Chapter 25: Malini

MALINI

The first time Malini learned how to hold a knife was also the day she learned how to weep.

She and Narina were playing in her mother’s flower garden, profuse with both lilies and water lotuses in small ponds, zinnia and hibiscus. They were being Dwarali merchants, crossing the borders of Parijatdvipa into the dangerous wildernesses of nomadic Babure and Jagatay territory. For that, they’d needed thick cloaks—for some reason, Narina was insistent that merchants always wore thick cloaks—but they also needed weaponry.

“To protect our wares,” Narina explained.

“I would expect we’d have guards to protect our wares,” Malini had said.

“Not everyone has guards, Malini,” Narina huffed.

“I see,” said Malini. “We’re not very good merchants, then. Or we’d be able to afford guards, wouldn’t we?”

Alori gave a small sigh.

“Don’t argue, please,” she said. “Anyway, I know where we can get weapons.”

Alori was the only daughter of the king of Alor, who had enough sons to constitute his own small army. Alori was quiet and small and had a gift for vanishing from view, fading into insignificance. But her quiet wasn’t timidity, and she guided Narina and Malini confidently to the room where the youngest of her nameless brothers slept. On the way through the corridors, they could hear the sound of thudding wood and the clang of chains below. The sound was assurance enough that the imperial princes—Malini’s brothers—and their attendant lords were busy sparring in the practice yard.

The girls went into the room and rooted through the trunk at the foot of Alori’s brother’s bed. He didn’t keep his mace or his saber or any of his more impressive weapons in the room. But there were twin katara, sheathed in leather at the bottom of his trunk, and two daggers with carvings of beady-eyed fish at the hilts. It was only as they were leaving the room that Malini had the sudden thought to look beneath the mattress. That was where she stored her own treasures, and her instinct rewarded her when she grasped a simple knife. It wasn’t a fine enough thing to be a dagger. There was no sinuous curve to the blade or decoration on the hilt. It was plain and brutal and sharp. Malini pocketed it.

They raced back to the garden, where they collapsed into fits of laughter.

It was Alori who offered to show Malini how to use the knife.

“My brothers taught me,” she said. “Here, this is how to hold it.”

There was a trick to holding a proper blade. Confidence, a shape to the grip. Malini extended the knife in front of her and felt a strange, blazing feeling unfold in her chest. She smiled.

“Let’s protect our wares,” she said.

She was pretending to be a Babure bandit, standing on the edge of a high rockery, waving the knife in front of her, when Narina and Alori—standing below her, yelling up at her valiantly—fell suddenly silent.

Malini was a sensible child. She lowered the knife to her side and straightened. Turned. Behind her, she saw a man’s figure rising, limned to shadow by sunlight. But she knew the shape of those shoulders; that turban, with pearls around the edge and a single peacock feather stitched to the crown. The slippers of gold and richly dyed vermilion on his feet.

Chandra stood before her. He was young, only a few years older than her. But he already had a hardness around the eyes, a stony quality of someone furious with his lot in life. He looked down at her with disdain, and Malini was suddenly conscious of her uncovered hair, her bare and dirty feet. Her weapon.

“Malini,” he said. “Where did you get the knife?”

Malini said nothing. Her palms were hot.

“I heard you in the corridor,” he said, approaching her. “Oh, you thought you’d gone unseen, I know. But I wasn’t in the practice yard with the others. I was praying at the family altar. Speaking with the high priest.”

“About what?” Malini asked.

Perhaps if she pretended that nothing was amiss—that she couldn’t see the curl of his lip, the narrowness of his eyes—his anger would melt away. Such wild hopes, she had.

Somehow his mouth thinned further.

“Give it to me,” he said.

Alori had told her, with a laugh, how a jab beneath the hollow of the ribs could kill a man. How she could cut a tendon. How she could slice a throat.

She’d said it all mildly, easily. Those were all things Alori’s brothers had revealed to her, as if a girl had equal right to weapons and knowledge, as if they expected her to spill blood by her own hands.

Chandra had taught her how fear felt. And shame. The way they could settle in your stomach, heavy as a stone. How they could alter your nature to something bidden and chained.

Malini thought of all the ways a knife could be used to kill or maim, her palm itching with bloodlust. Then she offered it blade first to her brother. Chandra took it.

“What did I tell you,” he said, “the last time you behaved improperly?”

“I’m sorry,” Malini said.

“Bow your head,” he replied, as if he hadn’t heard her.

