Chapter 15: Bhumika

BHUMIKA

Even Bhumika’s most loyal guards protested when she called for a palanquin to be arranged.

“Your health, my lady,” they said. “The child…”

“Is inside me,” Bhumika said, “and has no plans to go anywhere yet.”

One said tentatively, “If General Vikram hears of this…”

“He won’t be pleased,” Bhumika admitted, huffing as she donned her strongest, lined boots, with some difficulty. The girth of her belly was ever interfering with her daily business. “But why would he hear of this? Fetch my shawl, please.”

One of her girls brought over the shawl and arranged it neatly around Bhumika’s shoulders.

“We,” one hesitating guard said, “would hate to see more conflict between you and the master.”

“Perhaps I should take a war chariot instead of a palanquin,” mused Bhumika. She smiled, to show she was joking. Mildly, she added, “We’re going now.”

Only a handful of Lord Santosh’s men had remained in the household to act as spies, and she avoided their notice simply by ensuring that her departure did not cross over with any of their guard shifts in the vicinity of the stables or the mahal gates. With the assistance of her own men and women, she had learned to track their patterns—the watches they took, the duties they demanded be assigned to them, the questions they asked.

She had met Santosh only once, when he’d first arrived at the mahal. It hadn’t taken her long to understand what he was: a pompous man, petty and small-minded, and hungry for power. She hadn’t thought much of him.

Santosh liked to think he was keeping a close eye on her husband. He had not yet realized that his spies were being watched in return, and he likely wouldn’t. He lacked the sense to be wary of maidservants. Like many of his ilk, he looked right through them.

Bhumika’s husband had allowed the markets to reopen after the raid on the brothel, albeit reluctantly, out of necessity. People needed to buy food, after all. The streets of Hiranaprastha were still relatively quiet, but people could not put aside all their daily cares because of rebel activity or the general’s soldiers patrolling, even if they wanted to.

Through the net of the palanquin’s sliding doors, Bhumika watched the bustling food stalls pass, tables laden with pans of hot oil for frying freshwater fish, pakoras and samosas, even Srugani-style rice dumplings with carefully pleated edges.

As a girl, Bhumika had loved the bustle of Hiranaprastha, the constant motion and energy of the city. She had never been able to enjoy it directly—as a noble daughter, she had been sheltered, only able to watch the city through a palanquin screen as she did now—but she had preserved the image of it in her mind like a miniature portrait. Noise. Life. Her own quiet body, hidden and protected, watching it all.

The world beyond the palanquin screen had changed since her girlhood. Although the sound and motion remained, the edges of the portrait had frayed. There were more beggars now. The buildings were poorer, drabber. Color had leached out of Hiranaprastha. And Bhumika was no longer just a quiet body, consuming the city with her eyes alone.

She was carried from the bustling center, out beyond the quieter markets, the pottery district where she had once bought exquisite blue vessels for her rose cuttings, over a stretch of overgrown fields and barren hills dotted with houses, toward the burnt, flattened field where imperial traitors were put to death. Here, there were only a few homes—a scattering of dwellings for the men and women who guarded the jail and then cleared away the dead. Behind those houses loomed the high walls that encircled the field. Forbidding walls of wood and stone, rimmed with jagged points of glass. In the morning sun, they shimmered like the dome of a crown.

She rapped the side of the palanquin—three raps, an easy way to alert the bearers to slow their pace. A moment later, she saw a figure exit one of the dwellings—an ancient woman with thick white hair piled upon her head in a neat, knotted bun, dressed in a plain gray sari with a brown shawl thrown loosely around her shoulders. The woman bowed her head. Waited.

Bhumika’s palanquin bearers lowered her to the ground. Bhumika alighted, ignoring the twinges of her body as she bent and stood, her spine and hips burdened with the uneasy ache of the child in her belly. She thanked the servant who offered her an arm, taking it gratefully so that she could rise to her feet with some modicum of dignity.

“Are you sure this is best?” Her servant was frowning.

“Yes,” Bhumika said. “Entirely.”

She had not cultivated servants and followers who obeyed without question. But sometimes she tired of all the hesitation, the concern. It had grown so much worse since… well.

She touched her fingertips to her stomach, then tucked them away once more beneath her shawl. The old woman nodded at her in greeting.

“It’s begun,” said the woman. “We can watch from the east.”

