We Shall Be Monsters, page 13
He shuddered, goosebumps erupting over his arms. Kajal felt rather sorry for his current state, and that she hadn’t thought to bring anything for him to wear. At the time, clothes had seemed the least of her problems.
Then it all crashed down on her.
She had succeeded in reviving a prince, but not the prince the rebels wanted. She had been so sure she could deliver Advaith to them come dawn and they would get her Lasya’s body in return. But this wasn’t Advaith.
Did that mean they wouldn’t retrieve Lasya until they’d found and revived the real crown prince?
Kajal straightened and touched the scratches at her neck. No. She didn’t have time for that, not with a Meghani and Vadhia soldiers at the university, and not with her sister’s bhuta already hunting for her next victim.
She laughed, low and helpless.
“You didn’t answer me,” Tavinder pressed. “About why and how I’m here. About why you were searching for Advaith. Is he…Is he the one behind this?” Hope leapt into his eyes, and he looked around like his brother would materialize in front of him.
Kajal was getting tired of being the one to deliver bad news. “Advaith is dead. That’s why we were searching for his body in the first place.”
“De—” Tavinder’s voice choked off, as if he were physically incapable of saying the word. He flexed his arms against the rope again. The chair creaked ominously.
“He can’t be,” Tavinder whispered. “You’re mistaken. I went to fight for him so that he wouldn’t die!”
“It seems like neither of us has the answers we want.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, beneath where a headache was forming. “Look, I…I’m going to get you something to wear, maybe some food”—her stomach made an inquisitive noise—“but the situation right now is very delicate, and I need you to stay here. Stay,” she repeated, holding her palm out toward him as if she were giving a command to Kutaa.
“He can’t be dead,” he kept mumbling, eyes wild.
Kajal made a silent gesture for Kutaa to follow her. “Stay,” she said again, shutting the door on Tavinder’s bewildered expression and locking it behind her.
* * *
Hoping the dog’s abilities were up to the challenge, Kajal told Kutaa to sneak ahead and sniff out any guards. She kept to the dark corners and slanted shadows of predawn, following the vague shape of Kutaa’s tail as he led her through a winding path back to the dormitories.
Kajal’s heartbeat didn’t settle until she reached Jassi’s flat. The professor was fast asleep, snoring, her body akimbo. Kajal made quick, silent work of Jassi’s clothes trunk, but even her longest pair of salwar wouldn’t be big enough for Tavinder.
Gathering her resolve, she tiptoed down a flight of stairs toward Dalbir’s room, thankful they’d pointed it out yesterday. The crack under the door was dark, and when a disheveled Dalbir answered her quiet knock, there was a pillow crease on their cheek.
“I have an exam today,” they muttered.
“Do you have a spare set of clothes I could borrow?”
Dalbir blinked owlishly. “What?”
“I spilled cha in my clothes trunk, and I don’t have anything else to wear.”
“That’s what you’re worried about at”—they leaned out to gauge the sky beyond their doorway—“five in the damn morning?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Nightmares. I have this recurring one where I’m being chased by a giant festering foot with a hunk of bone sticking out the top, and I think it’s trying to get me to scratch an itch on its sole—”
Dalbir interrupted her with a long sigh and disappeared into their room. They returned with a pair of dark-blue jodhpurs and a long green kurta.
“Don’t stain them,” Dalbir warned before firmly closing the door in her face.
Hugging the clothes to her chest, Kajal hurried back to the laboratory with Kutaa while the fringes of the sky tinged gray with light. Soon Jassi would wake, and Kajal would have to admit what she’d done. Would have to face the rebels.
Unless she found some way to spin this.
Her mind frantically sputtered with ideas, but as she strode toward the laboratory and reached for the key in her pocket, they fell and scattered like marbles.
The door was open. Where the knob and lock should have been was a ruin of broken wood, as if a fist had punched straight through.
“Shit.” She ran into the laboratory, dropping the clothes at the sight of the empty chair, the frayed rope, the missing soldier’s uniform.
So he’d discovered his revenant strength after all.
Kajal scanned the worktable to see if anything else had been taken. Her notes were still there, glaring accusingly up at her.
Oh Raja Hiss, we’re really in it now.
Kutaa’s hackles rose at her agitation. But while she turned in a tight, panicking circle, wondering where Tavinder could have possibly gone, the dog went to the bloodstained cloth and sniffed at it.
“Can you follow his scent?” she asked hopefully.
In answer, the dog ran through the door. Kajal’s eyes were hot and itchy, her body buzzing with lack of sleep, but adrenaline spiked through her veins as she followed.
She couldn’t let Tavinder escape. Couldn’t let any of the Vadhia soldiers see him, in case they somehow recognized the former crown prince. There were portraits of him in Malhir, Vivaan had said. It was a possibility—one she couldn’t risk.
The air was crisp, and her slippers slapped against the ground as she ran behind Kutaa. When she spotted a Vadhia uniform in the central courtyard, she quickly pulled herself and Kutaa into a niche. She palmed her scalpel, but the soldier passed by without noticing them.
