The door opens to a spacious chamber flooded with natural light. My jootis sink into cloud-soft carpets, patterned with paisley and Ambari wild roses. The design echoes on the walls, paint foiled into shimmering greens and yellows. A gilded chandelier hangs over a seating area corralled with mattresses and long, velvet-covered pillows.
“This is the gold room,” the queen says, and all of a sudden, I find myself under the scrutiny of that yellow gaze. “But you would already know that if you worked for me.”
“I beg your forgiveness, Rani Amba, but I am new here.”
I avoid looking directly into the queen’s eyes and focus somewhere around the region of her chin, where two full moons are tattooed: one blue, one gold. It’s said that only the direct descendants of the moon goddess, Sunheri, are allowed such tattoos—though I’m not certain how these descendants have verified their bloodline and connection to a now nonexistent goddess. The moons are so perfectly etched onto Queen Amba’s skin that to anyone not looking closely, the tattoos simply blend in with the hoop of her nose ring and elaborate choker—firestones and pearls embedded in a lattice of gold. She raises her hands in a pair of resounding claps. Within a space of two breaths, another serving girl appears.
“Are we expecting any new girls?” the queen asks.
The girl shoots me a sideways glance. “Yes, Rani Amba. We were expecting someone new today. To replace Siya.”
“I see. What’s your name, girl?” Rani Amba asks me.
“G—S-siya,” I stutter.
“One Siya to replace another. Interesting.” A finger tilts my chin up, forcing me to meet that yellow gaze. “What you did outside with that shield spell? That was clever,” the queen says coolly. “Who taught you?”
“My mother.”
Pain, not unlike the slice of a knife, burns across my left side. I bite back a scream. There’s a cruel, knowing look on the queen’s face, even though she touches me with nothing other than a finger.
“With a touch, I can enter the recesses of your wretched mind and penetrate its every curve and bend. With a touch, I can make your eyes water, your eardrums burst, turn your organs into tar. I am going to say this only once: Don’t lie to me.”
A truth seeker. It’s the first time I’ve come across one other than Kali. Only Kali never wielded her power like this.
“No one,” I blurt out. “No one taught me this.”
The truth. I’m suddenly immensely grateful for Amira’s refusal to give me any kind of instruction or help during our training.
The smallest of frowns mars the smooth perfection that is Queen Amba’s forehead. “And your mother. What happened to her?”
“She’s dead.” Give them the truth, but never the whole truth, Juhi always said when training us to answer suspicious thanedars. I think of my mother’s eyes, golden in the moonlight, the life in them suddenly extinguished in a flash of red. “She died two months before my fourteenth birthday.”
I wait for another jab in the belly, a nosebleed, something worse. But what I feel is weight: an invisible rock threatening to crush my ribs, a sensation I’ve always associated with grief. The queen’s hand drops back to her side. Breath rushes into my lungs. Weakness is not always a terrible thing, Cavas said. And it’s only now that I understand why.
“Open the bundle you brought in,” she says.
“Rani Amba—” I begin.
“Open it. Unless you have something to hide.”
I swallow hard, undoing the knot, allowing the cloth—an old gray sari—to fall to the sides. The bangles on Queen Amba’s wrist click together delicately, pausing inches from the contents. Her nose wrinkles, as if presented with dung cakes and not a stack of day-old bajra roti.
When she looks up at me again, I hope I appear sufficiently embarrassed about my poverty. I hope it is enough to evade another interrogation—one that very well might lead to other secrets being brought out in the open. Like where my daggers are hidden right now. Like my murderous plans for Raja Lohar.
“This must be your lucky day, Siya. I am not going to punish you for using magic against a royal.” I don’t miss the slight emphasis on my pretend name. Or the warning that rattles somewhere inside my rib cage, along with my heart. The queen’s mouth curves up into a shape that would, on any other woman, be a smile.
“Show this girl her quarters,” she tells the serving girl. “And get her a ghagra and choli that fit.”
“Look at what the tabby dragged in.”
“I thought it was Rajkumari Malti who did the dragging. She’s fond of strays, that one.”
“No, it was the princes! She’s probably one of their discards.”
The three serving girls in my assigned dormitory talk about me as if I’m not there, even though I can feel them watching, their eyes examining every inch of my body as I fumble with the string ties at the back of my blouse, struggling to get them knotted. It was already a task keeping my birthmark hidden with these girls staring at me, laughing when I pretended shyness and showed them my back while getting dressed.
“What is this?” a voice cuts across the chatter, soft and imperious. “A show at a bawdy house in the Walled City? Get to work, you three!”
Tongues as sharp as daggers soften to the consistency of rose petals.
“Apologies, Yukta Didi.”
“We’re leaving, Didi.”
Slippers brush over the floor, the sounds rising behind me and then fading away.
“Leave that.” The same voice, with a touch of impatience. A hand brushes aside mine and does up the tie that was giving me so much difficulty. I keep my gaze lowered to the floor, to the woman’s feet, which are encased in jootis made of polished brown leather.
“Look up—Siya, isn’t
