“You might not want to feel too bad for me,” he said, forcing a grim smile. He didn’t want her feeling sorry for him, the cursed hereditary thief. “That’s why I went to your room.” He looked her right in the eye and said, “I wanted to steal the pendant. I didn’t know if it would help, but I had this idea that I could have it fixed and maybe somehow return it to the temple in Mysuru. And maybe that would be enough, even with all the missing rubies. Maybe that was the way to mend that which is broken and repair that which is severed. I don’t know. I don’t know.” He rubbed his cold face, then stopped and dropped his hands to his lap, looking straight ahead. “But maybe most of all, it means I am what my father says I am. Different. Cursed. Broken.”

They sat in silence for a full minute. Saying those words out loud, Grey felt freer than he ever had before. But lurking under that open sky of freedom was a vast black ocean of shame and a surety that he was not just doomed but corrupt, too.

Grey glanced at Jaya, sitting, pensive, beside him. “You can yell. It’s okay. Or you can leave. I’ll understand.”

She shook her head slowly. “I… I won’t say it doesn’t make me angry, that you were in my room without asking. That you wanted to steal a gift my father gave me, that might actually belong to my family in the first place.” Her voice was hard as she said the last part, as if there were big things, like chunks of rock just under the surface, she wasn’t saying. “But the point is,” she said after a moment, her voice much gentler, “that you were desperate. We’ve all done things when we’re desperate that we might not do otherwise.”

“I somehow doubt that you, Perfect Princess Jaya, have done anything so crass as trying to steal someone else’s necklace.”

“Maybe not stealing,” she said, shaking her head. She kept her gaze straight ahead too. “But I have planned to do things that I might never have considered under other circumstances.”

“Really?” Grey was intrigued. “Like what?”

She looked at him, something burning in her brown eyes. She opened her mouth, paused, and then closed it again. “The details aren’t important,” she said quietly, averting her eyes.

They sat in silence another moment, and then Jaya said, “But wait a minute. You said you wanted to steal the pendant to end the curse, but you didn’t steal it. I brought it with me.” She patted her coat; presumably, the pendant sat nestled in an interior pocket.