Chapter 31: Priya

PRIYA

The first night, she didn’t leave Malini’s side. She measured out a careful dosage of needle-flower tincture and prayed that she hadn’t made an error, that Gautam hadn’t misled her, and that Malini would survive. Ever since her last dose, when she’d pinned Priya and raged, Malini had been utterly silent, eyes closed. If Priya hadn’t held a hand to her mouth to feel the cadence of her breath, or touched the pulse in her wrist—and Priya had, over and over again—then she would perhaps have thought Malini was gone.

She sat beside Malini on the woven charpoy and urged Malini to drink the needle-flower, coaxing the other woman’s mouth open. She propped Malini up in her lap and fed it to her, without even the medium of wine to make it easier.

“You’re going to be okay,” she told her, when Malini coughed and pressed her head against Priya’s arm, eyes still squeezed tight shut. She ran a hand through Malini’s hair, as if Malini were a child, easily comforted by kind touch. “It’s going to be okay.”

She hoped it wasn’t a lie.

Priya slipped in and out of a doze, out of exhausted dreams. When she blinked her eyes open, shifting between sleep and wakefulness, the carvings seemed to dance on the walls before her eyes, surrounding her in an unblinking circle. The Hirana thrummed beneath her feet. And Malini slept on, breathing warm and steady against Priya’s side.

The next day, Malini was still alive, but she continued to sleep, consuming no food, taking water and needle-flower only when she was coaxed. On the night that followed, Priya held her again, watching the rise and fall of her chest.

Let her live, Priya thought. Don’t let me wake and find her cold. Let her live.

It was only human, only natural, to want Malini to live. No more than that.

She took Malini’s hand in her own and held it firmly.

“You’ll never get your revenge if you don’t survive, Malini,” Priya said to her. “If you can hear me, don’t forget that.”

It was the next day, in the middle of a rainstorm, when Malini finally woke. Drank a little water. She held out her hand—laced her fingers with Priya’s once more.

“Tell Rao,” she whispered, when Priya asked her how she felt; when Priya tried to convince her to eat, to rest more, to take her next careful dose. “Tell him to go.”

Then she fell back asleep. Her fingers on Priya’s were cool.

Priya drugged Pramila once more. Paced the triveni, waiting, anxious, then climbed down the Hirana in the dark of night.

The regent’s men were patrolling in significant, intimidating numbers. But the night bazaars were alive with people regardless, all of them winding between the food stalls with stubborn cheer, their voices loud, their smiles defiant. Colored banners had been hung between the houses. There were lanterns set out on every veranda, not yet lit.

It took Priya, confused by the bustle of the crowd, a moment to remember that the following night would be the festival of the dark of the moon, when households donated lavish gifts to the poor, ate golden jalebis and milk sweets, and placed dozens of lanterns on their verandas to light up the dark. It took her significantly longer to gather—from the gossip of people around her—that the regent had given explicit permission for the festival to go ahead as normal. No one seemed to know exactly why he’d chosen to do so, but there were discontented murmurs here and there as she walked about things that had been done in the city by Parijatdvipan soldiers. And sure enough, she saw a handful of buildings with their wooden frames clearly hacked apart, the damage still unmended.

She managed to enter the palace of illusions easily enough. All it took was approaching the servants’ entrance confidently with a broom in hand—stolen from the veranda of an unfortunate household—and she was allowed in by the disinterested guards. After that, she was just another unnoticed maidservant slipping through corridors as distant sitars played and women warbled love songs.

Lord Rajan—or Rao, or the nameless prince, or whatever Malini wanted to call him—came to meet her. She’d asked one of the men for him—guards, she assumed, though they smoked and slumped outside his door far more calmly than any guards on duty she’d seen before—and he’d come, dragging on his jacket, as if he’d stumbled straight out of bed.

“What is it? What did she say?”

Priya told him. At the end, he gave her an incredulous look.

“I can’t simply leave her.”

“It’s what she wants you to do. She said Aditya needs you.”

Rao assessed her, his gaze taking her face in, as if he could read something in the look she wore, in the furrow of her brow and the twist of her mouth. “Yes,” he said finally. “He does. But he needs her, too. Aditya is… not like her.”

She didn’t know what she’d expected of a man living in a brothel. But Rao was like a doe: gentle-eyed, but not without reflexive cunning.

“I told you she’s sick,” Priya said. “I… truthfully, I was afraid she’d die. And I am still not sure she won’t. She can’t help you. She doesn’t have the strength to escape. And she has no one she can trust in her prison but me.”

I could help her escape, Priya thought, as Rao’s face crumpled a little and he brought a hand to his forehead. I could bring her here to this man. It wouldn’t be easy to get her down the Hirana, not as she is. But I could do it. Maybe—certainly—she’d be safer.

But Priya’s first loyalty wasn’t to Malini. It was to herself, and to Bhumika, and to Ahiranya.

Rao’s throat worked. “Are you sure?”

“As sure as someone can be.”

“I cannot leave her to risk death alone,” he said.

“She’s not alone,” said Priya. “She has me.”

The prince bowed his head. “It’s not enough.”

“It’s more than most people get,” said Priya. “But… I promise, for what it’s worth, that I’ll do everything I can to keep her alive. I’ll use what I have to help her survive until you or your prince can return for her.”

It was more of a promise than she should have made—more feeling and more debt than she wanted to give Malini—but could Priya really leave her now, when she’d stayed up two nights watching her sleep, terrified the fool woman would die?

“I’ve done my duty by speaking to you,” she said. “But now—I have to return to her. My lord.” She bowed her head in acknowledgment.

He said nothing in return.