The swords clash. And while Rama’s eyes are on the swords, Alexi reaches for the metal glittering on his back.
And just as the scream breaks free of my throat, he slides the broken arrow into the false Esmae’s heart.
Into Rama’s heart.
My scream shatters the sharp, sunny day, but it’s not the only one. As soon as the blood spurts over the other Esmae’s shirt, as soon as the blood trickles down Alexi’s hand and the broken arrow he pulls free of her chest, the crowd’s cries and screams join mine.
The other Esmae tumbles forward onto the grass. Blood spills out from under her. The crowd goes quiet. Alexi drops the broken arrow and stands very still, just looking down at her. His face is pale, the bronze blanched into a deathly white.
And there it is, the inevitable vision that the gods saw.
A duel. A broken arrow. Blood on the grass.
And me, dying.
They said Alexi would kill me. I swore I wouldn’t die.
In the end, we were all right.
By the time I break free of the crowd and stumble to Rama’s side, he’s transformed back. The small, sturdy body on the grass has grown taller and lankier, the coppery-brown hair has shortened and turned back to black, the light bronze skin and gray eyes have darkened to his brown. He’s Rama again, in and out now.
There are confused cries as I kneel down beside him; the onlookers can’t understand what’s happened.
“Rama,” I whisper. “Rama, stay with me. Please.”
He blinks at me slowly, confused. Once, twice. The sun turns his eyes to gold.
“Ez,” he says, and then he’s gone.
CHAPTER FORTY
My heart collapses in on itself. I put my hands on Rama’s chest and feel the wound there. I touch his still, dearly loved face with bloody hands. A howl locks in my throat.
Around me, noise and chaos erupts. Vale guards, who were stationed to keep the crowds in line, now herd them away. Sybilla has her hands pressed over her mouth and tears flood her eyes. Max is on Rama’s other side. He gently closes my friend’s eyes and reaches for one of my bloody hands, holding it so tight it almost reminds me that I’m still anchored to the world. Almost.
Then Max lets go of my hand and stands. I hear his voice, cracked down the middle, genuinely and truly shocked: “I never really believed you’d go this far. How could you, Alex?”
“It had to be done,” he says. His voice is unyielding, defiant.
The sound of it splinters the howl of grief stuck in my throat, stilling my hands’ frantic attempts to wake Rama from a sleep there’s no coming back from, punching a hole in the chaos and the rage and the unbearable guilt. This is my fault, all my fault. And not just because I planted the seed of the idea in Amba’s mind, saving myself and sealing Rama’s death instead, but because none of this would have ever happened if I hadn’t fired an arrow at a fish.
Watch, Esmae. Watch the forest burn.
I rise and face Alexi. This is not the golden hero of the star system. This is not the brother I’ve come to know and love over the past few months. That brother was a lie; here is reality, this hard, stony boy who will do whatever it takes to get what he wants.
“You killed him,” I say.
“I didn’t mean to kill the prince. I’m sorry for that.”
“No, you didn’t mean to kill him.” My voice breaks. “You just meant to kill me. I’m your sister. You tricked me into a duel just so you could break the rules and murder me.”
“I’m sorry.” It has a false, hollow ring to it.
“No, you’re not. Not yet. But you will be.”
“Esmae,” Max says.
I step so close to Alexi that we’re scarcely a foot apart. The air turns white between us.
“People will remember today,” I say. “They’ll remember it as the day Alexi Rey abandoned his honor and fell from glory.” I touch his face, my thumb leaving a bloody streak across his cheek, saying good-bye to the brother I never really had. “You will have the war you wanted so badly, Alex. Elvar and Max have held back on Kali; they’ve watched and waited to see if you would ever rise against them, but that’s over now.”
“Don’t,” says Max. His voice is raw, as if he can see the future unfolding in front of us. As if he can see what fate I’m about to seal into stone for myself. “Esmae, don’t.”
