“The person we have come to see. From what I was told, she has been in a terrible mood for the past five hundred years, and we can only pray she will help us. Now come!”

The three of them dashed past stall after stall with stranger and stranger wares: featherlight bamboo flutes that could only be played by foxes, fresh lassis made of blue mangoes harvested from starry orchards in Svargalok, stone figurines the size of her thumb that softened into living animals if you watched them long enough. The tiny monkey chirruped at Tanvi, and in the space of a blink, it had bounded across the distance between them and landed on her shoulder.

“Shoo!” Venkat swatted at it. The indignant monkey made as if to bite him but hopped back to its tent.

“Potions! A potion for what ails you!” a rickety voice called. The voice’s owner, an old man with far more wrinkles around his mischievous grin than teeth in it, displayed vials of striped healing salve: red, white, and black. He tapped a vial with a hairy knuckle. “Ground-up unicorn horn to mend all bodily wounds.”

“No, thanks,” Tanvi said. Her wound wasn’t physical.

“I also have unguent of unicorn eye, if that is more to your liking.” The man brought out a jar of glowing cerulean eyeballs suspended in a viscous jasmine-scented liquid. “Steeped from new moon to new moon for true insight into one’s own shortcomings.” He cackled. “Unless you are too afraid to know yourself?”

Tanvi already knew what a mess she was. She didn’t need magic for that.

Venkat touched her arm. “Everything all right?” He smiled, his brown eyes seeming more golden, as if the haze surrounding the Market had settled inside them.

She nodded, making herself look away before the flood of feelings could knock her over again.

A stall down the winding path glittered at her, covered in keys of all kinds. Silver keys wreathed in white apple blossoms and green heart-shaped ivy; golden keys wrapped in fiery leaves in reds, yellows, and oranges; translucent keys made of icicles and tipped with ice-blue frost. Venkat’s crystal door and key would fit right in here. “Open the door to autumn,” the vendor cried. “Find your way to a fragrant, fruitful spring!”

“Serenade your ears with the music of the spheres!” proclaimed a middle-aged woman in a silver-blue-and-black sari as she uncorked a cut-crystal vial of miniature silver musical notes. They soared up and surrounded Tanvi and Venkat in perfect constellations, tinkling for the span of a few heartbeats before returning to the vial.

Venkat stepped closer to the retreating notes, entranced, but Tanvi flicked away the stray one by her ear. The Night Market was almost irritatingly full of temptations. Its magic diffused around her like a mist, wrapping her in its promise. Inviting her to forget why she’d come here. Inviting her instead to stay.