Kutaa steered her through the Elephant Court, to the door that led to the old palace. The lock had been crushed by an impatient hand and now lay mangled on the ground. Kajal stuffed it into her pocket and followed Kutaa through the archway.
The hexagonal gardens of the royal quarters were both overgrown and dead, the water in the stained fountain long dried up. Along the perimeter were shrubs of still-blooming sky flower, purple stalks of fountain grass, and waxy red iresine bushes. Pandan leaves rustled together in a chorus of frenzied whispers.
Kutaa didn’t falter as they brushed by the tangled, gnarled plants and into a series of long corridors full of marble relief panels and colorful murals. The paint was cracked and faded, depicting scenes of elemental spirits dancing in pastoral landscapes, of hulking daityas in armor, and of horned danavas crafting illusions in the sky. One showed a young woman riding a tiger demon, scimitar held out for battle. Another showed an antlered boy kneeling in the light coming from Svarga above him.
The corridors had been built in a zigzag shape—likely to slow down intruders and assassins—and Kajal was dizzy by the time she and Kutaa stumbled upon the back gardens. They were in the same state of overgrown neglect, with a wall covered in spiderwebbing ivy. Kutaa stopped at the base of it, whining.
“I’ll go on ahead,” she panted. “Stay here.”
Kutaa restlessly paced while Kajal climbed the thick natural trellis. Some of the vines gave way under her hands, making her scrabble, but she’d had more than her fair share of launching herself over walls to escape precarious situations.
She perched at the top and caught her breath. There was just enough light now to reveal a figure running north.
“Idiot,” she snarled once she dropped into the long grass. “Where’s he even running to?”
His legs were longer than hers, and though she had the advantage of not being dead for nearly twenty years, he had that frightening new strength he shared with Kutaa. She had to put her head down and tap into the heated resource of her fear to spur her faster. Grass whipped at her legs as she descended the slope of the promontory with a speed that would have her falling ass over crown to the bottom if she lost even a sliver of control.
She must have made an awful lot of noise, or else Tavinder sensed her gaining on him, since he looked over his shoulder. She had no breath to curse him out or tell him to stop, but she made sure her expression screamed it for her.
The earth shivered under her feet. Kajal lost her balance and tripped forward, scraping an elbow against the ground. Something wrapped around both her ankles, just like the clawing, grasping bhutas on the Harama Plain. She twisted around and pulled out her scalpel, only to freeze at what she saw.
Roots had punctured through the earth and formed long, knobby hands. They encircled her ankles, holding her in place.
“What—?”
More roots slithered from the loosening soil, forming a head, the long, waving grass hanging from its skull in the likeness of hair. It stared at her with hollow eyes that wept dirt.
A yaksha.
She briefly stayed her hand. But Tavinder was getting away, and her future hinged on him. Lasya’s future hinged on him.
Kajal lunged. She sliced and stabbed at the root hands, careful not to accidentally jab herself. The yaksha writhed, its roots groaning in pain. The spindly, strong fingers tightened briefly before she hacked one off and it twisted away. She kicked out of its hold and scrambled onward.
She couldn’t stop to question why a yaksha, of all things, had attacked her. She thought she heard Tavinder swear as she once again gave chase, following him to the rise of a nearby hill.
The sun finally broke in the distance like the hint of yolk in a cracked egg. At first, Kajal thought that was what was distorting her vision, but then there was a flurry of disturbed air and she nearly tripped again in astonishment.
Butterflies flocked around her. Dozens of them, white and glowing, harmless yet trying desperately to get in her way. She batted at them, but they kept closing in, wings beating furiously at her skin and hair and clothes.
She knew the look of them, the feel of them. One of their kind had led her to what she’d thought was Advaith’s body.
What is going on?
While Kajal tried to swat them away, the distance grew between her and Tavinder.
“I’m not going to hurt him!”
She didn’t know what made her say it, why it felt like the only thing she could say. Almost reluctantly, some of the butterflies danced away while others continued their gentle battle. She picked up the pace, arriving at the base of the hill as Tavinder crested the top of it.
“Stop!” she yelled.
He did stop, but only to turn and fling his hand out toward her, a move halfway between offense and defense. More of those butterflies surrounded him in an aura of shimmering white.
And then she realized—it wasn’t just the butterflies. As the sun climbed behind him, the honey of his eyes sharpened into something pale and inhuman, like the ghost lights that bobbed above the fields at night. The tips of his fingers became the pinpricks of faraway stars. His hair stirred and the ground hummed and the wind smelled of ancient, growing things.
He was a fixture on the hill, a statue of some ancient and revered soldier in his tattered and stained uniform. Like a reminder that war was not a thing of glory but instead a thing of mud, of churned earth and blood between teeth and anguished cries cutting through fog.
But as the sun limned the horizon and those butterflies swarmed around him, he transformed again into something wholly unreal. A deity who had stepped forth from their hidden realm to survey the mundane, a bringer of light after the long cold hours of nightfall, a fast and terrible star aimed at an already dying world. Mercy, and forgiveness, and justice.
Kajal believed in hard truths and blunt facts. She did not like the uncertainty of other worlds and empty words and the promise of an ending without a proper beginning.
