A Crown of Wishes (The Star-Touched Queen, #2)

by Roshani Chokshi

Vikram had spent enough time with bitterness that he knew how to twist and numb the feeling.

Kindness is a rather squishy thing.

And sometimes a smile was a knife cutting the world in two: before and after.

The Otherworld felt like a body in the dark, a presence hiding its true face. I didn’t need a ruby

But paranoia is a house full of locked doors. So I withdrew.

“Magic is like that,” he said. “It’s like faith.”

People always think killing requires a force: a cup of poison tipped into a mouth, a knife parting flesh from bone, a fist brought down repeatedly. Wrong. Here’s how you kill: You stay silent, you make bargains that peel the layers off your soul one by one, you build a scaffolding of flimsy excuses and live your life on them. I may have killed to save, but I killed all the same.

This was a place where dreams and nightmares borrowed each other’s faces.

he would have sworn she tasted like cold honey and caught magic.

Nothing to protect us except the flimsy trust I’d placed in a stranger and that most terrible of poisons: hope. Even now, I could feel hope seeping and settling under my skin. Growing. What shape would it take? Wings? Like something set free. Or mushrooms? Like something birthed in decay.

“Stories are boundless and infinite, ever-changing and elusive,” said Kubera. “They are the truest treasure and therefore my dearest possessions.

A story had no ownership. A story could break its bones, grow wings, soar out of reach and dive out of sight in the time it took just to draw breath. It meant we weren’t walking a cut path. We carved it into existence with every step.

If we didn’t win, we would be like ghosts: our forms held together by the sheer force of our unfulfilled wants, with nothing left of our lives but what had been and what could never be.

In that moment, he looked like mischief and midnight, like a temptation that always slipped away too fast and left you at once relieved and disappointed. “I want one dance with you.”

Vikram never understood that compulsion to hold what felt sacred. Now he did. It was the connection people craved; the feeling that touch connected them to something beyond themselves. That was why he needed to dance with her. He craved that connection to the moment when magic had snapped his reality and showed him that

Guilt accretes. It builds and builds, whittling stairways and spires in the heart until a person can carry a city of hopelessness inside them. My guilt was building a universe.

Vikram hated fear. He hated how it fed on him and stripped away his comfortable blindness. Fear forced him to hold up the contents of his heart to the light. Once, he stood over a rockslide and beheld that fear:

“Love is like Death without the guarantee of its arrival. Love may not come for you, but when it does it will be just as swift and ruthless as Death and just as blind to your protestations. And just as Death will end one life and leave you with another, so will Love.”

But for the first time, I wanted to believe in the things that outlasted us: the stories that came to life in a child’s head, the fear of the dark, the hunger to live. Those were the footsteps that not even Time could discover and erase, because they lived far out of reach, in the song of blood coursing through veins and in the quiet threads that made up dreams. I wanted to hold the hope of those tales within me and follow it like a lure all the way back to myself.

But I’d tasted the fruit of vengeance. And it was narrow and sour. Not a story at all, but an ending.

But Death commanded urgency. Death tore the skin off dreams and

showed the bones underneath.

“I was thinking about Kubera’s warning. About desire. And how it’s dangerous.” He stopped short. “Yes,” he said slowly. “It is.” And then because he had to, because every splinter of him screamed that this moment could grow wings if his soul steered him true, he said, “To me, there is nothing more dangerous in this palace than you.”

I didn’t want to cut out my heart. I wanted to give it. Freely and without feeling as if it would be turned into a weapon against

True strength sometimes demanded unstitching everything you knew.

Fear was a key that fit every person’s hollow spaces—those things that kept us cold at night and that place where we retreated when no one was looking—and all it could do was unlock what was already there.

This was the key to immortality. The thing that made kings quiver and deities distrustful: Nothing but a tale.

“Fear takes away our sense of time,” said Kubera. “That is why I saved it for last.”

Instead, he discovered that magic hid her fangs behind fables. The stories of his childhood were not ways to live, but ways to see—a practiced blindness. And now he saw everything.

This was the price of vengeance, a slow obliteration of self until you were nothing but your hate.

But potential meant nothing in the face of willpower, and that was something no one could possess or preordain but him.

But that bravery required no choice. It was something I had to do. Living under Skanda’s rule hadn’t frightened me because I had expected his brand of horror and trained myself.

thought that the moment I’d won, my breath would catch and stars would pave my path. Instead, all I could think of was my own bone-weary exhaustion and the fact that I didn’t know myself anymore.

After all this time, I realized that I didn’t even know what I would wish for anymore. It had changed. I wanted my throne and I wanted Nalini’s safety, but at what cost? My desires had trapped me. My fears had tried to devour me. If I acted on them, knowing how easily everything could turn against me, would I end up doing more harm than good?

“Some tales that never end start with something as simple as an act of impulse and end with something as evil as an act of love.”

The world ends, not with a snap but with a sigh A tether cut loose: before and after, beloved and bereaved, wishful and widowed Rich loam for heartbreak. Richer loam for demon fruit. A body. A bone. A bounty of tears. That is how the world ends And curses begin. Years pass Names are dropped and picked up again Kingdoms creep closer to the shadows, waiting. And a queen turned to rock waits for a kiss.

But why settle for a story, when I could start a legend?

What were those words but different fistfuls of a tale that all depended on who was doing the telling?

Weakness is a privilege. I had never told him. I thought … I thought I was keeping myself safe. But sometimes weakness wore the face of strength, and sometimes strength wore the face of weakness.

Maybe it had already traveled, from mouth and ear to mind and memory. And perhaps that in itself was the great secret—not just for legacy, but also for life. You could carry a story inside you and hold it up to the light when you needed it the most. You could peer through it, like a frame, and see how it changed your view when you looked out onto the world.