Chapter 28: Rao

RAO

“There’s a woman here to meet your cousin, Lord Prem,” said one of Prem’s men. “A servant, looks like.”

That was a surprise. Prem and Rao met each other’s eyes. Prem’s jaw firmed, mouth thinning.

In the three days since Lord Iskar’s assassination, even the pleasure houses had been gripped by an atmosphere of unease. Prem’s men had briefly investigated the damage to the local area, in the aftermath of the rebels’ attack—and the reprisals from the regent’s men that had followed. They had seen splintered stalls; ransacked houses; beggars dead, felled by horses, lying forgotten in street corners. The pleasure house they were in had survived, it seemed, by sheer luck.

They’d gleaned enough information to assume that Lord Santosh had been behind the damage to the city. “It’s exactly the kind of stupid thing a man like him would do,” Prem had said, distaste in his voice. Rao had nodded, and tried to make sense of General Vikram’s decision to leave the city open in the aftermath. He wondered how the act of one lord tied into the act of another, how Santosh’s brutality had triggered General Vikram’s magnanimity, and what their choices said about the current balance of power in the regent’s mahal. If he’d had more time—and more resources—Rao would have chased answers like a predator with the scent of blood in its nose.

“Who let her in?” Prem asked. “None of the guards stopped her?”

“Why would they stop a maidservant?” said Lata. She sat ensconced in a pile of pillows with a book in her hands. She didn’t look up as she turned the page. “No one stops maidservants.”

“After what happened to Lord Iskar—and at that Ahiranyi temple, let’s not forget—they should,” muttered Prem. “Besides, what if she’s a spy from that jumped-up Lord Santosh? I don’t think he was suspicious of me, but we should be a little careful. What is she—Parijati?”

“Ahiranyi, I think, my lord.”

“Right, probably not one of his spies, then,” said Prem, relaxing. He leaned forward, elbows on his crossed knees. On the ground between him and Rao lay a silk embroidered cross, the necessary board for a game of pachisa. He flung six cowrie shells to the floor with a little clatter. One shell fell aperture up and he swore mildly.

“I’m losing,” he said, “so go if you want.” He gathered up the shells. “Is this a pre-arranged meeting?”

“No,” said Rao. To the guard he added, “Did she say why she needs me?”

“No, my lord.”

Rao stood, wincing at the twinge of his still-healing wound. He listened to the quiet of the evening. The insects humming beyond the veranda. The sound of the fountain’s running water. And he made his decision. “I’ll come.”

The maidservant stood waiting in the corridor. She was a simple Ahiranyi woman in a plain sari, perhaps in her early twenties, with loose black hair and dark skin, a crooked nose and penetrating eyes. She offered him a perfunctory bow of respect, then said, without preamble, “She told me to look for a man who calls himself Lord Rajan, a cousin of a low prince of Saketa. Is that you?”

Rao was taken aback by her directness. “Who asks?”

“My… mistress asks,” she said haltingly, pausing before mistress, as if struggling to find the word she wished to use. “Are you Lord Rajan?”

“I am,” he said. “Tell me the name of your mistress.”

The Ahiranyi woman shook her head. “She told me to tell you that long ago she stole your knife. Not your dagger. Your knife.” The maid repeated this as if she’d learned it by rote. “And she wanted me to tell you that she was glad when you returned it to your sister and to her. The weapon gave her hope.” She met his eyes, the look ever so intent. “Perhaps you know my mistress now?”

“Come with me,” he said quietly, and pushed open the first door that came to hand. She followed him into a bathing chamber and he shut the door firmly behind them.

“How do I know you’re truly from her?” Rao asked roughly. Hope had cut his voice to shreds.

The maid shrugged, a single rise and fall of her shoulders. “I don’t know. Does anyone else know the tale I told you?”

Rao swallowed. “No one else living,” he managed. “But torture could have taken that story from her.”

“Well, it didn’t,” the maid said tersely. “And I don’t have long. I have to return to her, and I have questions for which she needs answers.”

“Tell me.”

“Can you save her?” the maid asked bluntly. “Can you get her out? Are you trying?”

“Trying, yes,” said Rao. “But the need for secrecy has made success… challenging. I am not sure I can free her,” he admitted with difficulty. “But I will continue to attempt to do so.”