He gripped her by her hair.

And then he began to cut.

“I told you,” he said, sawing through her braid, his other hand roughly gripping her roots, “that women are a reflection of the mothers of flame. You were born to be holy, Malini. I told you if you refuse to behave properly, you’ll have to learn.”

Malini could see Narina right near them, her face red, her hands in fists. Alori had moved beneath the cover of the trees and was utterly still. Watching.

She’d never forget the look on her friends’ faces.

She tried to shove him away—shoved hard, with both hands. He’d merely wrenched her head back and cut harder. She’d felt a piercing pain. He’d cut her flesh. There was a sting, and the heat of blood trailing down her skin.

She’d felt it then, as she’d feel it many times over, in the years that followed: the dizzying sense that when he hacked at her hair he wanted to hack her neck clean too. That hurting her made him love her more intensely and want to hurt her all the more intensely too; as if destroying her was the only way to keep her pure.

She began to weep, then. She wept because fighting had not helped, and she couldn’t bring herself to beg. And his cutting gentled; as if her tears were a submission, a sign of defeat, and so he could afford to be kind to her. As if this was what he’d wanted all along.

She learned. Tears were a weapon of a kind, even if they made her fury smolder and rot and writhe inside her.

“Chandra,” said a voice. And her brother’s blade paused.

Malini’s eldest brother, Aditya, stood on the veranda to the garden. He was still dressed for the practice yard, bare-chested in nothing but a dhoti, no turban to hide his sweat-slicked hair. He crossed the garden, his tread quick. Behind him, in the shadows, stood their mother. Her pallu was drawn over her face, her head lowered.

When Malini saw him she cried all the more furiously, great heaving sobs even as her heart stayed spiteful and furious inside her.

“Leave her,” said Aditya. He sounded tired.

“She had a weapon. A woman should know better.”

“She is a child. Let Mother deal with her discipline.”

“Mother would ruin her if she could,” Chandra muttered. “The priests say—”

“I don’t care what the priests say,” Aditya said. “Come with me, Malini.”

She didn’t have to be told twice. She ran to his side.

Aditya guided her to the veranda. After a moment, Narina and Alori followed.

“No one else thinks like he does, little dove,” Aditya said gently. He lightly brushed the shorn ends of her hair. “This is a more enlightened time. But you’ve no need for a knife. You have guards enough to protect you, and two brothers who love you.”

“And who will protect me from my brothers?” Malini asked.

“Chandra didn’t really want to hurt you.”

Malini knew Aditya was wrong. Chandra had wanted to. And he’d managed to.

But Aditya wouldn’t understand, if she tried to explain it, so she didn’t.

That night, when she and Narina and Alori had curled up like pups under one blanket, Alori tucked a sheathed blade between them. Another one of her brother’s knives.

“He wants us to have it,” Alori said. And: “He’s sorry, Malini.”

But no prince of Alor was responsible for Malini’s pain.

She learned that day to turn to a carapace of meekness rather than showing the true mettle of her fury. She learned, when Chandra hacked her hair, that there was a way she was expected to be, and if she failed to be it, there would be a price to pay.

Only her mother knew what she was about. Once her mother sat beside her on the bench swing in the same garden where Malini had learned her lesson.

“I am going to tutor you and your girls,” her mother said, after a long silence. “It’s high time you learned. The philosophy of military strategy and leadership, the teachings of the first mothers—these are things a princess should know of.”

Malini was silent. She had never been given the impression by anyone, not least her subdued mother, that such knowledge was for princesses.

“When I was a girl, my father arranged for a female sage to educate me,” her mother continued. “I will try to provide the same to you, my garland child, but until that day, I can give you what I have. Such things will help you survive as a daughter of Parijat. A blossom with a thorn heart.”

“I am not thorny,” Malini said. “I cried.”

“Weeping does not make you any less yourself,” her mother replied. She touched her fingertips to Malini’s shorn hair. “Be careful with your tears,” her mother added, in a voice of cultivated restraint. “They’re blood of the spirit. Weep too much, and it will wear you thin, until your soul is like a bruised flower.”

Her mother had been wrong, though. Weep enough, and your nature becomes like stone, battered by water until it is smooth and impervious to hurt. Use tears as a tool for long enough, and you will forget what real grief feels like.

That was some small mercy, at least.

