Chapter 38: Malini

MALINI

You poisoned me first.

Malini did not say it, of course. But she thought it. She sat very still, her hands in fists in her lap, her eyes wide, and thought it with all the fury in her. She had not had to feign softness or weakness when Pramila had first confronted her and slapped her, accusing her of poisoning Pramila in secret, of being an impure and evil creature down to her core. Malini’s tongue was thick with the taste of metal, the clinging memory of needle-flower, gently administered by Priya the last time Malini had briefly awoken.

The second—and third—time Pramila had hit her she’d refuted everything Pramila had said. No, she had not poisoned Pramila. No, there was no plot against her. Malini had been consuming her wine obediently, taking her medicine as was expected. No, Priya had not betrayed Pramila. Priya was loyal.

And yet. For all her lies, spoken with all the earnestness she could muster, here they were: Pramila, red-eyed and furious, her hand trembling around a knife. Priya, with her head slightly raised, a thin rivulet of blood winding its way down her throat.

“Why are you holding a knife to my maid’s throat?” Malini asked, letting a quiver shake the last words. It was not difficult. It was amazing, really, how close a tremor of fury sounded to a tremor of fear. How dare Pramila. How dare she. “Pramila, I don’t understand. Why are you doing this? What have I done to offend you?”

“Oh, don’t try that with me, you sly bitch,” Pramila said. Her voice was savage, and her hand twitched a little with the force of her feeling. “It may have taken me time, Malini, but I know now. You used this maid to poison me, didn’t you? You want me dead. Well, I can’t kill you. I…” A shuddering breath. “But this one is a traitor.”

Priya was soaked. Her hair was plastered to her shoulders. Water was dripping from the hem of her sari, and the blood at her neck had turned from red to a washed-out pink. Where in the world had she been? Malini had been trapped in a haze of sickness for mothers knew how long, and clearly much had passed in the time she was in a void. Curse it.

Priya looked strangely calm. She met Malini’s eyes. What did she want to tell Malini? What did that calmness mean?

Malini could not understand it. She was tired, hollowed out by grief dreams and poison.

“Priya has been a loyal maidservant,” Malini managed to say in a wavering voice.

“Loyal to you.”

“She’s a good girl,” said Malini, even though she knew it was useless to continue the lie. Still. The knife. “A simple girl.”

“I don’t even know if you’d be sad to lose her,” Pramila said thickly. “You probably didn’t even weep over my Narina, did you? And she was meant to be like a sister to you. Oh, but you let her die happily enough. What will a simple, stupid maid matter to a monster like you?”

This time it was not an accidental flinch that brought blood to Priya’s skin. It was a deliberate movement of Pramila’s hand. Priya’s mouth parted, just slightly.

And Malini felt something inside her tighten.

Being locked here had made Malini a shadow of herself. She’d been haunted by her own past—by a flower-wreathed princess of Parijat with a shrewd smile and a voice full of secrets, who had the hunger and the wherewithal to tear Chandra from his throne—and by how beyond her grasp even the possibility of being that woman lay.

But suddenly it no longer mattered. Suddenly her spine was iron. Her tongue tasted of blood, as if Priya’s hurt lay inside her. She did not need flowers or court or the graces due a princess, to be what she was.

“Pramila,” she said. Her old voice came out of her—water-deep. “Lower the knife. You’ve never killed before. Will you start with this one?”

Pramila went quite still. After Malini’s trembling, her sudden strength was a weapon all its own.

“I can do what is needful,” Pramila gritted out.

“Is killing a mere maid needful?” Malini asked, letting her voice spool from her lips like a silk noose. “Come now, Pramila. You’ve never been cruel.” A lie. But it was a lie Pramila believed, and it would strike her like truth. “The only needful murder you must commit is mine. And you balk even at that, don’t you? You feed me needle-flower, but not enough to kill me quickly. You entreat me to choose the pyre, but you will not light one beneath me yourself.

“In that, you are very like my brother.” Malini let pity seep into her tone. “He cannot stand to have blood on his hands either. He chose to place mine on yours, after all. Tell me, is he displeased I still live? Is my continued survival a failure?”

“I have dreamt so many times of killing you myself,” Pramila spat. “Believe me, I have. I don’t fear blood on my hands. But unlike you, princess, I try to do what is right. I’ve tried so hard to ensure that your death would purify you. But now, now I’ve woken time and again from a sleep riddled with nightmares, now I’ve dreamt drugged dreams where my daughter screams…” Pramila swallowed. She raised the knife an increment further.

A thicker rivulet of blood snaked down Priya’s throat.

