Epilogue

EPILOGUE

Chandra kneeled in the ruins of his mother’s garden. Around him the flowers lay in rotten heaps, their roots exposed, the flies and ants climbing over their remains. When Chandra had ordered that the garden be prepared for his use, a mere handful of weeks ago, he had made it clear that the flowers were to be left here to die.

There was a sweetness to the scent of dying vegetation that soothed him.

His mother had loved her Dwarali birch trees—the pale bark, the proud spires of the branches, laden with leaves.

Servants had cut down all the trees in one morning, years of growth instantly obliterated. The roots had been levered out of the soil, the wood dried, then axed and carefully arranged into individual pyres. Women had been led to the pyres; the pyres had been lit; the ash had been cleared and piled high again, until all the wood was gone, put to good use in service of a higher purpose.

Chandra had watched it all.

Today, only one pyre still burned. Its fire had reduced to glowing embers, pulsing under the blackened weight of the wood. The woman upon it had long since died, and the garden was blissfully quiet once more. A maidservant had brought Chandra refreshments: sherbet laden with crushed blossoms and pearly basil seeds, pink and white. A clay cup of tea, covered with a cloth to maintain its heat. She had arranged these neatly on the low table beside him, bowed, and departed, her pallu drawn over her mouth and nose, her eyes red from the miasma of smoke.

The light of the embers faded further, choked by the weight of burnt wood. Chandra looked closer, through ash white and black, through birch and bone. And there it was.

One ember—only one—had brightened. Grown. It lay in the dark, pulsing like a heartbeat. The small fist of light shuddered before Chandra’s astonished, hopeful eyes, and began to uncurl. A molten gold bud blooming into a flower of fire.

Chandra breathed in, a deep breath to give him the air for the joyous laugh that left him then. His mouth was full of the smoke of human char; the sickly perfume of dead jasmine. He had never tasted anything so sweet.

He sat and watched the fire burn. And he thought of his sister with a smile on his lips.