She guided Bhumika and her servant to a staircase that led to a tower overlooking the execution grounds. Within the walls was a macabre theater of death. There was a watching crowd—a thick throng of men standing shoulder to shoulder, with the wealthiest watchers seated above them, in high stalls—and soldiers stationed in the opposing watchtowers, ready with arrows.

At the center of the grounds were the elephants. Parijati war elephants were enormous, heavy-tusked, and small-eyed. Bhumika had never liked elephants, and these were blinkered and whip-flayed, their tusks already wet with gore. One unfortunate scribe—recognizable by his tonsured head—was being forced down to a plinth of rock, his head pressed to the surface as the mahout led the elephant close and urged it to raise its leg. And lower it.

The noise of the scribe’s screams and the wet splinter of his skull were only partially masked by the yells of the crowd. Bhumika watched and listened and did not wince. In some ways, she was a temple daughter, still.

“He views from above,” said the old woman, “with a few of his men. See.” She raised a finger, pointing at a figure in one of the high stalls. And yes, there sat Bhumika’s husband, calmly observing as the champions of Ahiranyi independence were executed. She could see Vikram’s advisors around him, and Santosh at his side, in a position of honor the man did not deserve.

She had learned more of Santosh’s nature, from the girl who had served wine on the night Vikram had entertained Santosh and a Saketan prince; from the older woman who swept all the guest rooms, including Santosh’s own. They had spoken to Khalida, who had spoken to Bhumika, and confirmed that her low opinion of Santosh was entirely correct. He was not a clever man, but he was a driven and ambitious one. He would require watching.

The mahout led the elephant away. There was a pause. Bhumika fanned her face with a hand and wondered at the delay. The execution groundskeepers ran out in groups, lugging straw and firewood with them, and giant buckets of a viscous liquid that they poured over the wood as it was laid. Bhumika leaned forward to get a closer look, but she could not be sure what it was. Oil? Ghee?

There was another roar, as more rebels were finally brought out. These figures were not hooded, their faces bare to the crowd. From their short stature, their figures, Bhumika knew they were the women. Maidservants.

Someone had dressed them up like brides.

A ripple of noise ran through the crowd, an uneasy shift that moved the press of bodies like a physical tremor through muscle.

Bhumika’s whole body revolted in an instant, a wave of revulsion sweeping through her. She pressed her own hand to her mouth to hold back the nausea.

She could not afford to be sick or horrified. Later, perhaps. But not here, and not now. So Emperor Chandra intends to purify our women, she thought, with forced detachment. How generous of him, to murder us thus.

The women were forced to climb the pyre. Their hands were tied.

One of the men brought forward a torch.

Bhumika did not look away from them. It was important to remind herself of what was at stake: how easily the tensions in Ahiranya could bubble over, how delicate the balance she had struggled to cultivate alongside her husband truly was.

The air smelled of rancid smoke. The crowd was screaming.

She forced herself to think.

Her husband would not return home for some time. His advisors were with him. Lord Iskar’s haveli was nearest. They would go there. There would be drinking, and rounds of catur, and in the midst of all the gambling and games of strategy and dice would be the business of politics. She knew the way of it, for men like them.

And Lord Iskar, of course, would be keen to cultivate Lord Santosh’s favor, now that it was eminently clear that Ahiranya would be the place where Emperor Chandra tested his particular brand of faith, and where Santosh would, perhaps, soon be regent.

So she waited, hands clasped in front of her as the arena emptied. She waited and breathed with shallow, steady care, mindful of her roiling stomach and the sick, cooked smell of the smoke. She waited until she heard the creak of the stairs, and the old woman said, “My lady.”

Then she turned and watched as the mahout touched his hands together in a gesture of respect. He still smelled of blood and the beast. He raised his eyes.

“Lady Bhumika,” he said.

“How are your girls, Rishi?”

“Well, well. I have a son, now.”

“My congratulations. And your wife’s health?”

“Well. She’s well.”

“Thank you for indulging in pleasantries with me,” Bhumika said. She gave him a smile. She saw some of the tension in his shoulders ease. “And thank you for coming to speak with me.”

The mahout inclined his head again. “I owe your family a debt, my lady. I don’t forget.”

“And I am grateful for your loyalty,” she replied sincerely. “Now please. Tell me. They were tortured?”

“Yes.”

“The women too?”

He nodded silently.

“What did they say?”

