Lips Touch: Three Times(12)
Author: Laini Taylor

On the day of the earthquake, he knew something was wrong as soon as she came up blinking into the light of day. "What is it, Memsahib?" he asked.

"Take me to the Agent’s Residence," she said quietly, and he did.

Jaipur was a Rajput kingdom ruled by warrior princes, not a part of the British Empire. There were no officious governors or magistrates here, only the Political Agent, a mustachioed former cavalryman whose military career had come to an end when he lost an arm to a tigress in the Himalayas. Now he had to hold the reins in his teeth when he hunted jackal with the native princes, which was one of his primary duties, and for which service he was rewarded with a palatial home and a small army of servants. He even kept a hookah-burda just to light his pipe.

When Estella appeared uninvited at his gate, the party was in full swing. It was a christening for the Agent’s third daughter, but it looked like any other party — bright gowns billowing in a garden, gentlemen lolling about with drinks sweating in their big, hot hands. There was a table laden with gifts, and there was a pink iced cake, but the baby’s bassinet seemed like an afterthought at the edge of things, and the baby within lay silent and composed, gazing up at the fringe of neem trees with solemn gray eyes.

"What’s the old bitch doing here?" murmured the Political Agent to his wife, and they both cringed. At the best of times Estella had a way of robbing them of amusement at their own vapid talk, and she looked particularly grim on this occasion. The usually neat coils of her silver hair were frayed from the drafts of hellfire she had passed through, and her heart was heavy with the curse she had come to deliver.

She went straight to the bassinet and looked down at the pretty baby. Silence fell over the merrymakers. It struck them all like a scene from a fairy tale, and Estella a witch come to spoil their fun. "She looks like a madwoman," someone whispered. Estella didn’t even look up. She reached toward the baby, and the baby grasped her finger and smiled up at her.

Estella’s heart clenched. She couldn’t change her mind. Twenty-two children in Kashmir lived and Vasudev wouldn’t hesitate to take them back again; he was no doubt dreaming up awful accidents at this very moment. So she did what she had come to do. She said, "I curse this child with the most beautiful voice ever to slip from human lips." She looked up and peered around at the partygoers. Their faces were flushed with laughter, with liquor. They seemed to be waiting for her to continue, so she did. "But take care that you never hear it. Anyone who does shall fall down dead on the spot. From this moment forward, any sound this child utters will kill"

There were gasps across the garden, and then a titter of incredulous laughter. Someone cried out, "A curse! How rare!"

"Capital fun!"

"It’s too, too divine!"

Estella stared at them. Delight gleamed in their eyes. They didn’t believe her. Of course they didn’t. Her Majesty’s subjects didn’t go around believing things willy-nilly. But whether they believed it or not, the curse was as real as the heat, and soon they would know it.

How soon?

Estella’s finger was still caught in the girl’s tiny fist — she’d never ceased to marvel at the strength of a baby’s grip — and she looked back down into those gray eyes. She was a lovely little thing, this child. Estella had never had a baby of her own, her husband had died so young. In the darkness of grief in the days after his death, she’d hoped ferociously that there might be a baby–that something of him might be arranging itself within her even as she followed his coffin to the cemetery. But it was not to be. She had been left alone, and she had also been left empty.

A breeze stirred the trees and the baby smiled again. She looked as if she might coo, and Estella felt suddenly that her own death was perched upon her shoulder like a bird. How easy to die, she thought, and how fitting, if she were to be the first victim of this curse … the first victim of this child, whom at the behest of a demon she had just turned into a murderer. For, as surely as twenty-two children in Kashmir lived, people in Jaipur would die.

But not yet. Vasudev had his curses, but Estella was not without power of her own. Before the Political Agent’s wife could sweep over and scoop up her child, Estella leaned down, pressed her fingertip gently but firmly to the baby’s lips and whispered, "You will stay silent, won’t you, little thing? Until you are old enough to understand the curse, your voice will be as a bird in a cage." And so it was.

Three Limbo

Year by year the girl grew up. Queen Victoria died. Black rats aboard steamships carried plague from China to India. Millions died. Estella and Vasudev were kept very busy. The Great War began with a shot. The Germans used poison gas first, but the British followed suit. They were so ashamed of themselves they forbade the very soldiers who carried the chlorine canisters from uttering the word "gas." Millions died. In India, Vasudev’s curses mostly came to their fruition. Among their victims were a child in Chittagong who went fleetingly invisible every time she sneezed, and a Punjabi princeling who crowed like a cockerel at dawn.

But through some remarkable depth of will, the gray-eyed daughter of the Agent of Jaipur held her own curse in a curious limbo, and after more than seventeen years, the British still had no reason to believe in it.

Vasudev chafed and swore. "It’s not fair, you meddling with the servants!" he hissed to Estella, his face flushing in fury so that its two halves nearly matched crimson. "You haven’t let things take their natural course!"

"Natural course?" Estella repeated, giving him a flat look. "There are no curses in the ‘natural course.’ You’ve had every opportunity to influence the Agent’s servants too, Vasudev. You spend enough time spying in the garden there."

The demon gave her a sour look but said nothing. What could he say? That that damned Pranjivan had taken unfair advantage of his broad shoulders and flashing white teeth to sway the girl’s servants? That the factotum was too damned handsome, and an ugly little demon hadn’t a chance at a game like that? It was true, but he wouldn’t say it. Even demons have some dignity. The truth was, Estella had won — so far. First that trick of whispering the girl silent until she was old enough to understand the curse, and now this. The servants believed Pranjivan, damned handsome beggar, and the girl believed the servants. In that raucous palace of singing sisters, she lived her life butterfly-silent, never giving so much as a laugh out loud. When Vasudev spied on her in the garden, he saw a deep sadness in her, a dreamy wistfulness, but he never saw her test the curse, not even on a beetle or an ant. It was inhuman. The girl wasn’t normal!