The walls were breathing. When she’d left the cloister room, slow in the guttering dark, she’d seen vines force their way through the walls, moss unfurl through the spiderweb cracks in the floor. Now those roots and leaves pulsed along with Priya’s breath. Priya lay unconscious on the floor. Malini could see her eyelids flicker, restless, but never quite opening.

The catlike tilt of her eyes; the crooked nose and the sharpness of her bones. You couldn’t dress this one and make a highborn woman out of her. She was unlovely and strong. She was exactly what Malini needed. Malini had known that, the first moment she’d laid eyes on her through the lattice in the dark.

She’d been sure of it when she’d heard screams from across the corridor, pressed her hand to her cell door, and felt the lock release as if it had been waiting for her touch. When she’d slipped free and watched Priya take the rebel’s life.

Priya was a possibility, a hope. The only one Malini had.

“Priya. Wake up,” Malini said firmly. She looked beyond the vines to the end of the corridor. All it would take was one guard seeking her here—or mothers forbid, Pramila turning the corner.

“Priya. Wake.”

With a groan, Priya opened her eyes once more.

Malini’s own eyes were dry. She thought of feigning tears again, of being soft and softening Priya in turn.

But no. She’d failed to play the game adequately. The fire below had made her good sense lapse, and she’d revealed herself too quickly. All that carefully cultivated trust, the vulnerabilities she’d revealed—all of it, wasted.

Either she’d need to find a new ploy to win Priya, to snare her into service, or she would have to resort to honesty.

But first…

“Priya,” she said. “Put an end to this. Your—magic.”

“I’m trying.”

She watched the rise and fall of Priya’s chest, the way her hands curled as she rose up onto her elbows.

“What happened to you?” Malini murmured.

“Stop talking,” Priya said, “and let me think.”

Priya’s gaze was distant, fixed on a point far beyond Malini. She breathed slowly, deeply. Malini remained silent and kneeling. She did not touch the green around her—only watched as it receded, withering back into the floor and walls.

Priya looked down at her own hands with wonder and fear. “Soil and sky,” she whispered. “It worked.”

Then Priya raised her head, pushed herself up straight, and looked at Malini. Her expression was ugly—thin-lipped, jaw tight, narrow-eyed. Priya looked like she’d happily choke the life out of her.

“I have long known that I can’t trust anyone,” Priya said. “Known how the world is. But you. I was foolish about you. I thought I understood a little of what you were. I watched you sicken. And weep. And I was afraid I’d have to watch you die. But everything you said and did… it was all a lie, wasn’t it?” Priya shook her head furiously and held a hand before her. “No, don’t answer. I know it was a lie.”

I did not lie, Malini thought. She knew how to lie, of course. She did so often. But the value of a truth, carefully carved to meet the needs of her audience, was much greater, and far more difficult to disprove.

She liked Priya. Liked the steady grip of her arms; the way muscle dipped and curved just so; the way she smiled, always oddly guarded, no more than a flash of white teeth, a dimple etched into one cheek.

Malini did not know how Priya’s look of fury and betrayal made her feel. There was a pain in her chest that reminded her of the sensation of eating a fresh green chili whole when she was a small girl, purely because her nursemaid had told her not to—a pain throbbing and yet intensely sweet. She was not sure if she hated it or hungered for more of it.

I do not want you to hate me, she thought. I want you to like me. It’s absurd, but why else would I ask you to imagine me in my finest saris? Why else would I ask you to imagine me beautiful?

This truth could do her no favors. And she needed Priya.

“You should listen to what I have to offer,” Malini said again, instead. “Even if you will not help me escape—you should listen.”

“With respect,” Priya said, voice cutting, “I don’t have to listen to you. You have nothing.”

Priya was right. Everything Malini had fostered in her time at court—a garden of loyal highborn women and kings and lords and princes, a network of whispers to feed her the nectar of knowledge—was gone, withered or scoured by fire or simply placed beyond her reach. Even her mind was not what it should have been, thanks to the needle-flower poison. She had nothing and no one. She could only offer Priya favors and debts she would hopefully be able to pay one day.

She leaned forward, pressing a hand to the cool ground that had been covered with moss. She did not play any game that Priya would reject. Instead she met Priya’s eyes and thought, I am a highborn daughter of Parijat, I have outlived the sisters of my heart, I have won men to my cause. I still live, despite faith and flame.

You will listen to me. I command it.

She poured the thought into every inch of her own limbs: into the tilt of her neck, the firmness of her hand on the ground, the proud jut of her shoulders.

It was enough to hold Priya fast for a moment. Just enough.

