Chapter 3: Priya

PRIYA

Rukh stared at everything in the regent’s mahal: the lattice walls cut into hollow roses and lotus flowers, the airy hallways broken up by white silk curtains, the bouquets of peacock feathers carved into the bases of the sandstone columns that held up the high, silver-tiled ceilings. He tried to dawdle and drink it all in, but Priya dragged him along mercilessly. She couldn’t afford to give him the time to gawp. She was very, very late back, and although she’d warned the cook Billu that she was going to be late—bribed him with hashish she’d saved specifically for this occasion—there was only so far that she could stretch his goodwill.

She handed Rukh over to the care of Khalida, a sour-faced senior maidservant who agreed reluctantly to ask their mistress if the boy could do some menial work in her manse.

“I’ll come back and see you later,” Priya promised Rukh.

“If Lady Bhumika allows him to stay, you may collect him before the evening meal,” Khalida replied, and Rukh bit his lip. Worry tinged his expression.

Priya bowed her head.

“Thank you, ma’am.” To Rukh, she said, “Don’t worry. Our lady won’t say no.”

Khalida frowned, but did not disagree. She knew just as well as Priya did how generous the regent’s wife could be.

Priya left them both, went to the maids’ dormitory, where she hastily daubed the worst of the mud and dirt from her frankly grimy sari, and headed to the kitchen. She tried to make up for her lateness by stopping at the stepwell on the way and collecting two brimming buckets of water. There was never a time when water was not useful in a busy palace kitchen, after all.

To her surprise, no one seemed to have noticed her absence. Although the large clay ovens were hot, and a few servants bustled in and out, the majority of the kitchen staff were huddled by the tea stove.

Mithunan, one of the younger guards, was standing by the stewing pot of tea, drinking from a clay cup held in one hand as he gesticulated wildly with the other. All the servants were listening to him intently.

“… only one advance rider,” he was saying. “One horse. You could tell he’d come all the way from Parijat. His accent was pure court, and the watch captain said he was carrying the imperial token.” Mithunan took a sip of tea. “I thought the captain would faint, he was so shocked.”

Priya put the buckets down and drew closer.

Billu looked over at her. “Good to finally see you,” he said dryly.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“The princess is arriving today,” one of the maidservants said, in the kind of hushed and excited tone reserved for the best gossip.

“She wasn’t meant to arrive for at least another week,” Mithunan added with a shake of his head. “We weren’t even told to look out for her on watch. But she hasn’t got a retinue with her, the rider said, so she’s moving fast.”

“No retinue,” Priya repeated. “Are you sure?”

Every royal from every city-state in Parijatdvipa traveled with a vast and mostly useless array of followers: servants, guards, entertainers, favored nobles. For the sister of the emperor to travel with anything less than a small army was an absurd concept.

Mithunan shrugged. “I only know what the rider told us,” he said awkwardly. “But maybe the rules are different when—well, you know. In the circumstances.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway. I was sent to bring some food back with me. We had a double shift and we might need to stay on for a third. The men are hungry.”

“Where are the day shift guards?” Billu asked, already moving to pile a basket full of food.

“Out in the city,” said Mithunan. “Captain said the regent wants everything safely shut down before the princess makes it here. Brother Billu, do you have any more tea? Or sugarcane? Anything to keep us all awake…”

Priya quietly slipped away as they continued talking, filching one paratha from the basket by the ovens as she went and stuffing it wholesale into her mouth. Sima would have called her a mannerless beast if she were here, but she wasn’t, so Priya was free to be as uncouth as she liked.

She’d been wrong to assume someone had been murdered. There had been no throats cut or bodies laid outside temples. No rebel killings.

Just a princess, arriving early for her imprisonment.

After her work was done, Priya plucked Rukh from Khalida’s care and guided him to the dormitory where the children slept. Once she’d found him a spare sleeping mat, she took him with her to her own dormitory, shared by eight other maids. Beneath the cover of the plain canopied veranda that surrounded it, ringed by fresh falling rain, she kneeled down, wrapped her hands in her pallu, and started carving the sacred wood down into a bead.

The burn of the wood through cloth was strong enough to make her swear. She bit down on her tongue for a moment, one pain to distract her from another, and kept on whittling, hands steady and sure. She could handle a lot more pain than this.

“Come and sit next to me,” she said to Rukh, who was still standing in the rainfall, visibly overwhelmed by the direction his day had taken. He stepped onto the veranda. Kneeled down beside her. “Hand me one of those,” she added, pointing to the small pile of ribbon and thread spooled on the ground next to her. He picked one up. She lowered the knife and took it from him.

“Is there anything else I can do?” he asked timidly, as she threaded the bead neatly onto the string.

