Page 57 of The Burning Mountain
“Oh.”
He stopped to drink a glass of water, his strong throat muscles working. A drop of water slid down to disappear underneath his shirt. Chandra looked away, embarrassed, her mind supplying several seductive images. When had she started to find the simple act of drinking water attractive?
Fortunately, Veer didn’t appear to notice her distraction. “Let’s just say I have a feeling I need to throw in something to sweeten the pot, to make him agree to what I need.”
Chandra’s brow wrinkled, ready to ask what Veer had in mind, but his next question distracted her.
“Anyway, what was so urgent you had to come barging in?” he asked.
Belatedly, Chandra remembered. She showed him her opened fist. The nose ring lay innocently in the palm of her hand.
Veer stared at it blankly.
“Nice nose ring. Did you buy it?” he asked, deadpan.
He really was good at hiding his true thoughts. If Chandra hadn’t been intently watching, she would have missed the infinitesimal stiffening of his shoulders.
“This isn’t mine. It belongs to Queen Gauri Devi.”
“Oh. Are you sure? Could be a replica.”
Chandra shook her head. “A queen’s jewelry is customized. Always. There is no replica. This is the only original piece.”
“If you say so.” He affected a bored expression. “I don’t see why you thought I would be interested in such things.”
“Don’t you want to know how it came to be here?” persisted Chandra. “Don’t you think it’s strange that it found its way here to me?”
“Not really. No.”
If Chandra had any doubts, they were swept away by Veer’s almost forced offhandedness. How had she never noticed his gaze would fixate on something whenever he was trying to get her off a certain topic?
“Thianvelli’s women have a custom,” said Chandra contemplatively. “They would never remove their nose rings. If they die or are burned on the funeral pyre, their nose ring goes with them.”
“I still don’t understand what this has to do with me. Maybe some enterprising soul had decided to scout the ashes for something he could salvage.”
“This ring wouldn’t survive the fierce fire of the burning platform. From the way people were describing it, the blaze wentup to the heavens,” she said slowly, watching him the entire time.
She caught his arm when he turned away.
Veer’s eyebrow rose in that supercilious way she hated. But this time, she didn’t care.
“She’s alive, isn’t she? Tell me the truth,” she said in a hushed voice.
There was no way Gauri Devi had died in the fire and this nose ring survived.
Veer regarded her earnest expression and sighed, as if resigning himself to the inevitable. He walked past her to close the door and then came back into the room.
“Yes, both Prince Aditya and Queen Gauri Devi are alive. In fact, they are on their way out of Thianvelli to lie low for a while.” He took the nose ring from her unresisting hand and examined it, frowning. “Have to say, I revise my opinion of Gauri Devi. She is far too reckless, but somehow, it’s paying off for her.”
He swung a sharp gaze toward her. “And the fewer people that know about her being alive, the better,” he said. “If I were you, I’d never show the nose ring to a soul until the danger is past,” he said, handing it back.
“But how?” Chandra was still reeling from the information he revealed about Aditya being alive too. Was everything that happened a mirage, a clever illusion? “How did you make this happen?”
“When we went to rescue Aditya, we had a dead body of a boy.” He paused at her grimace. “Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t easy to scour the graveyards in search of someone the same age and build as Aditya. We had to carry the dead body in a bag with us while also carrying a bunch of rats. Thank God for Ilavu’s help. He controlled the animals into behaving or else it would have ended badly.
“Then when we got Aditya out of the prison, Shota rendered him unconscious. We had to injure Aditya a bit when Shota made a cut on his neck. It wasn’t a mortal injury, but since dead bodies don’t bleed, we had to spill some of his blood to make it seem realistic. We didn’t dare use our own blood in case they brought in some other wizard to verify if it was indeed Aditya.”
“They could do that?” she asked in amazement.
