The Chaos Curse (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #3) - Sayantani DasGupta Page 0,13

Tuntuni. “So what if the bear doesn’t have a great sense of spelling? He’s a bear after all.”

I drove on, not bothering to explain to my bird companion that it wasn’t the bear’s spelling of the word honey that was bothering me. Why were so many stories from different cultures mashing up like this?

We hadn’t gone but half an hour when something else weird happened. It was almost sunset, and I was getting more and more worried about ever getting my moon mother’s attention before she rose in the sky. Tuni and I were calling and calling to her, our heads turned upward, which is why I didn’t notice—until it was too late—the sticky white strands covering the road like a huge spiderweb. I swerved the auto rikshaw hard and ended up driving us into a ditch.

“Hang on!” I yelled.

“Second accident in a day! There go your rikshaw insurance raaaaaaaaates!” shrieked Tuni as we crashed, the auto landing with a metallic screech down in the ditch.

“You okay?” I rubbed my head where I’d slammed it into the side of the vehicle. The front of the auto rikshaw was all crumpled, and there was a big metal piece sticking out of the bottom. (An axle? That’s a car thing, right?)

“Oh, my wing! My beak! My poor handsome head!” groaned Tuni. “Princess, if you had a driver’s license, I would tell them to revoke it!”

The gecko just sat there, blinking at the both of us.

I managed to get myself out of the beat-up, sideways auto and then limped off to look at the stuff blocking the road. The path in front of us was covered in white stringy goo. It looked like we were at summer camp and someone had decided to pull a prank by decorating our cabin with crisscrossing string. The string wasn’t just across our path in the road, but threaded through the groves of thorny trees on either side of it. There was something about this that felt like a setup. Immediately, I took out my bow and arrow and looked this way and that.

“Keep your eyes peeled for trouble,” Tuni hissed, again sounding like he’d escaped from some old-timey movie about a hard-boiled detective.

I made a motion like he shouldn’t talk. Then I used two fingers to point to my eyes, before scanning my fingers out over the landscape around us.

“What is that? Do you think we’re in some kind of police show or something?” Tuni scoffed, totally not bothering to keep his voice down.

I rolled my eyes. My birdbrained friend was so annoying. Ignoring Tuni, I continued to scan the roadside, my weapon at the ready. It didn’t take us long to see where the string was coming from. A few yards away from where I’d crashed the rikshaw, a woman sat by the edge of the road. She was spinning the threads, which flew off her spindle as if by magic, coating everything in sight. She lifted her head as we approached, but she didn’t exactly look like she was about to attack us or anything. On the other hand, there was something odd about her. I mean, what were the chances of bumping into yet another old woman so soon on our journey?

I put down my weapon. “All right, Bunty!” I laughed, striding toward the spinning granny. “I know it’s you!”

“Take off that wig already!” Tuni added, dive-bombing the old woman’s gray hair and trying to pull it off with his beak.

The only problem was, the old woman’s hair didn’t come off. “Stop that! Who are you and why do you hurt a helpless old woman?” she shrieked, almost knocking over her magic spinning wheel.

“Wait, Tuni …” I was starting to get a bad feeling about this.

“Who are you?” The old woman moved her head in my direction, and I realized she probably couldn’t see me, as her eyes were coated in a white film.

“You can’t fool us, tiger!” Tuntuni yelled, dive-bombing her hair again. This time, even Tiktiki One got in on the act, climbing up to the old woman’s white-sari-clad shoulder, then flicking its tongue at the woman’s wrinkled face.

“Stop! Stop! Why do you hurt me so?” the pathetic old lady cried, sounding so real that my stomach dropped about a thousand feet.

“Tuni! Tiktiki One! Hold on! Halt!” I went to pull the bird and lizard off the granny. “That’s not Bunty!”

“Let me go!” Tuntuni squirmed in my hands, his claws aiming at the old woman’s face. “I’ll rip that cheap mask