“Don’t hurt her,” Malini said, and was horrified to hear her voice falter all of its own accord. By the mothers, it was one thing to tremble when she had chosen to do it. It was quite another to do it now, when an air of command had momentarily held Pramila still, and perhaps could again. “Don’t—Pramila, she is nothing.”

“Nothing,” Pramila repeated. “Nothing and yet—look at you. Are you going to weep? I think you might. If you’re debased enough that you’d cry over a maid, then—good. Good!” Pramila’s laugh was more a sob, a haunting ribbon of grief. “You took everything from me!”

Malini had felt helpless in the past. She did not feel helpless now, although she should have. Her cheek was throbbing. Her head was spinning with stars.

“If you kill her,” she said, in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere far beyond her, from somewhere old and beyond mortal lifetimes, “you do not know what you will make of me. I will see you ruined, Pramila. I will see your living daughters ruined. I will blot all that brings you joy out of this world. I will murder more than your flesh. I will murder your heart and spirit and the very memory of your name and your lineage. I vow it.”

“Will you? Will you truly?” Pramila’s hand was steady now on the blade, holding it so close to Priya’s throat that surely Priya could not breathe around it. “You are not in Parijat anymore, Princess Malini. You have no ready spies, no slavering fool boys following at your heels. You’re a filth-ridden, impure traitor and you will die in a foreign land like the shame you are.”

“I am still what I have always been,” Malini said, although Pramila would not understand. Pramila had never understood even her own child, her clever and prickly Narina, who had died believing in something, who haunted Malini still. “I’ve set many things in motion, Pramila. I can set a few more, before death comes for me.”

Pramila laughed. “Such empty threats, Malini! I never thought I’d see you stomp and shout like a small girl, but here we are. You—”

Pramila stopped abruptly, choking. There was something around her throat: a great, knotted skein of green and earth and root.

Malini had been so focused on the knife against Priya’s neck that she had not seen what was happening on the ground. But she saw now that thin tendrils of thorny vines had crept their way across the floor, winding through the lattice hidden behind its curtain and the crack beneath the heavy door. They’d crept up the side of Priya’s body, up her wrist and her shoulder, up behind her neck until the whole tangle of them had met, squarely around Pramila’s throat.

The vines tightened further. Looking—if anything—slightly irritated, Priya reached for Pramila’s wrist and clenched it tight. Pramila’s fingers spasmed, as she struggled for air and against Priya’s hold. Seconds later, the knife clattered to the ground.

“Sorry,” said Priya, leaning down and picking up the knife. The thorn tendrils slipped away from her, her clothes and skin unmarked. “I didn’t know if I would be able to do that.”

“Have you done anything like it before?” Malini asked, feeling a strange hunger at the base of her skull as she watched Priya turn the knife over in her grip. Tell me what you are, the hunger was saying. Tell me what you are, every layer of you, tell me how I can use you—

“No.” Priya tucked the knife away. “No, I found something that belonged to my people once. And now I have—new gifts. And new weapons.”

It was Malini’s childhood teacher—the sage that her mother told her must be called her nursemaid, should anyone ask—who had taught Malini and Narina and Alori about the Ahiranyi and their old council leadership. Although Malini had learned something of what the Ahiranyi had once been able to do, gleaned through a mix of old history scrolls on the Age of Flowers and common tales alike, it was her sage who had detailed all the gifts they’d supposedly once possessed. Inhuman strength. Power over nature, so strong they could rend the earth and turn it to their will. A fragment of the yaksa’s terrible magic, all of it born from a trial performed within sacred, deathless waters.

Waters that were lost when the temple elders and their children died.

Priya looked at Pramila, who was still gasping for air. The knife was still in Priya’s hand.

“Will you kill her?” Malini asked, leaning forward upon her charpoy, the pain in her cheek and jaw only making her thirst for blood stronger.

But perhaps she sounded too eager, because Priya shot her a look, a frown creasing her brow. “No,” Priya said, as Pramila crumpled to the ground behind them. The woman’s eyes had fluttered closed. “She’s unconscious now. She can’t hurt us. We’re not going to be here much longer, after all.”

“I wish,” said Malini, “that you would kill her.”

Priya was silent for a moment. Then she held the knife, hilt first, out to Malini. Priya’s catlike eyes were hooded, her mouth a thin line. She looked like a carving of one of the mothers, all austere fury.

“If you want her dead, then do what you will,” she said.

For a moment Malini considered it. Truly considered it. The knife was before her. Pramila was still upon the ground. It would be easy.

