CHAPTER SEVEN

Meera couldn't sleep.

She lay on the narrow cot in Vikram's cottage, wrapped in a heavy woollen blanket that smelled of woodsmoke and dried lavender, and stared at the ceiling. The rafters were dark oak, hand-hewn, the joints fitted without nails. Someone had carved patterns into the beams — serpentine figures that coiled and twisted in the firelight, their scales picked out in minute detail.

Nagas. Even in this world, the serpent motifs followed.

She pressed her palms flat against her stomach and tried to breathe. Through the walls came the sound of the fire Vikram was tending in the front room, and beyond it, the silence of a world that had no electricity, no traffic, no distant hum of civilisation.

Tara. Her Chhaya-Bandhu. Her shadow-twin.

Dead for two years.

Two years ago, Meera had been living in her small flat in Kothrud, teaching her first semester at Fergusson College, when the depression hit. Not the garden-variety sadness she'd known since losing her parents — this was a black, drowning thing that had no bottom. She'd stopped eating. Stopped answering her phone. Stopped leaving her flat for eleven days until Priya had broken down the door and found her sitting on the kitchen floor in the dark, her phone dead, her plants dead, her will to exist reduced to the mechanical act of breathing.

No therapist had been able to explain what triggered it. No medication fully lifted it. She'd clawed her way back to functioning — teaching, researching, pretending — but the shadow of that collapse lived in her bones like a fracture that had healed crooked.

Now she knew why.

Half her soul had died.

She sat up and put her feet on the cold stone floor. Her trekking shoes were by the door — Vikram had insisted she keep them within arm's reach. "In case we need to move fast," he'd said, which was not the comforting bedtime reassurance she'd been hoping for.

She found him in the front room, sitting in a wooden chair by the fire with a cup of something that smelled herbal and sharp. He'd changed out of his travelling clothes into a loose kurta and cotton pyjamas, and without the heavy outer layers, she could see how much tension he carried in his shoulders — bunched muscle that never quite relaxed, like a man permanently braced for a blow.

"Can't sleep?" He didn't look up from the fire.

"No." She sat across from him. "Tell me about Tara."

His jaw tightened. The firelight threw shadows into the hollows of his face, making him look older, more weathered, more like the stone warriors carved into the pillars of Rathore House.

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything."

He was quiet for a long time. Then: "She was born in this realm. Grew up in the mountains — the Devgarh region, which mirrors our Himachal. Her father..." He paused. "Her father is the Raja of Devgarh. The closest thing to a king in this part of Chhaya Lok."

Meera's breath caught. "A raja?"

"Not like the ones in your history textbooks. There's no Mughal court here, no British Raj, no parliamentary democracy. The human rulers in Chhaya Lok are more like... tribal chiefs. Local leaders. But yes — Tara's father is a powerful man. His name is Raja Devendra."

"And Tara married Arjun."

"When they were young. Arjun is..." Vikram's expression shifted — something between pride and pain. "Arjun is the son of Maharaja Pratap Singh. The high chief of this region. Our father's Chhaya-Bandhu."

"So your brother — your shadow-twin — is basically a prince."

"More or less."

The fire popped. Somewhere outside, an animal called — a sound she didn't recognise, low and mournful, like a flute played in an empty temple.

"Tara was dev-sparsh," Vikram continued. "God-touched. She could speak to the Nagas — the great serpents that live in the mountain lakes. She was Nag-Bandhu. A serpent-bonded."

Meera's hand went to the pendant at her throat — the gold disc with twin serpents that her mother had given her. "She could talk to serpents?"

"Not talk. It was more than that. She could feel them. Hear their thoughts. And they could hear hers." Vikram looked at Meera's pendant, and his eyes went dark. "That design. Your mother gave it to you?"

"Yes. She bought it from a temple goldsmith in Goa."

"It's a Nag-Bandhu mark. The twin serpents coiled together — that's the sigil of a serpent-bonded." He leaned forward. "Your mother painted landscapes of places she'd never been. Places that looked impossible."

"How do you know about my mother's paintings?"

"Because Tara's mother painted the same landscapes." His voice was barely above a whisper. "The same impossible mountains. The same colours that don't exist in our world. Your mothers were Chhaya-Bandhus too."

The fire crackled.

"Your mother was seeing this world," Vikram said. "Through the bond. Through dreams. Through whatever thin membrane separates Prakash Lok from Chhaya Lok. She was painting what Tara's mother could see."