“You have little love for the Parijati, I know,” Malini said. “But you do love Ahiranya. And you know that Emperor Chandra will soon remove your regent.”

“What do I care if he does?”

“You want one of his cronies lording over your country? A zealous believer in the unity of Parijatdvipa under the one flame of faith? Whatever you may think of General Vikram, he’s no idealist. Idealists are by far the most dangerous rulers.”

What was she doing, trying to explain politics to a maidservant?

But Priya is no simple maid, a voice whispered in her head. It sounded like her own voice from—before. Before she had drunk poison day in and out and her thoughts had begun to fray within her mind. It was a sweet voice, speaking cultured court Dvipan with a cadence like a boat skimming deep, deep waters. She is a temple child, isn’t she? She has more power in one finger than you possess in your entire body. You do not know what she knows. You do not know what she can do.

“What harm,” Malini asked, “is there in listening to me?”

Priya hesitated. There was a sound somewhere in the Hirana. A name was being shouted. Priya’s mouth firmed, and she took Malini by the elbow, hauling them both to their feet.

“Harm enough,” said Priya. “But I’ll do it anyway, I suppose.”

The bitterness in Priya’s voice… ah, if Malini were one to indulge in self-hate, she would have felt it then. There was something so blazingly soft about Priya’s heart. She had never seen the like of it before. When Priya had spoken of making an offering of coconut and flowers to the Ahiranyi spirits, when she had spoken of grieving her dead, Malini had been sure she could feel that heart in her hands: a muscle as fragile as an egg with a world inside it, compassion flowing from it as terrible and nourishing as lifeblood.

But Malini was not one for regrets, so she felt nothing.

Pramila was not even angry. Priya glibly concocted a story of how Malini had raced away in fear and panic and Priya had sought her out, calmed her, and brought her back as soon as she could—a blatant untruth, but one Pramila was ready to believe. The older woman had been crying, and trembled still. Once she was assured that Malini was safe, she turned away and closed herself into her own room. To weep more, Malini assumed.

She and Priya were not the only ones with terrible memories of fire, after all.

Priya moved restlessly around the room as Malini sat still upon the charpoy, cross-legged, her spine straight. Without preamble Malini said, “My brother wanted me dead because I tried to arrange for our elder brother to take the throne from him.”

Priya stopped pacing.

“Aditya left the faith,” Malini added. She did not know what Priya knew, or did not know, about Parijati politics. Best to tell her everything. “He had a vision and became a priest of the nameless god. He could not do that and remain crown prince of Parijatdvipa. He could not be emperor. And so we were left with Chandra. But I knew in my soul Aditya should rule. I knew he would be so much better at it than Chandra, because he was so much better than Chandra in every way. And I knew his status as my father’s firstborn—and his nature—would give him the backing of Parijatdvipa’s nations. So I sought those kings and princes out, and cultivated them. I ensured their support. Then Chandra discovered my intent.”

“You told me you were impure,” Priya said. Flung the words out as if they were an accusation.

Impure. Yes, Malini had implied it—that her wants had been the thing that condemned her. It was not… untrue. But Malini had always hidden her desires well. If Chandra had known her true nature, her otherness, the fact that she preferred women to men, perhaps she would have ended up on the pyre sooner. But he had not known.

“I am,” she said simply. Watched the way Priya looked at her—the flinch of her, the disbelief. “But it was what he called treason that brought me here.”

“And was it not treason, to try to depose the emperor?”

“If I had succeeded, it would not have been,” Malini said. “And I may still achieve my aim. The kingdoms of Parijatdvipa do not forget the Age of Flowers, or the sacrifice of the mothers. They made a vow to our bloodline, to unite around the rule of a son of Divyanshi’s line. By their honor, they will not break it. But Chandra’s vision places them not at his side but beneath his feet. I have offered them an alternative that provides them the status he wants to take from them. No more.”

No more.As if building a coup against the emperor of Parijatdvipa, grand empire of city-states and forests and seas, were a small matter and nothing of consequence. It was a thing she had worked herself bloody for—risked everything for. And she had lost so much in the process. Her heart sisters, her Narina and Alori. Her standing at court. Her freedom. And her health and her mind, slipping from her, bit by bit. If Chandra had his way, her efforts to depose him would also cost her life.

“And you truly think this—this feckless brother who left your empire in the hands of someone everyone hates is fit to rule?”