But she could not forget Narina’s face. Her whisper, before they had walked to the pyre.

I want my mother.

Priya waited a heartbeat longer. Drew her hand—and the knife—back. “I thought not,” she said.

The thorns slithered across the floor, following her as she moved. She looked exactly as she always did: crooked-nosed, dark-skinned, her hair perhaps a bit damper and wilder than usual. And yet there was power like an aura around her, in the stone and green, in the way Pramila lay unmoving behind her.

In the way she’d held the knife, no deference in her at all.

Priya had called them equals before. But she looked at Malini now as if Malini were the servant and supplicant, and Priya the heir to an ancient throne.

“A final deal,” Priya said, voice a hoarse rustle of leaves. She reached up a hand, absently brushing the blood from her throat. “Malini. Make one final deal with me.”

“What would you have of me?” Malini asked, throat dry.

“There isn’t much time. Someone is coming for me.” Priya said the words carefully. Her eyes were unblinking. “Someone wants the waters that gave me this gift. Someone wants new power, greater power, so that they can destroy Parijatdvipa’s hold on Ahiranya.”

“How does a rebel know you’ve found these magical waters?”

“They felt it,” Priya said simply.

“Are so many people gifted with magic in this place?”

“Ahiranya isn’t like Parijat.”

“You know nothing about Parijat.”

“I’m part of Parijatdvipa, aren’t I?” Priya said. “I know a lot about what it means to belong to your country. I probably know more than you do.”

Malini look at Priya’s face. Thought, I do not know this woman at all.

And yet that did not frighten her as it should have. She knew how many faces people possessed, one hidden beneath the other, good and monstrous, brave and cowardly, all of them true. She had learned young that a fine-bred brother could turn into a brute over nothing. Nothing. She had sat with lords and princes and kings, binding them to the vision of Emperor Aditya upon the throne. She had known the size and clout of their personal armies, the names of their wives, their greed and whispered sins—she had met them and learned them as one learns any stranger. She had learned them in person; pried them open and controlled them, and had still been aware that beneath all their carefully cataloged hungers and weaknesses likely lay a multitude of selves she would never see.

The face Priya wore now was a familiar one. She’d worn it when she killed the rebel maidservant on the triveni; when Malini had first looked at her and thought, I could use this one. It was the face of a temple daughter, formidable and strange. Priya was not just a maid or a weapon. She was something more, and Malini had no words for her.

“Malini,” Priya said, with sudden alarm. “Can you understand me?”

“I can.”

“You need a dose of the needle-flower.” Priya touched a hand back to her throat—not to the wound, but to the stoppered bottle, still safe upon its thread.

Malini shook her head, after a moment. “I don’t need it,” she said. It was not sickness that had distracted her. Her fingertips tingled as if there were fire inside them. “Continue.”

“Malini—”

“Tell me your deal,” Malini said sharply. “You said there wasn’t much time.”

Priya’s hand paused.

“Fine,” she said. “I want Ahiranya’s freedom. Entirely. No kindness or benevolence from your Emperor Aditya—no graciousness bestowed from on high. Ahiranya doesn’t need to be another nation bound to the empire. I want our independence. I’ll set you free, Malini. I will make sure you reach your nameless prince and his men. And in return, you will vow to me that you will give Ahiranya to me.”

“To you,” Malini said slowly. “And what would you do with it? Become its queen?”

Priya’s mouth quirked into a smile.

“Not me,” she said. “But belonging to Parijatdvipa has done this country no favors. No matter how kindly you say your brother Aditya will treat us, we’ll always be dogs at the table. We’ll always be angry if we remain chained to your empire.”

Malini said nothing for a moment. There were consequences to such a vow. She could not unilaterally alter the shape of Parijatdvipa. She did not know what Aditya or his men would say, in the face of a woman’s foolish promise.

Oh, vows could be broken. Of course they could. And yet Priya was… not entirely a safe person to lie to. And worse still, Malini did not want to break a promise to her.

There was a sound, somewhere below them. Priya’s jaw hardened.

“Promise me this, or one way or another, you die here.”

“You’ll kill me after all, Priya?”

“No, you fool woman,” Priya said, eyes blazing. “No. Never me.”

Malini was not sure she understood what she felt in that moment—the furious storm of feeling in her—but she knew the choice that lay before her.

“I vow it,” she said. “If you save my life—if I am reunited with Rao—then Ahiranya is yours.”

“Well, then.” Priya exhaled, long and slow. The thorns around her receded. The vine at Pramila’s throat crumpled. “We need to go. Now.”