Meera's eyes burned. Her mother — sweet, distracted, paint-stained Kavita Sharma, who talked to trees and painted mountains that glowed from within — had been connected to another world her entire life and never known it.

Or maybe she had known. Maybe that was why she talked to the trees.

"How did Tara die?"

Vikram's face closed like a door slamming shut. "She was poisoned."

"Poisoned?"

"Two years ago. At a feast in this castle." He nodded toward the darkness beyond the cottage walls, where the great fortress of Devgarh presumably stood. "It was made to look like an illness — a fever that came on suddenly and took her within days. But Arjun didn't believe it, and neither did I."

"You were here when she died?"

"No. I was in the Prakash Lok — in my workshop, hammering a commission for a tourist resort in Manali. I felt her go." His hands gripped the arms of the chair, knuckles white. "The same way you felt it. Something broke inside me. Something that had nothing to do with my own life."

The depression. The black, drowning thing with no bottom.

"Vikram." Her voice was steady even though her hands were not. "Who poisoned her?"

"That's what Arjun has been trying to find out for two years. It's why he went to Prakash Lok — to look for answers on the other side. He traced something to Pune, to you, to your mother's paintings. He thought if he could find Tara's Chhaya-Bandhu, he might find a clue."

"That's why he came to Pune."

"That's why he came to Pune. And then—" Vikram's expression cracked, just slightly, a fissure in the stone. "He fell in love with you."

The words landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water.

"And you have to understand," Vikram said, "what that means. Because you wear Tara's face. And Arjun loved Tara with the kind of love that makes men cross worlds."

"So he didn't love me," Meera said. The words came out flat, toneless, like a diagnosis delivered in a hospital corridor. "He loved her. And I was the closest thing he could find."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

---

She went outside. The cottage had a small porch — just a stone step and a wooden overhang — and the night air hit her face like a slap of cold water. The sky was the colour of pewter, luminous and strange, with no stars and no moon but a diffuse glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

The meadow stretched out in front of her, chest-high grass silvered by the strange light, and beyond it the forest rose like a dark wall. Lights drifted between the trees — the same amber orbs she'd seen during their passage through the gate — and in the distance, on the ridge above the forest, the dark mass of the fortress stood against the sky.

Somewhere in that fortress, Arjun was sleeping. Or pacing. Or doing whatever princes did in parallel dimensions at whatever hour this was.

She sat on the stone step and wrapped her arms around her knees.

You crossed a world for him, Meera. And now you find out he crossed a world for someone else.

The pendant burned cold against her collarbone.

But you're not her. You're not Tara. You're Meera Sharma from Kothrud, Pune, who teaches mythology to undergrads and eats Maggi at midnight and once cried for three hours because a street dog died outside her building.

You are not a princess. You are not Nag-Bandhu. You are not the beloved wife of a prince.

You are the shadow of a shadow.

The cottage door creaked. Vikram's heavy footsteps.

"It's not safe to sit out here alone."

"I don't care."

He sat beside her on the step, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from his body — forge heat, the kind that never quite left a blacksmith even when the fire was banked. He smelled of woodsmoke and the herbal tea and something underneath that was just him — iron and earth and the sharp green scent of the mountain.

They sat in silence for a long time. The lights drifted between the trees. The strange mournful call came again from somewhere in the hills.

"For what it's worth," Vikram said quietly, "I think he does love you. Not because you're her twin. Because of who you are."

"How would you know?"

"Because I asked him. Before he left for Pune, I asked him what he was looking for. He said answers. When he came back, I asked him what he'd found." Vikram paused. "He said he'd found someone who made the world worth living in again."

Meera pressed her face against her knees and breathed.

"That doesn't sound like a man chasing a ghost," Vikram said. "That sounds like a man who found something new."

"Then why didn't he tell me? About any of this?"

"Would you have believed him?"

She lifted her head. "You asked me the same thing yesterday. 'Do you believe in fairy tales?' And I said yes."

"You said fairy tales are real." His amber eyes held hers. "But believing they're real as stories and believing they're real as your life are two very different things."

He was right. She hated that he was right.

"Get some sleep," Vikram said. "Tomorrow we go to the fortress. You'll see Arjun. And then—" He stood and looked out at the dark forest. "Then you'll have to decide what you want to do."

"What are my options?"

"Go home. Forget all of this. Live your life."

"And the other option?"

He looked down at her, and the firelight from inside the cottage caught the amber in his eyes.

"Stay," he said. "And find out who killed your sister."

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