The Chaos Curse (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #3) - Sayantani DasGupta Page 0,1

give her a casual wave, like celebrities do when meeting fans.

“Thumbs-up on freeing Prince Neel! Shabash!” called another girl with a big green streak in her braid. She obviously hadn’t gotten the memo that my hair had gone back to its normal black. I wondered if I should ask the Kingdom Beyond’s teen fashion magazine, Teen Taal, to do an article on my hairstyle change.

“Too bad the game show turned out to be a big scam, and that the Serpent King wanted to kill you with the Chintamoni and Poroshmoni Stones so he could cheat death and live forever!” added a third girl, who was carrying, I noticed, a replica of my own bow and arrow. “We saw it all on the live broadcast! What a bummer!”

“Totally! Yeah! I mean, thanks!” I managed to call back. I guess you could classify my birth dad turning out to be an immortality-seeking homicidal maniac as a serious bummer. But I didn’t let the smile fall from my face. This huge crowd was here to see me, or so I thought, and I didn’t want to let them down. I wondered if I should offer to sign autographs or something.

That is, until I realized that no one was actually there to see me after all.

“Your Royal Majesty,” squeaked someone in a ridiculously high voice.

I turned around graciously, trying to channel every royal princess I’d ever seen on television, only to realize that the man with the high voice wasn’t talking to me at all. It was one of the bearded minister dudes, a tiny fellow with a purple turban on his head the shape of a state-fair-prizewinning turnip. And he was addressing Neel, holding out a little pillow to the prince. Wait a minute, none of this pomp was for me? I felt my face heat up like the sun.

Then I looked more carefully at the diamond-and-pearl-encrusted pillow in the minister’s hand. On it, weirdly enough, was a cheap paper crown—the kind a little kid might get in a fast-food restaurant with a side of fries and a shake.

Neel, who had been a little more jumpy than usual since his imprisonment, kind of scooted back at the minister’s offering. Like it was going to hurt him. “What’s with the crown, Sir Gobbet? Am I just imagining it or is it made of construction paper?”

“We did the best we could, Majesty,” said the little minister named Gobbet. “We were in a rush, and a coronation isn’t a coronation without a crown.”

“Ooo! A coronation!” Naya clapped her hands like the goofy ray of sunshine she was.

“A coronation?” I mumbled, like the confused and disappointed girl from New Jersey I was.

“Coro-what-tion?” repeated Neel, looking both annoyed and confused.

“Your Majesty.” With some difficulty, because of her one shorter leg, my cousin Mati now knelt before Prince Neelkamal in the sand. She then pressed her hands together in a respectful namaskar. Neel jumped back even more. He may have been the Raja’s oldest son, while Mati was the daughter of the palace stable master, my uncle, but I’d never seen Mati get down on the ground before Neel like this. Apparently, Neel hadn’t either.

“Don’t do that! Stop!” Poor Neel tried to help Mati to her feet, his face horrified. “Get up, Mati! It’s not like that with us! We’re friends!”

“Sooo dreamy!” drawled the rakkhoshi Priya as she came over to stand next to me. Like the other Pink-Sari Skateboarder demonesses, Priya had been down in Sesha’s undersea hotel when it started to crumble, but had been sucked out into the ocean a little before us. Yet somehow, her camo pants, tank, and the pink sari she wore around her neck like a cape were already dry.

By the look on her face, I thought at first Priya was talking about Mati being dreamy, but then she went on in a fake-girly voice, “Prince Neelkamal’s just so darned dedicated to equality, you know? That kind of attitude is, like, really attractive in an absolute monarch filthy with inherited wealth and unearned power.”

The fire demoness breathed stinky smoke out of her nose as she shot the sarcastic words out of her mouth. I was still feeling stupid for thinking that all these people were here for me, but at least I wasn’t soaking anymore.

“Thanks for the blow-dry.” I coughed, waving my hands in front of my face. “What’s with the shave?”

“The revolution doesn’t have time for hair products.” Priya ran a long-taloned hand over her newly bald head. “But apparently, it