Obsidian: Retribution (Book 2)

Twenty-One: A Tomb With No Name

Nazir remembered the day they met. Every boy remembered the first woman he slept with, the experience pleasant or not, willingly or forced. She had come to him in the middle of the night, carrying with her a scent of cedar wood and jasmine that clung to every inch of her skin, a smile that dripped like honey as she stepped into the room, and a presence that didn't allow one to object whatever it was she might propose. Not, at least, for a boy of sixteen who had yet to experience a woman. Not when the woman was as experienced as Shreya Devi.

He remembered her making her way toward him, her arm extended like a dancer, pausing to glide her fingers on his table, on the fabric of his chair, on the robe he'd carelessly tossed, on his sword, his belongings. She'd paused where the moonbeam shone at its brightest, made a show of removing the pigeon blood red robe she wore as he watched and stared, words, breaths, and heart imprisoned somewhere in his throat, squeezed together into something he could no longer control or tell apart. The foreign pressure in his chest had escalated, had grown in intensity, in speed as it pulsed, led and lured forward by the slightest rise and fall of her limbs, the way her hands, her fingers, untied the strings on her chest, stretching minutes into hours and hours into eternity. The knot came loose, and she pushed the robe back over her shoulder, allowing it to slip off her frame onto the floor, revealing a sheer white dress that nearly glowed in the dark and the warm honey skin it failed to hide.

He remembered that dress too, how it clung to her body, her hips, on her chest upon which the fabric draped loosely, covering only half of her breasts and just enough to conceal the hardened, visible buds underneath. The silk moved as she breathed, offered a glimpse of her breast as she exhaled, taking the view away when she filled her lungs, and his control with it.

There had been no words spoken, not before she'd slipped into his bed with that dress, that scent, not when he tasted her lips, her skin, or when she took him inside of her, none during everything that happened thereafter.

She had left quickly when it was done, her limbs moving more efficiently on the way out, touching nothing but her clothes as she put them back on, ignoring that table, that sword, those belongings that no longer held significance. It hadn't occurred to Nazir until now that he'd never actually spoken to her, not once. He had avoided her summons since that night, and they'd stopped coming since she became ma'adevi. Not that it surprised him. It was his seed she'd always been after and the power that came with it. Not his words. Never that.

Not today either.

He'd known it the moment he entered the chamber, when he saw her in that high backed chair, wearing the exact same white dress she had worn coming to him that night. Only now a silver snake pin gleamed over her left breast, and behind her, displayed against the gold veined white marble tiles, wrapped around a staff of pure silver, the larger version of the same snake made entirely of blue-tint moonstone gave her presence an authority as jarring as the enormous amber amulet trapped behind the serpent's fangs.

It was all symbolic, of course. The white snake was the symbol of Ravi, amber was said to be the color of her eyes, and silver that of her hair. The white staff of Citara, passed down to every ma'adevi in office, underlined and etched as if in stone the elevated status all trueblood Shakshis were entitled to. A privilege, one could say, for being born with the same appearance as the goddess herself. Purebloods who had been born close–––with lighter hair and eyes––shared some of those privileges, while the commonbloods' dark eyes and dark hair left them scraping for their own fortune.

'Why would I want to fight for people who judge others by the color of their skin, their hair, their birthplace, or the god they worship?' the Prince had said. A hard truth to swallow, that. A truth no one wanted to see. In many ways, no other society in the peninsula sorted its citizens as strictly as theirs did by appearance.