Chapter 4: Malini

MALINI

They were greeted courteously by the regent, General Vikram. He had his young wife at his side—a pretty and doe-eyed Ahiranyi woman, who offered her a polite but timid smile, then retired to her own palace with apologies. Lady Bhumika was late into her pregnancy, and unable to keep up with the demands of entertaining guests.

Malini was not a guest, of course. She was not here by choice. But Lord Santosh—as disgustingly pleased to be in charge of her imprisonment as he had been on the day Chandra had placed the responsibility of her in his hands—insisted on a lavish meal. Advisors to the regent joined them, but to her relief Malini was given a place of honor at a remove from the rest of them.

Great platters were brought out. Perhaps General Vikram had been warned in advance that Lord Santosh, like Emperor Chandra, had a marked distaste for anything that was not inherently Parijati, because the meal resembled the food she would have eaten in the imperial mahal in Harsinghar. It was heavy with ghee and raisins and pistachios, saffron swirling fragrantly through pale dhal. She picked at it, struggling to make herself eat as the regent asked polite questions about the journey and Santosh responded. Ever since Malini had begun being dosed with needle-flower, her appetite had waned. She felt no hunger now.

She should have been weighing up the regent: his weaknesses, his beliefs, the likelihood that these things could be leveraged to turn his loyalties against Chandra. He could not possibly like her brother—no sensible man liked her brother, and General Vikram would not have held the regency for so long if he were lacking in intelligence—but her mind was still a tangle of knotted thoughts, made slow by the weeks of needle-flower.

She could only sit, and stare at her plate, and feel her own mind stumble drunkenly over what must be done. She would need to find a way to win over the maids of the household, now that she had no jewels or coin to bribe them for favors. She would need eyes and ears in the mahal.

“The princess does not yet know,” Santosh said, sounding more gleeful than Malini liked, making her head rise, “where her prison cell is located. Would you like to do the honors, General Vikram?”

The regent’s gaze flickered between them.

“Emperor Chandra has requested that you be housed in the Hirana, princess,” he said.

Malini wished she could be surprised. But she was not. Dread and resignation pooled through her, rolling from her stomach through her limbs, until even her fingers felt numb.

“The Hirana,” she repeated. “The Ahiranyi temple.”

Pramila inhaled audibly. She had not known, then.

“The temple where the priests of Ahiranya set themselves alight on my father’s orders,” Malini said slowly, looking from Pramila’s pinched face to the regent’s unreadable one. “The temple where twenty-five children—”

“Yes,” General Vikram said abruptly. He looked rather gray himself. He had, she remembered, been regent when her father had ordered those deaths.

“There is no other Hirana, princess,” Santosh said with a mild chuckle. Oh, he was thrilled, wasn’t he? “What better place,” Santosh went on, “to contemplate your choices. To think about what awaits you.”

General Vikram was looking away from her, his eyes fixed on the lattice window. As if by not acknowledging what lay before him, he could ignore her fate.

“Whatever my emperor brother wills,” Malini said.

The Hirana was like nothing she had ever seen before.

It was a huge edifice, rising to a zenith where the temple proper sat. But there were no clear stairs up its height—no easy gradient of stones. Instead, it was as if someone had actually taken a pile of bodies—animal, mortal, yaksa—and stacked them upon each other to create a mountain of the dead. From a distance, to Malini’s eyes, it looked grotesque.

It looked no better when she was guided to a rope and bid to climb it.

“You must be careful, princess,” Commander Jeevan, the guide provided by the regent, told her calmly. “The Hirana is extremely dangerous. The surface is damaged in many places, and opens to deep pits. Do not release the rope. Follow my lead only.”

The carvings upon the stone were uneven to walk on and distressingly lifelike. Malini looked at them as she climbed, clutching the rope tightly, Pramila huffing behind her. Snakes coiled, their teeth bared, mouths vast enough to act as a neat trap for an ankle; mortal bodies, etched out of stone, with hands upturned, fingers curled; yaksa, those ancient spirits that were part mortal and part nature, with eyes that oozed greenery, profuse vegetation escaping their mouths, their forms humanlike, but broken at the stomach, the heart, by thick, violent surges of leaves.

