Lips Touch: Three Times by Lips Touch; Three Times Page A

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
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    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.
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    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
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    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!
    That one unfulfilled curse was the single blemish on Vasudev's joy
when he guessed that the old bitch was dying.
    Estella had been old for a