“Or you could have my face,” she said. “Count your blessings that you don’t.”
In the fading dusk, Nritti looked silvered. Apsaras were always beautiful, but she was a gem even among them. It didn’t matter that her hair had fallen out of its braid or that her clothes were crumpled. She looked more polished than a gemstone that had gulped down the moon.
For as long as I had known her, Nritti had the kind of beauty that earned her a place among the stars. When she entered a room, light clung to her. When she left a room, light seemed a mere legend. No radiance compared. But it came with a price. One that wore on her. I nudged her arm.
“How many marriage proposals this time?” I asked.
“The usual.”
“About a hundred?”
“Give or take.”
“Any entertaining acts of idiocy amongst all your besotted suitors?”
She smacked my arm, laughing in spite of herself. “Don’t mock their love.”
“Why not? They mock you with the assumption that you’d say yes.” I rolled my eyes. “More than that, they mock you by assuming there’s nothing more than your beauty and dancing.”
“Isn’t there?”
“You sing too.”
Another smack. Another laugh. But this one a little more hollow.
“One of them said he’d write my name in the stars,” said Nritti. “He was a mortal king, invited to the court of the heavens for a great yagna he held honoring the gods.”
“And so…”
“And so he fell off a balcony with a sword in his hand. I think he intended to cut a path through the stars.”
Now it was my turn to laugh.
“Did you catch him?”
“Oh yes. Eventually. But I did let him fall a great deal before I stood up.”
We laughed for a long while, stealing seconds before my evening duties called me from her side.
“Is that why you want to attend Teej? To find a consort and hopefully put an end to all these unwelcome marriage proposals?”
She shrugged, and her hair ornaments chimed delicately.
“I don’t want simply to find someone. I could’ve done that years ago.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You want love.”
“Is that bad?”
“Of course not. I want that too.”
It’d been something we’d talked of since we first met. She’d been asked to perform a solo dance for the grand Festival of Lights. I’d barely started making dream fruit, and the night was so new that it was hardly flecked with stars. She was nervous about practicing in the light, so I conjured shadows for her and we became friends.
“Then I want love,” she said simply. “And I’m willing to believe that I can find it. I’m willing to be brave enough to search for it, even if that means failing.”
“Are you hoping the God of Love will be at Teej? Crouching behind the curtains and stringing his sugarcane bow and arrow of honeybees?”
She laughed. “Will you let me know if you see him?”
“Certainly. I’ll be the one bribing him to make you fall in love with a cow.”
“Not a bull?”
“I prefer the scandal.”
Just then, the clouds in the river began to break apart. The silver trees behind us shivered in wait. The crossover from day to night was complete. I glanced up and saw the faint impression of hoofmarks against the clouds. Ushas—the goddess of dawn—had already driven away her chariot, and magic had eagerly poured back into the world.
We were in the human world, but just barely. Night thinned the boundaries of the mortal and Otherworld. Small amber lanterns no bigger than a thumbnail danced across the river. A handful of scarlet kinnara feathers drifted down the stream, releasing smoke and sparks of gold into the air. The gunghroo bells of apsaras ignited the silence. Nritti heard it too and stiffened as her own bells began to chime and keen.
But not all the magic that poured out at night was full of light and feathers and music. In the distance, I heard rough hands pounding on a stone drum, and the hollow knocking of skulls garlanded around a raksha’s belly.
“I have to go,” said Nritti, standing.
“I know. So do I.”
Soon, I’d have to shuck off this sari. Someone would notice if a disembodied dress started dancing and floating around. Nritti thought it was scandalous to run around naked. Technically, I was not running around naked. I was dancing around naked. Which sounded worse. But was it scandalous if no one could even tell?
“I’ll see you afterward?” asked Nritti, breaking my thoughts and nodding to the orchard.
“Always.”
“Prepare yourself for a crowd, sister. Tonight, we are entertaining a princeling.”
From time to time, mortal rulers were invited as personal guests to the Otherworld to reward them for certain prayers, offerings, or even aid in battle against demon spirits. And from time to time, some of them returned with an apsara for a wife. Their first wives were rarely pleased.
“What did this one do for the honor?”
Nritti shrugged. “I think he helped in some battle or another.”
“Poor thing. I don’t envy the attention he’ll get.”
The Otherworld had a bizarre fascination with humans. But they often expressed it with zero decorum. I’d once seen a curious naga girl tugging at a human boy’s neck, bemused because he hid no cobra hood behind his ears.
“It seems like fitting punishment for dragging me from your side,” said Nritti. “I hope he leaves with nothing short of four hundred proposals of marriage and a cursed sandal that causes him to stub his toe every day. But I’m glad, at least, that you get something out of that crowd.”
She stared past me to the silver trees heavy with fruit.
A human prince meant a huge Otherworld crowd. And a huge crowd meant more people to buy dream fruit. Maybe I’d buy some new trinkets after they bartered. An amphora of honey from moon-bees. Or a bolt of silk culled from sea roses.
*
As soon as Nritti left, I began.
Night heralded sleep and shadows, demons and dreams.
But I heralded night.
Sometimes I wondered whether that made me worse than a demon. But I supposed no one berated a door for allowing a robber to cross the threshold. Then again, people could be unforgivably stupid.
The sky broke. Black, starless waves poured into the ether, hovering over the world like a blanket that refused to fall. This was the very essence of night. The eerie scent of shadows perfumed the world. It smelled like fear at an unexpected bloom of cold between your shoulder blades; like the prickling of ice at feeling inexplicably watched; like a breath yanked from your lungs when you had run out of stairs on a staircase and couldn’t figure out how. But the dark didn’t scare me.
Quite the opposite.