“Remember the girl you saw today,” the mouth says before disappearing completely, leaving me with another puzzle that I don’t expect to solve anytime soon.
5GUL
The fireflies failed me tonight.
I felt them flitting around me, burning bright and glorious when I planted that kiss on the boy, and then later when we talked, drawing that awful merchant back to me, along with the burliest thanedar I’d ever seen.
“This is the last time I ask a group of giddy insects to help me find someone during mating season,” I mutter to myself.
Had it not been for the fireflies, I would have been quicker to realize that the person I was supposed to meet at the moon festival was a no-show. Had it not been for the fireflies, I would have left the boy behind, without answering his questions.
I ignore the voice in my head that accuses me of not wanting to leave. That I wanted to keep talking to the boy under the bright, flickering lights, to touch the stubble on his rough cheek, taste the salt-sweet flavor of his mouth again. I failed so miserably tonight I can barely stand to think about it. I click my tongue softly and, within seconds, feel the brush of a wet nose at my shoulder.
Agni, at least, does not fail. She knows when she’s needed, where she’s needed, before even I do—finding her way to Javeribad two years ago, a fortnight after Juhi and the others sneaked me there from Zamindar Moolchand’s haveli in Dukal. I reach up, grip Agni’s thick red mane, and climb onto her back.
You smell like boy, Agni accuses. Boy and lust.
I grimace. Agni lets out an odd, high-pitched neigh—her version of a mocking laugh. It’s not like I haven’t lusted in the past—or even thought of acting on it at times, when invited to walk through the bajra fields in Javeribad with the farmer’s handsome son.
But, in two long years, my lust has never interfered with my goal of finding a way into Raj Mahal and seeing the king—a flame that began burning ever since the day my parents were killed. It would not do, I knew, to be distracted by a boy’s touch or to be ensnared by a binding that would mate me to him and his babies, forcing me into a life of complacency and forgetfulness.
I don’t want to forget. Or forgive.
You nearly got caught today, Agni scolds. I roll my eyes. I love the magic that allows me to whisper to animals; there are nights when I wake up, terrified of losing it as suddenly as it came. But I do not need a horse playing the role of a nag and my conscience. Agni shifts, forcing me to hold on more tightly so I don’t slide off. A warning.
“It wasn’t my fault,” I say out loud. Not my fault that the merchant whom I touched thought I was a thief when I wasn’t planning to steal anything. “I was really there to see someone. I thought they’d be … there.”
A snort. Agni breaks into a gallop, the sound of her feet so light, I can barely hear them on the ground. Papa told me that the horses of Jwala were thought to have wings, with feathers that sprouted from both sides of their backs, letting them fly in the sky.
I know Agni’s right. I took a big risk by sneaking out tonight—only to meet a stranger who’d whispered the following words in my ear at the Javeribad inn last week: Be at the moon festival in Ambarvadi after sunset for a way into the Walled City. I had not seen the person’s face, seen nothing except shadows in the crush at the inn. But I remembered the brush of their cold lips on my skin. Felt the shift in the air that had come from another presence. An invisible presence. Invisibility wasn’t unusual at the Javeribad inn during happy hour; the old innkeeper never asked questions as long as enough silver slid across his table in exchange for the drinks. That this unseen person approached me wasn’t unusual, either—I’d spent the past hour flirting with a pair of drunken palace guards, not-so-subtly making inquiries about getting into the Walled City.
I wonder now if I had been dreaming. If the words had been a figment of my imagination—the hope of a desperate girl still haunted by her parents’ deaths. It’s not difficult to imagine ghosts being out on this night, the tops of the thatched roofs of Javeribad lit blue and yellow under the two moons.
Agni slows to a canter; even with quiet feet, sounds can be magnified in sleepy, little villages. Unlike Ambarvadi, where celebrations for the moon festival will continue into the wee hours of the morning, Javeribad is as quiet as a cemetery. Here, festivities begin when the blue moon is first sighted, a little after sunset, at the sky goddess’s temple, where a long prayer ceremony takes place, followed by an even longer distribution of prasad—food and fruit made in offering by the worshippers and blessed during the course of the ceremony. Afterward, families head home for quiet celebration; the revelry and mischief so prevalent in Ambarvadi are frowned upon here. “We are not like those promiscuous city people,” Kali often says, mimicking the baritone of Javeribad’s head thanedar so perfectly that we always burst out laughing.
I suppress a snort at the memory. It will not do to laugh now, not in this silence, when a single barking dog can wake the whole street, when house after mud-brick house is shrouded in darkness except for the white filigree moons painted on the doors.
The Sisters live on the street behind the temple—in a two-story building that once housed the village orphanage. Some of the novices mock the villagers for not guessing that it