“Fine. Prince Aditya,” she said. “He still lives? He’s well?”

“As far as the reports I have tell me,” said Rao. “He’s alive and well.”

“Does he have many supporters around him?”

“Maybe more than she hoped,” Rao said. “I did my best to guide all those who were trustworthy to where they needed to be.”

He did not mention his father’s painstaking work to unite the kingdoms of Parijatdvipa against the emperor, in Malini’s absence. Before the pyre, in the time when she’d first laid the groundwork for her machinations, she had written King Viraj a letter in fluent Aloran begging his help; had met with him in secret, with Alori’s assistance and Rao’s own, discussing her hopes and fears for rule under Aditya. His father had been nearly the first convert to her cause.

After Alori had burned, after Malini was imprisoned, his father had taken up the work. As had Rao, in his own small way.

But all of that was more than the maid needed to hear. He did not know if the woman was aware he was truly a prince of Alor—but frankly, he did not want her to be.

She was leaning forward, urgent now. “Who? Titles, at least, if not names.”

“Lords from Parijat itself. Several low princes from Saketa, though the high prince has not been approached, or his closest favorites. Their men took the long way to Srugna, skirting the imperial borders. There’s no sign they were spotted. You be sure to tell her that. She’ll want to know.”

“Who else? There must be more.”

“Are you sure you’ll remember this?”

“I’ll remember,” the maid said, an edge of impatience to her voice. “Go on, my lord.”

“Dwarali’s sultan has sent emissaries on his behalf, with their own horsemen.” And hadn’t they been conspicuous, on their pure white mounts with saddles of blood red. But the maid did not need to know about that either. “We have strong numbers. And Srugna’s own king has thrown his lot in with us.”

If the maid was impressed or alarmed by any of this, if she understood the implications of what he was telling her, she showed none of it on her face. He admired her impassivity. “Fine. I’ll tell her so.”

“And how is she? How does she fare?” Rao asked, and hoped he did not sound as he felt, in his heart.

The maid gave him a measured look. “She is not well. She’s been sick for a long time.”

“Has General Vikram arranged her a physician?”

The maid gave him a tight smile and shook her head. “The general has limited power over her care. On the emperor’s orders, I’m told. Besides, it’s her medicine that is killing her. She knows it’s so.”

“And who are you to her?”

“Her only attendant, my lord. And the one ensuring her poisoning does not continue.”

“And how,” he asked, “does that benefit you?”

“Ah, my lord,” said the maid. “I do it for the love and loyalty in my heart alone.”

There was a thread of truth in that quip, he thought. Something in the tilt of her chin, the shape of her mouth as she said the words, told him so. Malini had a way of winning people whether they liked it or not. And yet it wasn’t the entire truth, of course.

“Have you anything I can use to free her?” Rao asked. Prem’s efforts had failed. He had nothing but this—the hope that a maid carried a possibility and an answer. “Any knowledge, any information—any allies I can seek?”

Prem would have laughed at him for asking a maidservant for allies. But people who were invisible to others often knew far more than his highborn kind respected or understood.

“I don’t know.” The maid looked away from him as footsteps sounded in the corridor, then faded. “You shouldn’t try to storm the temple, or anything equally foolish. There’s no easy way up and down the Hirana. Its surface is dangerous. And there are guards, too. You’d have to make your way through the general’s mahal, across the grounds, and climb without taking the safe path marked by the rope. You wouldn’t be able to do all that. Not even with an army.”

“But you can,” Rao said.

A wry smile curled her mouth. “No one notices maids, my lord. And I’m Ahiranyi. I know the Hirana better than you ever could. But the princess cannot climb down the Hirana to her freedom, and I can’t simply walk her out via the gates.”

“She sent nothing for me?”

“Nothing but the information I’ve given you, of her health and her questions.”

“She gives me no way to save her?”

“I believe she hoped you’ll find one on your own. My lord.”

That startled a laugh from him. Her Zaban was coarse, her expression hateful. He found himself liking her and was mildly appalled with himself.

“Would you offer me your name?” he asked.

“Priya,” she said, after a reluctant pause.

Priya. A common name across all of Parijatdvipa. A sweet name for round-cheeked little girls and meek brides alike. This woman was neither.