Malini had to work to not flinch. She thought of Aditya—his morality, his goodness, the way he looked at her with fondness. Feckless, yes. She couldn’t deny what he was. But he was a better man than Chandra. He had never held a knife to her. Never tried to burn her alive.

It was not, admittedly, a high standard to judge Aditya by. But ah, by the mothers, if the vow between the nations required a male scion of Divyanshi on the throne of Parijatdvipa, who else was there but him?

“Let me simply say, the men of my family have a problem with overindulgence in religion. But Aditya is still a good man. And Chandra is not.”

“What makes him a bad man?” Priya asked.

Malini swallowed. “Is it not evidence enough, that he burns women? That he wants to burn me. He is—driven.” She would not tell Priya about her childhood. All the years of creeping, terror, that no one had seemed to see or understand. She would not talk about all the Srugani and Dwarali, Saketans and Alorans he had angered, long before he even had the opportunity to sit upon the throne. “Chandra is a man with a vision of what the world should be. It’s a horrible vision. And he will cut the world bloody to make it fit.”

Something flickered in Priya’s eyes.

Malini pressed on. “Chandra will destroy Ahiranya as you know it,” she said. “But Aditya would not. And in return for you helping me… I can ask him for more than you have. More than this.”

“Tell me.”

“The same power all city-states of Parijatdvipa possess,” she said. “Your own rulers. Places at court, to assist in the administration of the empire. A level of freedom, within the empire’s hands.”

“You can’t promise me that,” Priya said immediately. Her eyes were wide.

“Aditya has strong support,” Malini countered. “And he has the element of surprise. Chandra does not know what forces have been amassed against him. He does not even know where Aditya is. He only knows that I betrayed him, stirring up ill feeling against his reign. I, and my ladies-in-waiting. And what could I, his whimpering child of a sister with her two simpering women, do to truly compromise his throne?”

“All that,” said Priya. “For all that, what do you want? To no longer be poisoned? To be released from the Hirana? I won’t free you. Not when it would put the regent’s household in immediate danger. You need to ask for something else.”

“I want to be free,” Malini said. “You know that.” She folded the want away. Let it sink, deep down. “But there are other things I need. I can’t escape the Hirana, but—will your gifts allow you to?”

“Perhaps,” Priya said. Guarded.

That was as good as a yes.

“A man loyal to me waits in Hiranaprastha,” said Malini. Or so she hoped. “He waits for word from me. All I ask in return for Ahiranya’s future is for you to take him a message and give me his response.”

“What kind of message?”

“If you will not free me, then he will try to find a way,” Malini said. “A quiet way that does not expose our plans. If there is one. And if not…” Her hands twisted, curling into fists. “Then I will be grateful to know how business proceeds, and to send word to Aditya.”

Priya was very still. Malini looked at her, weighing up the tension of her body, the turn of her head, and wondered how close she was to breaking.

“You spoke of hating those with imperial blood,” murmured Malini. “You spoke of your loved ones burning. Well, I have lost people I love to the pyre, too. At my brother’s orders. Let us see him off the throne together, Priya.”

There was an openness, a painful openness to Priya’s face at that. Wide-eyed, mouth parting for words she couldn’t speak. It faded, after a moment, leaving nothing but determination in its place.

“If I do this—if I help you—then we’re not going to be mistress and servant,” Priya said slowly. “Outside of here you may be the imperial princess and I may be nothing, but here I’m something useful. I have something you need. And I will not be your tool or your weapon. I will be your equal. Do we have an agreement?”

Priya hated being belittled. Priya hated not being seen. Hated being made small. Malini had seen it in her when Pramila had hit Priya—when a black, calculating look had flickered, just for a moment, through Priya’s eyes.

It was lucky, then, that it was always so easy to meet Priya’s gaze. To look into that face and give her what she wanted, simply by allowing herself to be honest. Not having to manipulate Priya felt like a small blessing.

“You are immensely powerful,” Malini told her. “And if you choose to believe I am manipulating you, or not—please believe this: I am telling you the truth when I say I have needed a friend. And you have been—very kind.” Ah, she would miss that kindness. “I must have your title, then. What would you be called? An elder?”

“Just Priya,” she said curtly. “As you already call me.”

“Then I must be just Malini to you, in return.”

“Fine. We have a bargain,” said Priya, and Malini’s heart soared even as her stomach knotted. Bargains, and vows upon bargains. There would be no end to it.

“Now. Malini. Tell me about this man, and where I may find him.”