keep moving. They’re not likely to stop looking for you . . . Your Majesty,” she added, furrowing her brow with a formality that appeared ridiculous given the circumstances.
“You needn’t call me that,” I whispered, still unable to take my eyes off the spot in the ground that I had just emerged from. “You saved my life. And besides, no one would ever believe me if I told them who I am. My father made sure to keep my identity hidden my whole life.”
“That might be a good thing,” she said, and I remembered what Arjun had said about keeping my face covered. I fished a scarf from the satchel Mala had packed and wrapped it over my face.
“Let’s go,” Thala abruptly said as she marched forward.
¤
I had seen the walled city every day from my window, but on my visits, I had walked only the main avenues and thoroughfares, and that in a rush, with a retinue huddled around me like a cocoon.
I had never known the sounds of Ananta.
Now I heard the metallic tinkling of wind chimes, hurried footsteps, unabashed laughter, the long, shrill wails of vendors advertising the best fruit or toy or fabric. I tilted my head to hear the whistle of wind rustling through the leaves of miniature banana and palm trees that lined the lane I was standing in.
Above us was a roof made of elaborately patterned indigo and white tiles. I looked at the whitewashed walls around us, draped in curtains of pink and purple vines. Weeds grew between the cracks in the stones under my feet. In the middle of the alleyway, a broken glass bottle, its green-blue shards shattered everywhere. Just behind me, someone had scrawled LIVE IN THE ZEPHYR OF SPIRIT in purple ink.
I looked out from the enclosed alley, and in the distance, I could see a tiled blue and white fountain, gurgling.
“Shoo! You’re blocking my path!”
Thala and I quickly scampered to the edge of the alley. A woman dressed in an orange and gold sari assessed us. There was pity in her eyes. She must have thought we were vagrants.
She pursed her lips together and reached into a gold satchel in her hand, plucking out a small silver coin with her fingers. She held the coin out to me.
“Come now, take it,” she said, impatience in her voice.
Slowly I reached for the coin, turning it carefully to inspect it. My father’s face graced one side of it.
“Now go on,” she said.
And something about that prompt, about her stern and instructive tone, made me stand up taller.
“Go, go, go! You must have someplace to be now, don’t you?”
Before I could respond, I found myself behind Thala, marching into the mandarin orange–colored light of a new dawn in Ananta.
I was startled by the sight before me: a cheerful redbrick town square, bustling with activity; groups of people chatting or playing games as they sipped their morning chai and shikanji under large green umbrellas.
Along one side of the plaza was an open-air market, with vendors selling globes of claret pomegranate, so ripe that their skins burst open with seeds. Tiny perfect green mangoes, the size of my fist. Sticks of dried chili and bunches and bunches of small yellow grapes, tumbling off the wooden carts that housed them. Fish with silver scales tiled one cart, and there were other carts and vendors still, hawking colorfully painted wooden dolls and animals made of bits of string and clay, earthen vessels for cooking, and brightly colored patchwork quilts dotted with mirrors that sparkled in the cantaloupe-colored light.