And yet here she was, staring at a boy who should be dust, burning blue and white amid the dawn as if he had willed it into being.
And she—she was lampblack, a crimson stain splashed across a shrine, the first uneasy whiff of smoke in a dry and barren summer.
A low creature gazing upon a god and pleading to go unnoticed.
They stared at each other for she didn’t know how long. Long enough for the sun to drench him, to throw him into silhouette. The butterflies at her shoulders stirred the hair at her neck.
“What…” Her voice failed her, and she had to try again. “Who are you?”
He lowered his arm, much like she had lowered hers in the laboratory when she’d sensed he could be reasoned with.
“I already told you.” His voice floated down to her on beams of light, like wings skimming the surface of water. “My name is Tavinder Thakar. And I am the deva of Svarga.”
Chapter Thirteen
Although the grass under her was cool with dew, the sun rising at Kajal’s back was a hot brand. She was thirsty, and her stomach cramped with nerves and hunger. But she didn’t dare move, not when the boy sitting next to her fidgeted as if ready to take off at the slightest provocation.
The butterflies continued to flit around them. They were white specks in the corners of her eyes, like the squiggly spots she saw when she stood too fast after hours of reading. Kajal realized now the butterflies were yakshas. Sometimes one lit upon Tavinder’s shoulders or hair in a delicate kiss before taking off again.
Kajal risked another glance at him. He was chewing enterprisingly on his lower lip, which was in danger of cracking open. He’d pulled the amber lotus pendant from under his ratty shirt and fiddled with it between his fingers, turning it over and over.
“Do they not allow semiprinces to wear proper jewelry?” she murmured.
He gave her a sidelong glare. His eyes were their usual warm brown again. “It’s important to me.”
“Did you make it?”
“No.” He returned to surveying the city of Suraj, glittering in the early pink-streaked morning. The university perched above was like a patient vulture. “Someone made it for me.”
She waited for him to elaborate. He did not. That was fair; they had known each other all of a few hours, and not on the best of terms.
But there was something she had to clear up.
“You claimed you’re the deva,” she said, and he tensed. “That’s impossible.”
“I assure you, it’s possible,” he said wryly. “Or do you need more proof?”
The yaksha that had grabbed her. The butterflies. The way he’d looked on the hill.
Kajal’s mouth dried. She rubbed small circles on the center of her forehead as her thoughts returned to yesterday in Professor Manraj’s class, hearing about role of the asura and the deva in maintaining peace and balance between the three planes. The possibility that the increase of rakshasas, of blight, was due to their negligence.
A dead deva could certainly cause that.
The blight. If the deva had been dead all this time, would his resurrection mean the blight would recede? Maybe the rebels were actually onto something.
“Does that mean the asura is Advaith?” she demanded.
Tavinder leaned away from her sudden interest. “Yes. The asura and deva are always born as twins. Identical in every way, save for their powers. When a pujari blessed us at our birth, he immediately sensed what we were.”
“Is that why you were kept a secret?”
His mouth tightened. “No. Advaith was the first to be born, so he was made crown prince. My father was afraid of a succession crisis—never mind I never wanted to succeed him—and worried that if we ruled side by side, the people might be divided in their loyalty. So I remained hidden. If anything were to happen to Advaith, I would take his place.”
“That seems…cruel.”
“It’s not like I didn’t live my own life. Advaith and I frequently went on missions together. When only the asura was needed, I would have to pose as the crown prince, but that was rare.”
“You fought in his armor because you were pretending to be him.”
He nodded. “Advaith wanted to face Bakshi alongside me, but we couldn’t risk it. Couldn’t risk his life.” The pendant glinted as he turned it toward the sun. “I guess it didn’t matter in the end.”
The words were flat and emotionless, like he couldn’t bear to give them more than a fleeting thought.
“Yes,” Kajal said. “And now Bakshi sits on the throne.”
He wrapped a protective hand around the pendant. “Is this why your ‘interested party’ resurrected me?”
She raised her eyebrows. “I doubt they knew you and your brother were the deva and asura, but I guess that’s a nice bonus.”
“I won’t do it. Not without Advaith.”
“You—” Kajal reined in her irritation, kept her voice level. “You don’t even know what it is.”
“They thought I was Advaith and went out of their way to resurrect me. What else would they want other than to restore a legitimate heir to the throne and take it back from Bakshi? And for that matter, how did you resurrect me?”
“Ayurveda.” It was the truth, sort of, though pared down considerably.
“Ayurveda,” he repeated slowly. “There may be holes in my memory, but I don’t remember Ayurveda having anything to do with magic.”
“It doesn’t,” she said. “But our soil, our plants, and our minerals are all blessed with sattva. I simply used that natural energy to tap into your chakras. Speaking of which…”
She took his wrist. He tensed again but didn’t jerk away. Under her fingers was a weak, fluttering pulse, the radial artery skittish against her skin.
“Your circulation is off,” she muttered. “I’ll see what I can do about that. How do you feel otherwise? Physically, I mean.”
“I don’t know. Fine? This kind of hurts.” He pointed to the sutured wounds. “But not enough to kill me. Again.”