I was such a fool. The girl who stood in front of a war council and pleaded for a truce. I cared about Kali, about peace, about saving everyone, and let my best friend die instead.
They say the gods’ favorites can wreak havoc with their words. I am one of those favorites. Beloved by gods.
And so I wreak havoc.
“People will remember today, because today is the day we start a war. It will be fierce and bitter and I will repay every betrayal, every lie, and every drop of Rama’s blood a thousand times over. I won’t stop until the world is on fire. I will win. And I swear this, Alexi: I swear I will break you before the end.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I wait for her to come to me.
It takes three days, but she does come. Her body smokes into existence beside me as I stand at the peak of a lonely, spiky tower. She folds her hands on top of the rail and looks out at the Scarlet Nebula.
“You have always had a blind spot,” she says softly. “From the moment I first met you, I saw that your heart would be the ruin of you. You see so much. You plot whole wars out like a game of Warlords, but you have never been able to see the moves your love has blinded you to. You failed to see the move that would have destroyed you.”
“Love,” I repeat bitterly.
“Blinded by love for your family,” she says, “you never saw. You overestimated Alexi and underestimated Rama. You put your faith in the brother you wanted, the one I always knew would betray you, and failed to notice the brother you already had, the one I always knew could save you.”
Tears stab at my eyes. “Did he know he would die?”
Don’t let me lose her, he said to Titania. And he didn’t. I lost him. No one expected that.
“Of course he knew.”
“I don’t believe that,” I say. “He couldn’t have known. Rama loved me, but he also loved his family and Wychstar and those bloody cats at the palace that he always pretended to loathe. He wouldn’t have given all of that up. He wouldn’t have agreed to your trick if he had known he would die.”
Amba nods. “Then let me rephrase my answer. He knew he would die in as much as he knew about the vision. I didn’t lie to him, Esmae, if what’s what you want to know. I repeated the details of my vision to him. He hoped I was mistaken, but he understood the risk. He was told one of you would die and he freely took the risk that he would be the one.”
Take good care of her, Titania, he told her. She’s as much my family as my brother and sisters. She once saved my life and she’s made me laugh every single day I’ve known her.
I scrub at my eyes. “Why did you do it?”
“You must know the answer to that,” Amba says, a little sternly. “I care a great deal for you and I wanted to keep you safe. This was the only way to do that. I didn’t even arrive at the solution by myself, as I’m sure you’ve realized already. It was unlikely I would have been able to find another one in time.”
“That’s not what I meant. Why did you do it to him? He may not have been certain he would die, but you were. You knew. Why did you choose to send him into that duel?”
“I knew he would agree,” she says. “He was also—”
She stops, wisely, but I already know what she was going to say. My fists clench and unclench by my sides as I twist around to face her. “He was also dispensable,” I finish for her.
“You’re upset.”
“That’s very astute of you.”
There’s a chill on the air, a gust of annoyance. Her face grows sterner. “Do not try my patience, Esmae. I am sorry you lost a friend and I will allow you some latitude because of it, but do not forget that I am
a goddess and you owe me respect.”
I stare at her in silence. She is a goddess and could call down a universe of destruction on my head, but I don’t care. “My rage will outlast your storms, Amba.”
The chill vanishes as quickly as it came and she sighs. “I know it sounds like I’m being unkind, but I don’t mean to be. He just wasn’t important.”
“He was important to me!”
“But not,” she says quite gently, “in the grand scheme of—”
“Everyone is important. Rama mattered. There are whole futures that can’t exist now, infinite possibilities that are lost. There are children he could have had that won’t be born now. Thousands of good days he won’t get to have, and thousands of good days other people won’t get to have because he would have been the one who made those days good.”
You owe me exactly two hundred and twelve favors for this, he told me once. How do I repay those now?
“You are correct, of course,” says Amba at last. “I consider you important because you are important to me. He did not deserve to be dismissed as irrelevant simply because I was not especially fond of him.”
