The Library of Fates(72)

When it was clear that he wouldn’t explain, I said quietly, “It’s the only way, isn’t it?”

“There are many ways, but you have to ask yourself if this is the one that feels right.”

I hesitated for a moment, taking it all in.

“I want you to enjoy it,” he said. “Your time here on this Earth. You don’t want to end it by taking someone’s life.”

“I don’t want that either. So my life really is about to end.” I let the thought sink in.

“You don’t really know how it ends yet,” he said before he slowly disentangled his body from mine, propping himself up to look into my eyes.

As he did, I sensed the end of our meeting, and once again I felt bereft, alone.

“Find me again once you’ve carried out your task,” he said. His hand cupped my cheek, and I nodded, watching him transform back to Saaras before he took off.

I sat in the grass for a long time by myself, realizing that there wasn’t just one death. There were hundreds, if not millions of deaths in a person’s life. They varied in degree; they took on different forms. But they were ultimately all variations of the same few things: saying goodbye, change, sacrifice.

I realized something else as I sat there: There was a part of me that wanted to stay forever with Chandradev and Thea. I wanted to watch their affection and love for each other grow. I wanted to know my parents, every part of them. I wanted to feel like a normal person, but I knew I never would again.

Maybe nobody ever really gets that chance.

¤

When I returned to our room, Thala was up, reading a book, waiting for me.

“I have to prevent my parents from ever being together,” I announced.

She put her book down and took a deep breath. I braced myself for an argument. “I know what I came here to do, but I’m sorry, I can’t,” I told her. “It’s not who I am.”

“I know,” she said.

I was taken aback. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Can you see anything?”

Thala closed her eyes, and I realized how much I’d come to rely on her extraordinary gift.

When she opened them, they were gray. “All I can see is that it won’t last between Thea and Sikander. That they don’t have to be together forever in order to change Sikander’s fate. Just long enough that Chandradev can return to Shalingar.”

I walked to the window, and Thala followed me.

In less than an hour, a new day would break over Macedon.

But right now, the moon was still full, and the campus was drenched in a radiant silver light.

“Where will I go, Thala? If I’m never born in this new version of time, where do I go?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and we were both silent for a moment. We hadn’t slept in ages, and we were weary and still looking for answers to questions that baffled us.

And then, I heard a voice.

“Who are you?” it said.

We both turned at once. Thea was standing by the door, her hand against the doorframe, fear and confusion in her eyes.





Thirty-Five



“I . . . DON’T KNOW if you’d believe me,” I told her.

“Try me,” Thea said, sitting down on the bed across from us.

Thala glanced at me before she got up. “I’ll leave you two for now,” she said before she walked out of the room.

“I don’t know how to put this,” I said to Thea, “but I come from the future.” I looked at her to see if she would simply laugh at me, but she didn’t.

“I never knew my mother,” I started.

She was watching me carefully, waiting for me to go on, and so I continued. I told her about my childhood, about my father, about Shalingar. I told her about the betrothal to Sikander, about Arjun, about the attack on Shalingar Palace. I told her about meeting Thala and going on a journey. I told her about the temple at Mount Moutza and the desert and the Janaka Caves and Varun.

As I did, and as she listened, it was the strangest thing: I could feel myself disappearing. Maybe it was that I already sensed things wouldn’t be the same after I told her everything, but it was more real than that. I was asking her to do something that would erase me from the universe, negate me from the record of time, and I was hoping with everything inside of me that she would concede.

Finally, I finished my story.

“I’m the child that you and Chandradev will—would have had one day. Except, in that version of the story, Chandradev leaves Macedon . . . without you. And he raises me alone before he’s killed by Sikander’s men. I never get to be with or even meet my mother. We were separated amid this . . . tragic turn of events.”

I looked up at her, still trying to make sense of it: the fact that we were sitting face to face in a dormitory, me from the future, her from this present. A mother and a daughter meeting across time.

“You’re saying I have to marry Sikander? Otherwise, he turns into some . . . despotic ruler?” she quietly asked. At first I thought she was mocking me, but when I saw the look on Thea’s face, I could tell that she believed me.

“You don’t have to do anything. But I had to tell you what happens if you don’t marry him.”

“And if I do stop speaking to Chandradev? Cut him out of my life?”