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 tookeverythingfrom 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.”