“They admitted they have support from Ahiranyi highborn. Funding for dissemination of their poetry.”

“Did they offer any names?”

“No,” said the mahout. “No names. They had none to give.”

Good.

Patronage of Ahiranyi rebellion—even in the form of art—was a crime, and not one Bhumika could admit involvement in.

“And their connection,” she said tentatively, “with the rebels.”

“The rebels wore masks,” said the mahout. “They knew no more than that.”

She shouldn’t have felt relief at that. But she did.

“Thank you,” she said again.

Her servant stepped forward, holding out a small drawstring purse of coin.

“For your help,” said Bhumika, as the mahout took the purse with murmured gratitude. “And when your son is ready for an apprenticeship…”

“My lady,” he said. He bowed deeply and departed swiftly, the old woman following him down. Now only Bhumika and her servant remained, above an execution ground hazy with smoke, its ground stained dark with blood.

“Shall we return to the mahal, my lady?”

“No,” she said. “Take me to my uncle’s home.”

The Sonali family haveli was built in traditional Ahiranyi style. Modest by grand Parijati standards, it was nothing but exquisite to Bhumika’s eyes.

The Parijati loved their airy, expansive mansions, rich in pale marble and sandstone and high columns. Ahiranyi architecture was modest, almost quaint by comparison. The Sonali haveli was largely open to the sky, divided into parts only by delicate wefts of lattice screens, decorated in leaf and flower motifs carved into wood. Only the bedrooms were covered, closed off from the open air by curtains of light purple silk.

She entered the central courtyard, where a water well played melodic, liquid music. One of the maidservants had conducted morning prayers: There was a small platter of flowers floating in the well.

“Lady Bhumika,” one maidservant said in greeting. “He’s awake.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “Show me to him.”

Her uncle’s room faced the courtyard, allowing in the fresh scent of water and the faint warmth of the sunshine. She knew he loved listening to the patter of monsoon rain on the courtyard stone; the deeper echo of it as it met the water of the well. He’d been ill for many years, and such small comforts were precious to him.

She rapped lightly on the doorframe as she entered. She was greeted by the sweet scent of red lilies, arranged in blue lacquer pots around the windows, the walls.

“Uncle,” she greeted him, kneeling by his divan. “It’s me.”

“Ah,” he said, voice creaking. “It is you.” A smile curled his mouth.

He looked older. Thinner. There were lines of pain around his mouth. A bad day, then. She would try not to demand great conversation from him on this occasion. She’d only visited him a bare handful of weeks ago, but time was creeping over him with steady cruelty.

“I hear your husband has had trouble.”

“Where did you hear that, uncle?”

“You’re not the only one with loyal eyes and ears.” He tsked. “A messy business. He should have shown mercy.”

“He did what the emperor wanted,” Bhumika murmured, although she agreed with all her heart.

“We should not do what powerful people tell us, simply because they tell us,” he rasped. “You know that.”

He covered her hand with his own. His fingers trembled. “Are we alone?”

She raised her head. The servant who had led her in was gone.

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you remember when they came for you?” he asked.

“I remember,” she said. But he was caught up in the memory, and her response was not enough.

“You were so small,” he murmured. “And so alone. I did not want them to take you. There are plenty of children who can learn to serve on the council, I told them. But my girl is a Sonali. She stays with her family.”

“It wasn’t so terrible,” she lied. “They treated me well.”

He shook his head. But he did not argue.

“You’re a good girl, Bhumika,” he breathed. “You’ve made a good marriage. Ensured that our nobility have standing. You are not what the elders would have made you, and I am glad of that. Glad we saved you, your aunt and I.”

Priya had survived the massacre of the temple children by chance. She wore the scars of that night, still, in her nature and her memory.

Bhumika had not been there.

Her family had never wanted her to be a temple child. She and her male cousin had been the last of their family line, after her parents had perished of a fever. And then her cousin had died too, of a wasting illness, and Bhumika had been the only one left. Her uncle had brought her home for the funeral. After the burial, the sharing of food and song, he had asked her to remain at home. He and her aunt had argued—about heresy, about what the temple council would do if they didn’t return Bhumika, about how they had to return her—but her uncle had prevailed.

When the other children had died, Bhumika had been in this house. Drinking tea. Listening to birds beyond the window lattice. Playing the part of a good Ahiranyi highborn girl, instead of the temple-blessed creature she truly was.