“Priya,” he repeated. “Thank you for coming to me. Please, give your mistress a message from me in return.” A breath. “Tell her she must hold on to hope. Tell her that her work isn’t yet done. Tell her—I will wait for word from her, and I will continue to try to save her. And tell her…” He blinked, not wishing to show his emotions before this woman. “I am her loyal servant. As I promised her. I have not forgotten, and never will forget, the vow we made over a knife.”

She’d placed the cloth flat first, smoothing it down over the lacquered table with her fingers. The knife had followed. Compared to the table and the muslin, the knife was crude and ugly, unembellished, its edge a sharp and serviceable point.

But it was his knife.

He had not called for wine or tea or tall glasses of lassi or sherbet, dripping condensation on a hot afternoon. There would be no servants to disturb them. He had lived in the imperial mahal ever since he was a boy of eight, sent to foster ties between Alor and Parijat, and in all that time he had never been alone in a room with the imperial princess.

He was now.

They were quiet, for a long moment.

“My father is dead,” said Princess Malini.

He almost jumped, when she spoke.

“I—I know. I’m sorry for your loss, princess.”

“And my brother,” she said. “My kind, honorable brother is gone, where no one can find him. Chandra is the only one left. To light my father’s pyre. To sit upon his throne. I am sure when you took Aditya to the garden of the nameless, you never intended for this to happen.”

“No, princess. I did not. But the ways of the nameless aren’t in mortal control. One way or another, Aditya would have found the garden. And he would have heard our god. It is his fate, written in the stars of his birth.”

“I don’t believe that is the way things are,” said the princess. “That we have no choices. And if fate must be star-burned into us, then I don’t believe we can’t bend to the needs of our times and turn from our prescribed path.” She touched her fingertips to the dull side of the blade. There was still ash on her skin, from where she’d touched her father’s remains, in a final ritual act of mourning. “I want to see Chandra removed from a throne he shouldn’t have. And I want Aditya to rise to it. Can you help me?”

He met her gaze. No downturned, modest eyes from this one. The meek, quiet girl, easily given to tears, that Rao had expected her to be—had always known her to be—had fallen away. The princess who sat before him was stern and calm, her gaze pinning him as neatly as a dagger to the throat.

“That would put you and I, and everyone we value, in danger,” said Rao.

“I have letters from Aditya,” she said. “I know where he resides, and I will convince him to return. Fate or not, he knows his duty.”

That made Rao’s breath catch.

“You know where he is? Truly?”

“I have my own spies and my own women,” she said. “And my brother did not have the heart, or the sense, to leave me without a word.”

“How is he?” Rao asked. “Is he…”

Malini shook her head. She would not give him this. Not yet.

“You know what Chandra is,” she said. “You know what he’ll do. I can assure you, Prince Rao—your fears are not unfounded. My brother is the same creature he was as a boy and a young man. He thinks the tenets of his faith will purify his hands of blood. He thinks his atrocities are blessings.”

“He’s committed no atrocities.”

“If fate is written in the stars, then I am sure his atrocities are already written too,” said Malini. “Ask your priests. Or better yet, ask your own heart. You do not need to be a devotee of a god to know what he will do.”

He thought of all he had seen of Chandra’s nature. He’d grown up alongside him, after all. Shuddered.

Malini was still staring at him.

“We have a pact between us, Prince Rao,” said Malini. “Do we not?”

He let out a breath and stood with her. He folded the muslin around the knife and took it.

“Yes,” he said. “We do.”

His sister Alori stood in the corner of the antechamber beyond, her arms crossed. Ostensibly she was on guard for visitors, but she wasn’t visibly paying attention to anything. Her face was lifted up, catching a shaft of dappled sunlight come in from the high slat window. There were birds playing on its edge. Green parakeets with vivid orange beaks, the flit of their wings throwing shadows across Alori’s upturned head.

She looked at him then, her eyes shaded by wings.

“Is it done, brother? Have you agreed?”

“Yes,” he’d told her. “It is.”

He returned to the apartment chamber. Prem still had the pachisa board in front of him, though a few of his men had now joined him at the game. He raised his head when Rao entered.

“Good talk in the bathing chamber, then?” There was a teasing note to his voice. “I have to admit, I never knew you liked them so dark.”

“You’re a fool, Prem,” Rao said tiredly. He walked past him, and past Lata, still curled over her book, and stepped out onto the veranda.

He needed the cold air. He needed to forget.