“You could tell me how you’re finding your new life so far,” she said. “What work has Khalida set for you?”

“Cleaning latrines,” he said. “It’s fine. No, it’s—really, really good. A bed and food is… is…” He trailed off with a helpless shake of his head.

“I know,” she said. She really did. “Go on.”

“I said I’d do anything and I will,” Rukh said, all in a rush. “I’m very grateful, ma’am.”

“I told you to call me Priya.”

“Priya,” he said obediently. “Thank you.”

She didn’t know what to do with his gratitude except ignore it, so she simply nodded and pressed the bead of wood against her own skin. The bead was small enough that instead of burning her, it merely warmed her wrist, its magic seeping through her flesh and into her nerves, her blood. She held the bead there for a moment, ensuring that it wouldn’t be strong enough to harm Rukh but would still be strong enough to help him, and watched his face. He’d lowered his chin, gaze fixed on the raindrops splashing against soil. He still looked overwhelmed.

She remembered how she’d felt when she’d first come to the regent’s mahal. She’d cried every night that first week, folding her sleeping mat over her face to muffle the sound of her own tears so she wouldn’t wake the other girls.

“I’m going to tell you a story,” she said to him lightly. He lifted his head and looked at her, curious. “Have you heard the one about the cunning yaksa who tricked a Srugani prince into marrying an Ahiranyi washerwoman?”

He shook his head.

“Well, give me your hand and I’ll tell it to you.”

She wound the thread around his wrist and began her tale.

“It was near the start of the Age of Flowers, before the Srugani and others like them understood how strong and clever the yaksa were…”

By the time Priya had rambled out what she could remember of that tale of masks and mistaken identities, a duel of honor and a washerwoman draped in a veil of white lilies and saffron, Rukh had started to relax, leaning back on the veranda and smiling a little as he fidgeted with the new bead of sacred wood on his wrist.

“Be careful with that,” Priya told him. “It’s not going to be easy to get more sacred wood. You know where it comes from?”

“The forest?”

“From the trees that grew when the yaksa all died,” Priya said. “Sacred wood has some of their magic in it.” She tapped the bead with her own fingertip. “No more yaksa means no new trees, which makes sacred wood costly. So treat it nicely, okay?”

“There you are,” a woman’s voice said. Priya and Rukh both turned their heads. The rain was fading again, but the woman standing at the edge of the veranda with her pallu drawn over her hair had been caught in the last dredges of the downpour, the cloth glimmering faintly with water. “Priya,” she said. “Come with me. You’re needed.”

“Sima,” Priya greeted her. She picked up the spools of ribbon, the knife, and the remains of the shard of sacred wood, and tidied them away. “Sima, this is Rukh.”

“Hello, ma’am,” he said guardedly.

“Nice to meet you, Rukh,” said Sima. “You should head to the kitchen before you miss dinner.”

“Go on,” Priya agreed, as Rukh looked over at her for reassurance. “You can find your way to your own dormitory, can’t you? The other boys should guide you from there.”

He nodded. With a final mumbled thanks and the faintest smile in Priya’s direction, he jumped from the veranda and ran off.

As soon as he was gone, Sima grabbed Priya by the arm and hauled her across the veranda, back toward the mahal proper. Her hand on Priya was strong, rain damp and faintly scented with soap from hours laundering clothes.

“So you did bring a stray home,” Sima said to her. “I should have known it was true.”

“Who told you?”

“Oh, one of the guards who let you in. I don’t know,” Sima said dismissively. “You’re lucky Billu covered for you. You came back so late.”

“If I’d known the markets were going to be shut, I wouldn’t have bothered going out at all. I went to—help,” Priya said. “You know what I do. But I couldn’t do much. And then I found him. He was alone, Sima.”

Priya saw a familiar mix of exasperation and affection flicker across Sima’s face before her friend rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Speaking of market closures—you really do need to come with me.” Sima let go of Priya’s arm, twining her arm with Priya’s with a conspiratorial air instead. “And we’re going to need to rush.”

“Why?”

“The princess is almost here,” she said, as if Priya were a simpleton. “We’re going to watch.” She tugged Priya forward. “Come on. I had to bribe one of the guards with a whole flask of wine to get a good spot.”

“I’m hungry,” Priya protested.

“You can eat later,” Sima said.

They went to a storeroom, high in the mahal, where a narrow barred window overlooked the marbled entrance courtyard. The window was only large enough for one of them to peer out of at a time. Priya looked first and saw the regent and his advisors, attendants with parasols standing beside them to keep at bay the ever-present threat of rain. Soldiers in Parijatdvipan white and gold were arrayed in a great crescent around them.

She drew back, letting Sima take her place.