She had tried to use her survival for good. When the regent—older and grim, with the blood of her siblings upon his hands—had courted her, she’d smiled at him. Kissed him. She’d wed him. She carried his child. And in return, she’d gained the power to protect those displaced or orphaned by the rot, and the influence and means to fund her fellow Ahiranyi. Small things. But better than nothing.

And still, she sat in the quiet sickroom, with her uncle’s hand in her own, and thought only of the gore beneath an elephant’s foot, the screams over a pyre. Blood, flesh. Soil.

Fire.

She leaned forward and kissed her uncle’s forehead, beneath the weak wisps of white hair that still haloed his head.

“Everything I am, I have achieved because of you,” she said. “Now sleep. Please. You need your rest.”

She went to the household prayer room.

She had nowhere to pray in her husband’s household. He worshipped the mothers of flame, kept his Parijati ways, and she…

She was his wife.

Uncle Govind did not maintain the prayer room, particularly. For form’s sake, there were candles lit, and the finely wrought statues of yaksa were dusted clean and polished to an oily glow by the careful hands of servants. But there were no new offerings at their feet—no fruit, no shell of coconut, no flowers—just empty platters.

She sat down on the floor mat. Sat as straight and neat as she could, her legs crossed. Closed her eyes. Breathed. And breathed. Winding deeper, and deeper.

The sangam unfolded around her.

She opened her eyes. Waited. She knew it was only a matter of time until he came to her.

The waters moved around the shadow of her, deep and strange.

She had loved the sangam as a girl, when she’d first entered it. Loved its beauty and its strangeness. Loved its power.

Now she refused to look at it. She simply said his name.

“Ashok. Come.”

She moved forward, the water’s weight rippling around her. Stars burst and withered above her. And there was Ashok. He too was shadow. When he moved the shadow of him grew dappled, blurring for a moment, then settling, light breaking through a canopy of leaves.

She wondered how she looked to him.

“Bhumika,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

“I don’t care for this place.”

“And you don’t care for me,” he said. “I know. So let’s not play your usual games of pleasantries. Tell me. Did you watch them die?”

“I did.”

“Was it brutal?”

“Executions are always brutal,” said Bhumika. “Anything else would defeat the point.”

“I knew they were going to burn the women,” he said. “Does that surprise you?”

“I know you have your spies,” she said. “Just as I have my own.”

“Nothing like you have, but we make do. You have an executioner, don’t you?” he said. “But I have a man who sweeps up the temple to the mothers of flame. Apparently not all the priests are supportive of the emperor’s interest in purification. They’re worried the rebels may burn down their temple in return.”

“Should they be worried?”

His shadowy mouth curved into a grin. “Who knows,” he replied. Then his smile faded. “You know, of course, that your husband is a fool.”

Bhumika did not entirely disagree. But Ashok’s words were an attack on her, not Vikram: on her choices, on her sacrifices, on the life of a Parijati highborn wife that she wore, a mask of her own.

“He had to retaliate. The emperor required decisive action.” Or so Vikram had told her, his brow a furrow of irritation, when Bhumika had questioned his decision to kill the rebels by crushing. If she had known about the burning…

Ah, too late now.

A statement needs to be made, he’d said. You can’t understand, my dove. You have a soft heart.

“So he puts poets and maidservants to death? Does your husband know he killed the very people you fund from your family purse?” When Bhumika did not deign to reply, Ashok laughed. “I told you he’s a fool.”

“You were the one who set a false maidservant in my household,” Bhumika said tightly. “You were the one who made him and his ilk consider this necessary. You knew your actions would have consequences.”

“I need the waters.” His voice lowered. Liquid dark. “Surely you understand that.”

Of course she did. She felt the pull of the waters every single day. She felt the yearning in her, the gravity of it tugging at her blood. If the power of it could have unspooled her veins from her body, it would have. She understood why Priya climbed the Hirana. She understood why the sangam haunted her own dreams.

“I need them more than you know,” he told her.

“You’ve been consuming the waters,” said Bhumika. It was a knot in her chest, that knowledge. “Broken from the source. I understand exactly how much you need them. A desperation of your own making, I think.”

He said nothing. That was answer enough.

“Why?” she asked, hating how it hurt still to think of him one day dying. As if she owed him anything at all.