I let out a ragged breath. I can still feel fury in my bones, but maybe that’s just how I am now. Perhaps I’ll never be free of the fury again.
I close my eyes and see the broken arrow slide into my heart as surely as it slid into Rama’s. It feels like it’s always there when I close my eyes these days.
“He’s dead,” I say.
“And you will unleash a terrible war for it,” Amba, ever the war goddess, replies. “I never expected you to become one of mine. I wanted more for you than that.”
Esmae Rey, the winner of warships. In command of Kali’s forces, you’ll conquer the enemies who won’t bow and set fire to the entire world.
I give her a rather bitter smile. “I guess there’s quite a lot of Kali in me after all.”
She looks at me the same way she did at King Darshan’s competition, when I held the bow and arrow in my hands and she wanted to stop me. Her eyes are full of sorrow and catastrophe.
“And so the House of Rey will crumble into a house of rage,” she says before she blinks out of existence.
There’s a custom in our star system to preserve the dead for thirteen days after the date of death, partly so that mourners from all over the galaxy can come to pay their respects, and partly because there’s a belief that it takes thirteen days for the soul to ascend to whatever heavens await mortals in the gods’ realms.
On the thirteenth day, I get Titania ready. I don’t tell anyone that I’m leaving.
Even so, I’m not exactly surprised when, poised to clamber onto Titania’s wing, I glance back and see Max in the dock.
He doesn’t tell me he wants to come with me. I don’t expect him to. This is who we are. He is the crown prince of Kali, the commander of the Hundred and One, and he has a realm to keep safe from the war I’ve unleashed; I am the winner of warships, swallowed up by white fire, and I have promises to keep that will take me far, far away from where I once dreamed I’d be. This is who we are, and we won’t choose otherwise just for the sake of each other.
Max smiles ruefully. “I always knew one day you’d be gone before the stars even went dim at dawn.”
I kiss him. It’s possibly the last time I’ll ever kiss him. “I’m sorry,” I whisper against his mouth.
“I refuse to give up on you,” he whispers back.
And then he watches me go.
We fly to Wychstar, Titania and I, and I trace the path the way I always do: there’s a sealed boat and a newborn baby and they drift across the vast expanse of stars and gas clouds and moon rocks.
I’m expected. King Darshan meets me in a tall, arched temple where a glass coffin rests on a dais. Rama looks like he’s asleep, a pose so familiar it dashes my heart all over again.
“Why would you want to do that?” Darshan asks when I request his permission to do what I came for.
I blink away tears. “I promised him I would.”
The king looks at the coffin for a moment. He looks like he’s aged at least ten years since we last met, his face worn and gray with grief. Finally he says, “Yes, take him. That seems like the perfect place to let him sleep.”
The king summons the temple servants and asks them to carry the coffin onto Titania. They place it carefully where she directs them, in a space normally reserved for exit pods. The door hisses shut behind them and I settle next to the coffin in its quiet alcove.
It’s time to keep my promise to Rama; I’ll take him up into the stars.
Titania hurtles us deep into space. I watch Rama’s face and speak to him like I used to whenever he pretended to be asleep. For a little while, I almost forget that he’ll never wake up.
When the ship slows down, and then goes still, I rise and move to the window to look out.
I’ve never seen so many stars. They’re everywhere, all around us, some in clusters and some spread across the darkness, some aglow with the radiance they give off when they’re born and when they die. Milky clouds of gas pass by, tinted gold at the edges.
This is an extraordinary place, miles and miles away from anywhere known, and yet it doesn’t feel lonely. How could you be lonely, surrounded by all these stars? This is what the heavens must look like.
“It’s perfect,” I whisper.
There’s a smile in her voice. “I hoped it would be.”
“Thank you.”
“Go say goodbye.”
I kiss the glass of the coffin, right over Rama’s brow, and whisper my farewell. Then Titania seals me back into the control room and jettisons the coffin into the dark.
