The Chaos Curse (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #3) - Sayantani DasGupta Page 0,71
raise a nest of eggs! One wing cannot clap on its own!”
“Wait a minute, Tuni, you totally went along with the plan too,” said Neel accusingly.
“In cases like these, it’s exceedingly rude to have a good memory,” Tuni sputtered.
“Just try to stay out of trouble, you two, all right?” Mati said. One of the PSS girls skated in with a big pile of notes for Mati to go over, and she quickly left the room.
As we waited to hear word of Naya’s operation, Neel and I kind of wandered around the cave complex, checking out all the preparations for the next few pre-wedding days. Now that we had blown it, and Sesha knew that there was a human and rakkhosh resistance army of some sort out there, everyone had to be even more careful. The rakkhosh disguises, for instance, had to be perfect.
In one area of the cave complex, the fashion team was still trying wedding outfits on rakkhosh, clucking and cooing over outfits that didn’t fit right, and also ones that did.
“I’m brilliant, if I say so myself!” announced the fashion designer Gyan Mukherjee.
“Such grace! Such vision!” agreed his assistants, their mouths full of pins as they tucked up a ginormous purple gown on a warty, three-eyed rakkhoshi.
“I wish there was something we could do,” Neel burst out. “I hate all this waiting.”
“We could help the fashion team.” I gestured to Gyan Mukherjee’s work space, covered in mountains of fabric and ribbons and things. There were at least ten rakkhoshi seamstresses sewing away on giant machines, a countless number of rakkhosh models milling around, and in the middle of it all, the fashion guru shouting meaningless orders. “Fix that top stitch! Steam those culottes! Tack those hems!”
“Nah, I’m good.” Neel laughed. I laughed too. We kept walking.
In another area, a bunch of rakkhosh were practicing an over-the-top musical number for the sangeet, which was happening in two days. They fluttered their eyes and ground their hips and waved their arms in a typical Kingdom Beyollywood–style dance production, only, it looked seriously more scary, what with all the performers’ warts and fangs and teeth and wings.
“We could practice a song-and-dance number for the sangeet,” Neel said, pointing to the demonic dancers, who seemed now to be bumping into each other at every turn. The human choreographer looked about ready to pull out her hair with frustration.
“Step-ball-change, step-ball-change, kick, kick. Okay, close enough. Look left, look right, hip swivel, turn around, jazz hands! Get that finger out of your dance partner’s nose!” she yelled.
“No thanks, no jazz hands for me,” I said. “I’d rather face an army of supervillains again!”
Neel nodded in agreement. “But I could do without the fake beard this time!”
It would’ve all been funny, only I couldn’t seem to concentrate on any of it. All I could think about was Naya, on the operating table. Naya, so happy to be rescuing us. Naya, risking her life for her friends without a second thought. It was a good few hours before we heard from the doctor that she had made it through the surgery.
“She’s alive but I’m worried that she’s not waking up.” Dr. Ahmed looked incredibly serious. “Our tests show there was a rare kind of poison in that monkey arrow—and the only antidote …” The doctor rifled through a copy of K. P. Das’s The Adventurer’s Guide to Rakkhosh, Khokkosh, Bhoot, Petni, Doito, Danav, Daini, and Secret Codes. “… is from a long-ago-extinct flower.”
“What flower?” I grabbed on to that small hope. “What flower?”
“The juice of a blue champak flower is the only antidote to this kind of poison,” the doctor said, shaking her head.
Naya’s air clan friends next to me gnashed their teeth and hissed.
“What?” I looked around in confusion.
“The last-known blue champak tree grew on the grounds of the Ghatatkach Academy of Murder and Mayhem—the main rakkhosh school in Demon Land—but that last tree died back when my mom was a student there,” Neel said. “I remember her telling me about it. It was their school flower or something—everyone was really upset.”
“Unless we can find another antidote, we don’t know if she’ll make it,” Dr. Ahmed said. Then she turned to go, her face back in the book. “Excuse me, I have a lot more research to do.”
The news was such a horrible blow, I couldn’t look at Naya’s other clan members in the face. The black-toothed rakkhoshi made an angry noise and turned away from me. Next to me, wordlessly, Neel squeezed my hand.