“I’ve been consuming the vials for a long time,” Ashok said quietly. “And it keeps me strong. Keeps me alive. Now my new family—my soldiers, my fellow warriors—consume it too. They may not be twice-born like me. They know the vials will kill them. But they do it anyway, because like me they know that we must be free.”

He stepped closer to her.

“We’ve taken back forest settlements. We’ve placed people carefully where we needed them. In merchants’ houses. In highborn havelis. We’ve gained patrons. You’re not the only noble funding rebellion, Bhumika.” He leaned closer. “We’re learning every point of vulnerability, every place to strike so that the bones of the empire crumble around us.”

“All those plans will mean nothing when you’re dead and the rest of us are left to clean up the blood you’ve spilled,” said Bhumika.

“I won’t die,” Ashok said. “None of us will die. We’ll find the waters. We’ll live. Reinstate the temple council. If we bring back even a shadow of the Age of Flowers, it will be worth it.”

“Oh, Ashok. This won’t end as you hope.”

“We have Priya now.”

Even in the sangam, even in a place where they were dappled shadow, Bhumika’s face must have revealed something of what she felt, because Ashok said, “I sought her out.”

“Your damn rebel maid almost killed her.”

“I apologized.”

“Ah. That’s fine, then,” Bhumika replied scathingly. “As for having her—if you think you have any control of her, then you don’t know her at all.”

“I do have her. She told me how much she’s missed me. How she loves me still.” There was something like true sorrow in his voice. True feeling. “She didn’t know I lived.”

Bhumika didn’t say, She ran away a dozen times seeking you, and a dozen times my guards brought her back. She wept for you and if she’d known you lived, she would never have rested, she would never have given up on you—

Instead she said, “She doesn’t know the way either. Leave her be.”

“But she’ll find it. I know she will. Of all of us—she was always the one who could find it. She has a gift.”

A gift. Yes.

“Decisive action,” Ashok mused, when Bhumika did not reply. It took Bhumika a moment to realize he was repeating her own words regarding Vikram. “I think I need to perform some decisive action of my own. Those poor maidservants and scribes deserve justice. And I don’t think you’re inclined to provide it.” His shadowy hands clenched, with the creak of trees bending to the wind. “And now my followers and I have the strength we need to put the world right.”

“Whatever you’re planning to do, don’t. Ashok. This will only escalate.” She had terrible visions of the emperor’s soldiers swarming over the country. Trees felled, people burned, blood in the soil. Their history and their present obliterated. What little they’d saved, of resistance and art, of their culture, lost.

“Parijatdvipa is the rot that must be torn from Ahiranya,” he said. “The empire only rose because it crushed us. It doesn’t deserve to keep us under its boot any longer.”

“And what will you replace it with, exactly? Your plucky band of rebels?”

“When we have power, we won’t be called rebels anymore.”

“Of course. Apologies, Elder Ashok,” she said, her tone mocking. “And who will your new council trade with? Who will sell them the rice and cloth we need to survive?”

“We’re a rich nation, Bhumika.”

“I’m in a much better position to know our wealth than you are. We have forest, yes, trees that could be felled and wood that could be sold, the most profitable short-term route, for all that if Parijatdvipa were to trade with us at all, their terms would be less than favorable. But our people’s culture relies on the forest not being cut down. And our fields and forest are riven with rot. Perhaps you’ve noticed.” When he was silent, she said, “Ashok, we need allies.”

“And we’ll have them,” he said calmly. “When we’re free. That matters more than anything. It’s worth any price.”

“You think I don’t want a different world than this?” she asked. “You think I want the ruler of our country to be an outsider, beholden to an emperor’s whims? You think I want our siblings dead? You don’t understand that I’m trying to protect what remains of us—of our Ahiranya. I’m fighting for survival, and you—you’re choosing to gamble what little we have on a hope that may obliterate us.”

“Don’t pretty up your whoring,” he said, with a savagery that made her pause and then laugh, furious.

“There it is,” she said. “There’s the brother I know. The vicious bastard who once beat me blue to impress our elders. To prove himself strongest. You think being called a whore shames me? You think you haven’t bartered your body for your own ends? What do you think pouring death down your throat is?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t hurt you again. You’re not as strong as you once were. You wouldn’t survive it.”

He placed a hand against her chest.

“But your husband,” he said. “And those Parijati highborn. Well.”

“Ashok.”

He shoved her down.

She returned to herself. Shaking, she rose carefully to her feet.

The floor of the courtyard was being swept clean of dust. She crossed it. Made her way to her palanquin.