No wonder the world had feared Ahiranya once. Malini could imagine how the Hirana had looked in the Age of Flowers, when it had been lacquered in gold and the temple elders still held great power and the yaksa still walked the world. The figures below her, with hair of vines and razor teeth, skin like bark or crumbling soil, filled her with a visceral, instinctual wariness.

The Parijati soldiers that Santosh had brought with him to guard Malini climbed nervously. Santosh no longer looked gleeful. As they drew higher and the rain began to splinter the sky, his voice took on a distinctly whiny cast as he asked how long it would be before they reached the top.

“Not long, my lord,” Commander Jeevan said, still calm. If he thought anything of their cowardice, he was sensible enough not to show it. “Maids have prepared the rooms for the princess in advance. I believe you’ll be pleased.”

Malini’s prison was in the northern end of the Hirana. She was led through echoing, empty corridors—through a strange atrium opened all around to the sky—to a large chamber with a lattice wall hidden behind a faded curtain clearly intended to keep out the chill of the atrium. There was only one door. Another had clearly been sealed off—bricked shut to allow only one entrance and exit into the room. There was a single charpoy of woven bamboo for a bed. A trunk for her meager collection of clothing.

The walls were still stained black, the carvings in the room blasted and faded, worn by neglect and flame. Malini looked around. Raised her head to the ceiling, as the guards and Pramila and Santosh bustled around her, and realized, with horror, that this had to have been the room where Ahiranya’s priests burned to death.

Of course it was. Damn her brother and the cruel, twisted nature of his mind. Of course he would lock her away far from all her support, all her alliances. Of course he would send her to a room in a decaying temple where dozens of children had died screaming in flame, simply for the crime of being too powerful, too monstrous—

“Yes,” Santosh said. A heavy hand settled on her arm. Malini did not flinch. Did not hit him. She was proud and sickened by that in turns. “This will do. Emperor Chandra will be pleased.”

After the guards had been placed at the entrance to the Hirana—after Commander Jeevan had left, guiding Santosh down with him—Malini lay back on the charpoy and Pramila opened the tiny bottle of medicine she wore at her throat. She poured two doses, as promised, into a carafe of wine. Placed it by Malini’s side.

“Drink,” she said.

Malini turned her face away. Closed her eyes.

“Not this again,” Pramila sighed. “Drink, Princess Malini, or I will be forced to call the guards.”

She would do it. She had done it before. Had them pin Malini’s arms as Pramila wrenched back her head and pried open her mouth and forced the liquid in, watching Malini choke and splutter, all the while saying, If only you were good—good as the emperor demands… No one wants to hurt you, princess, no one.

Malini raised herself up onto her elbow and lifted the carafe. Drank.

Then she lay back down and waited for the drugged stupor to overtake her.

I cannot survive like this, she thought, already growing detached. The ash-marked ceiling stared back at her. I cannot.

“The regent has arranged maidservants to maintain the temple,” Pramila murmured. Malini heard Pramila open the Book of Mothers once more, to begin Malini’s lessons all over again. “You will not see them, though, princess. I’ve made sure of that.”

Pramila knew Malini too well.

A draft made its way in from the strange atrium beyond, the one that was exposed to the elements, even at its roof where the sky peered through a vast opening cut into the stone. She shivered, curling up to ward off the cold.

Use what you have, Malini reminded herself. Use anything and everything you have. What can you do? What do you have here that may save you?

They were stealing her mind from her. They had denied her human company. She had nothing but herself. Nothing but the rage and grief that pulsed in her heart.

The darkness crept over her. She heard Pramila’s voice, muted and distant. In the lightless world between sleep and waking, she tried to remember her old strength. Her old cunning. She wrapped her anger at Chandra around herself like new skin; as if she were a snake, sloughing off one body and making another.

She would force herself to survive. She would wait. And when an opportunity came to escape the Hirana—any opportunity—she would take it.

She promised herself this, and sank down deep, deep. Down into the memory of her heart sisters’ screams as they burned.