“You should have kept some wine for us,” Priya muttered, crouching on the floor.

Sima shook her head. “I’m not going to have time for drinking. I’ve got a new job. While you were off gallivanting around the city, Gauri was roping up girls to do chores in the princess’s new dwelling. Sweeping up, cooking, the usual.” Sima shot Priya a sidelong glance. “You should find her and volunteer too. We could finally work together again.”

They hadn’t shared chores since their first year in the mahal, when they were both still girls. Sima had left her village and her family and come to the mahal by choice, but she’d been overwhelmed by the size and bustle of the city. Priya had been like Rukh, of course: one of the pity cases taken in by the regent’s wife, just another orphan abandoned, feral and angry and entirely alone. They’d clung to each other out of necessity at first. But they had soon built a friendship on the back of a shared affection for pretty girls, liquor, and nights spent gossiping in their dormitory, laughing with each other until one of the maidservants trying to sleep threw a shoe to shut them up.

“Is the coin good?” Priya asked.

“The coin is very good.”

“I would have thought she’d have more volunteers than she could manage, then.”

“Ah, no.” Sima squinted through the bars. “Come over here. I can see horses.”

Priya got up with a groan. When Sima didn’t move, she nudged in close to her, pressing their faces together so they could both look.

The horses were beautiful, pure white and bridled in brilliant gold, drawing a chariot of silver and ivory bone. The inhabitants were hidden, shrouded above by a dark cloth canopy, surrounded by a wall of curtains. There were riders on either side of the chariot, but there was, indeed, no full retinue. Just a clutch of soldiers, bristling with weapons, and a nobleman who lowered himself from his horse and bowed perfunctorily to the regent.

“The princess,” Sima said against her ear, as the curtain of the chariot parted and an older noblewoman alighted, “is being imprisoned in the Hirana.”

There was a sudden white emptiness in Priya’s skull.

“Gauri’s struggling to get volunteers,” Sima was saying. “There’s me, of course. A few new girls who don’t know better. That’s all.”

“But you do know better,” Priya managed to say.

“I want the money,” Sima said quietly. “I don’t want to be a maid for the rest of my life. I didn’t come to Hiranaprastha for that. And you…” Sima huffed out a breath, but Priya was so numb she didn’t feel it, even though they were cheek to cheek. “I don’t think you want to be here forever either.”

“It’s not a bad life,” Priya said. “There are worse ones.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t want just a little bit more than you have,” said Sima. “And what happened there—it was a long time ago, Pri.”

“The Ahiranyi don’t forget.” Priya moved away from the window. Pressed her back to the wall and stared at the ceiling.

“Let the rebels remember,” Sima said. “Let them write their poems and songs and take up arms. You and I, we should look after ourselves.”

She didn’t add because no one else will. That truth was ingrained in their marrow.

But.

The Hirana.

If Gautam had brought her close to the bones of her past, the Hirana was the grave where the broken pieces of her memory lay at uneasy rest.

It all tumbled over her then. The exhaustion. The void inside her. Rukh’s bravado and loneliness, like a mirror flinging her own past before her. The thought of how easily a blade could part skin. The humiliation of being knocked over, dismissed, talked down to. And what do you do? Sweep floors?

She was meant to be so much more, once.

She couldn’t be the person she’d been reared to be. But maybe, just maybe, she could allow herself to want a little more than what she had. Just a little.

It sparked up suddenly in her heart—a desire so small and yet so powerful that it welled up in her like hunger in a starving body. She couldn’t let herself want her old gifts or old strength. But this she could want: enough coin to buy sacred wood without groveling before a man who hated her. Enough coin to make life a little better: for those children at the market, who had no one. For Rukh, who was her responsibility now. For herself.

Coin was power. And Priya was so tired of feeling powerless.

“I can see her,” Sima gasped suddenly. “Ah—I can’t see her face, but her sari is lovely.”

“She’s a princess. Of course her sari is lovely.”

“Gray, though. I thought she’d wear something brighter.”

“She’s a prisoner.”

“Who knows what imprisoned royalty get to wear? Stop sniping at me, Pri. Come and look.”

Priya took Sima’s place this time. A slim figure had just alighted from the chariot. Priya could see the edge of a hand still resting against the chariot’s wall, the pearly fabric of the princess’s sari moving slightly in the breeze.

“I’m going to find Gauri,” she said, stepping back.

“Right now?” Sima asked, her forehead wrinkling in confusion.

Priya didn’t want to wait. If she thought too long on how foolish this was, she would convince herself not to do it.

“Why not?” Priya said. “I need to ask her for a job. I’ll come to the Hirana with you.” She forced a smile. “You’re right, Sima. It’s time to take care of myself.”