“Home,” she said to her guards. They lifted the palanquin and obeyed.

Her husband had returned. He was in her quarters, in her rose palace, finishing lunch when she arrived.

“You took the palanquin,” Vikram said, rinsing his hands clean in rose-scented water.

“I went to visit my uncle,” said Bhumika.

“How is his health?”

She shook her head. Walked over to him, brushing a fingertip lightly against the back of his hand in greeting. “I am going to pray for him. Incense for the mothers. And I will burn jasmine.”

Vikram made a hum of approval. Or perhaps it was sympathy.

“I have a new maid,” said Bhumika lightly, taking the glass of lemon water a servant proffered. “Oh, don’t look at me that way, my love. This one is trustworthy. She’s from my uncle’s own household.”

One girl had escaped the soldiers at the brothel. Only one. It was only right that Bhumika protect her.

“You don’t have the sense to know who to trust,” he said.

There was a hardness to his tone. So Bhumika lowered her eyes, chastised.

“My soft heart makes a fool of me,” she said.

“This one should be interviewed by someone trustworthy,” he said, as water was brought to him as well, a sheen of condensation upon the metal cup. “I’ll have Commander Jeevan speak to her.”

Bhumika nodded.

Vikram hesitated.

“Lord Santosh,” he began. Then went quiet. “Emperor Chandra is ordering women burned.”

She said nothing.

“This is not the way of the mothers of flame,” he said. “This Chandra… if the older brother ruled, if he hadn’t left his family and faith, it would not be so. But some men dream of times long dead, and times that never existed, and they’re willing to tear the present apart entirely to get them.

“I am glad you did not see it,” he added, and she wondered for a moment if he was testing her. If he knew. But no. He had never suspected her of anything, her poor, unknowing husband.

“Oh, Vikram,” she said quietly. “I am sorry.”

He sighed, and said, “You have nothing to apologize for.” He drank deeply, then lowered his cup. “Now. Come here. Tell me about your day.”

When Vikram was gone, Bhumika retired to her room. Khalida came in not long after, a pot of flowers balanced against her hip. Her expression was tight.

“Lady Pramila won’t release her,” said Khalida. “The maid Gauri told me. She won’t give your girl a day’s ease. What do you want to do?”

“Nothing,” said Bhumika. Here, through her window, she could see the edges of the Hirana, framed in sunlight.

“I can insist on your behalf that household rules around the treatment of servants are adhered to.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Bhumika. “I’ll find a way to talk to Priya regardless.”

She knew the Hirana’s power. She knew how it was already changing Priya. She had a hunch, a suspicion, and she would know soon enough if it was correct.

“What are you holding?” Bhumika asked. “A gift, is it?”

“Jasmine from Parijat itself,” said Khalida, placing the pot on the window by Bhumika. “General Vikram sent it to you. It’s a gift.”

“How kind of him,” Bhumika said, and saw Khalida’s lips quirk at the sweetness of her voice.

It was not a container fit for jasmine flower, and the fragrant blooms would die soon enough.

“Is he here?”

Khalida knew she wasn’t speaking of her husband.

“Yes.”

“Tell him to enter.”

As she waited, Bhumika brushed her fingers over the flowers; felt the deep, river rush of the deathless waters within her. She watched the small blossoms wither and fold in on themselves beneath her touch. There was no reason not to kill them, if they would not survive anyway.

“Lady Bhumika.”

A man’s voice. A man’s shadow on the marble, as he bowed behind her.

She turned.

In her years of marriage, Bhumika had made sure of one thing, at least: Vikram was master of his mahal, but the first loyalty of the majority of maids and children, the soldiers and serving men, those who cooked the food and set the fires, and held arrows and swords against the dark, was to her.

She—the regent’s kindly wife, his vapid dove—had saved them. She had given them work and a home. And she demanded nothing in return.

Not yet, anyway. Not until now.

She did not speak of the executions. She did not speak of Ashok. “You may be needed, soon enough,” she said. “And I am sorry for it, but I must ask for your loyalty. I must ask for your service. I must ask for what you promised me.”

There were resources you should use sparingly. Resources too precious to be wasted. There were resources you must test before the time truly comes when they will be needed.

This was his test. He raised his eyes. On his arm, the cuff of metal marking his status gleamed the faded silver of a scar.

“My lady,” he said. “You have it. Always.”