For just one instant it’s suspended, among the stars, and then the glass shatters, exploding into particles so tiny they immediately disappear from view. Glass like that wasn’t meant for open space. I watch as Rama hovers, limbs slack, and then he starts to glow. As the cells in his body break down and are absorbed into the universe around us, he glows until he loses shape and becomes a burst of brilliance.
And then that, too, fades until it’s gone. Except Rama’s not gone. He’ll always be here, a part of the stars.
I sit at Titania’s console and don’t speak for what seems an eternity. When I do, I say, “You don’t have to stay with me.”
She’s alarmed. “What do you mean?”
“I failed you. You chose me because you hoped I’d end the war, not make it worse.”
“This isn’t the life either of us wanted,” she says.
“I don’t want you to be part of this if you don’t want to be. You deserve better than to be tied to my fate. So you don’t have to stay with me. Just drop me off somewhere with starships, and I’ll make my own way from there. You’re free to go wherever you like. If you want to return to Darshan or just go somewhere else, that’s okay. It’s up to you.”
“What if I want to stay with you?”
I smile a little. “That’s okay, too.”
“Then that is what I intend to do,” she says.
So we stay there together. I sit and look out at the universe and let Titania tell me stories until she drifts into silence.
And I wonder how long this can last, this interlude of absolute nothingness, where time and guilt and sorrow have no meaning. The world is so sleepy, so peaceful. Old stars die and new stars form all around us.
“It’s so quiet,” I whisper, afraid to disturb the stillness.
It’s easy then to remember that Rama wouldn’t have wanted me to avenge his death. He wouldn’t have wanted me to destroy the world for his sake. And it’s tempting to be swallowed up by the quiet and turn my back on wars and families and ruins.
Titania hums under my feet. “Shall we go now, Esmae? Shall we fly deep into the stars and never look back?”
Yes. I want to go.
And yet.
And yet, I am what I am, and what I am is fury. I can’t let it go. I can’t forget. I hear it growling under my skin.
> I think of the friends I’ve left behind. I think of justice. I think of the austere spikes and towers of the realm I yearned for all my life and grew to love when I found it. I think of Max and of the way he looked at me when he told me he always believed I would disappear one day.
“No,” I say, and it feels like a wound and a relief to make that choice. “We have to go back to Kali.”
She spins us slowly, a compass pointing to Kali and Max and war. “Home, then.”
“Yes,” I tell her. “Home.”
End of Book 1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Hey, Jem. Before I say anything else, I’m going to say this: thank you. You won’t remember this because you weren’t even three years old at the time, but you gave me the spark to bring this story to life. I’d wanted to write something inspired by the Mahabharata for a long time, but nothing ever felt right until you became obsessed with space. You rattled off the names of the planets and told me what a black hole was and had a solar system placemat at the table and I ate, slept, and dreamed galaxies for a few months because it was Your Thing. And from that obsession came an idea: what if I told a story about Indian mythology . . . in space?
So thank you, Jemmy. Thank you for this idea. Thank you for being brilliant and kind and funny. Thank you for reading this book and asking me if bedtime can be just a little later so you can read more of it. To quote you, I love you to the end of the universe and through Cygnus X-1 and around all the dwarf planets—and back.
I started writing A Spark of White Fire in October of 2014, so this has been a long, winding journey. And almost four years later, I know one thing beyond any doubt: it wouldn’t have been possible for me to write this book, or any book, if it hadn’t been for my husband, Steve. Thank you for giving me the time and space to work, for looking after the kids, for the beta reads, for the endless supply of cold drinks (and for always remembering the ice!). Most importantly, thank you for believing I’m awesome, even and especially when I don’t. (Pssst, I think you’re awesome too.)
To Eric Smith, agent, friend, and the ultimate cheerleader. Thank you for fighting for this book and for shouting from the rooftops about it. I know you’ll never forgive me for what I did to [Spoiler], but I want you to know I live for your anguish.