The Library of Fates(40)

I wondered how many people made this journey despite themselves, handicapped by grief, by pain, by injury—all the things I had never been exposed to before today.

I noticed Thala far ahead of us, stumbling on a jagged cobblestone. My impulse was to run to her, but she caught hold of the wall next to her, stabilized herself, and continued to slowly walk ahead.

Varun watched Thala with concern in his eyes before he turned back to me. “People say that you can ask for anything on the top of Mount Moutza. It doesn’t matter where you come from, what you believe, what faith you adhere to.”

“What do you ask for—since you make the journey there all the time?”

Varun hesitated. “I lost someone I loved too. Long ago. I hope one day she’ll come back to me.”

I wasn’t sure why I felt a hint of jealousy when he said this, but I put it aside, reminding myself that he was a stranger, free to love whomever he wanted.

I thought about Sikander, realizing that it wasn’t the first time this very land was in crisis. “Except we don’t have Maya the Diviner to help us this time,” I said wistfully.

“But we do.” Varun turned to me. He grinned that alluring grin and watched me carefully. “It’s a very special place. You’ll understand when you get there,” he said.

I paused, struck by the similarity of his words and Meena’s. But before I could question him, I heard a thud and looked ahead of me.

Her hissed whisper cut through the ambient sounds around us. “I can’t,” it said, and there was Thala, crumpled into a ball on the earth.





Seventeen



I RAN TO HER, collapsing to the ground next to her. “Thala! Thala, are you all right?”

I reached for the skin of water, handed it to her, but she could barely lift her head. I tilted her face back to look at her. She had a smile across her lips, but her eyes were closed. “Feeling so strange . . .” she mumbled. “Out of sorts. Dizzy.”

“It must be the heat,” I said.

Varun reached down, pressing his palm against her forehead, a hint of uncertainty crossing his face. We helped her up, guiding her to the nearest fountain. The way her body slumped against it when we carefully sat her down frightened me.

“Thala, Thala!” The pitch of my own voice was enough to induce a terror in me. She was practically the only person I knew in this world. If something happened to her, I would be completely adrift. I forced myself to maintain my composure, but my heart was already racing with fear.

“Thala, I know you’re tired. We can rest here for a bit. And when you feel better, we’ll start walking again,” I whispered to her, and she merely nodded.

I turned back to Varun. “She’s been through quite a bit today,” I said to him. “I think it’s probably just exhaustion. Maybe if we rest here—”

Varun shook his head. “No, that’s not it,” he said. His voice was coated in worry, his brow furrowed as he carefully examined Thala.

“What do you mean?”

“Her eyes . . .” He gestured to her, and some sort of recognition registered on his face. “I’ve seen this before. Your friend—she needs chamak.”

“She needs chamak?”

“Look at her eyes, her skin . . .”

I carefully inspected Thala’s face. Her skin was paler than I remembered it, beads of sweat glistening across her forehead. But it was her eyes that terrified me. Her irises were large and black. I placed two fingers on the hollow of her throat, as Mala had once instructed me to do to measure out my own heartbeat, and the swift pounding of Thala’s pulse, beating like a war drum, terrified me.

Varun reached for my arm, touching it gently as though to brace me for a jolt. “She’s been taking chamak—a lot of it—and from the look of her, she hasn’t been properly weaned off it. Look at the goose bumps on her arms, the way her teeth are chattering. She’s very sick, your friend,” he quietly said.

I anxiously watched Thala again, and I knew he was right.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“There are two options. We could give her more chamak to stabilize her, but the results would be temporary, and we’d have to keep giving her more and more. Taking risks with chamak can do severe damage to her body’s natural balance. Besides, it looks like it’s already too late for that, given her symptoms. At this stage, if you give her chamak, she might stay in this state indefinitely—hallucinating, her mind still active but her body unable to function. The best thing would be simply to wait until it’s out of her system, but I should warn you—”

My head snapped back in his direction. “Warn me of what?”

“It’s very difficult to wean one’s body off chamak. It can sometimes be deadly. And even if she does survive, it’ll get worse before it gets better.”

“You mean she could—”

“She could die.”

His words hit me like a slap, blood draining from my face, terror filtering through my body. I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t speak.

“She’s cold now, but soon her body will burn up from the inside. It’s excruciatingly painful. A medicine man can help with the pain, maybe give her some herbs to help boost her immunity, but there’s no way of knowing whether she’ll—”