Maybe the foolishness of her decision to enter the water with Priya, to act on her want, would strike her later. But right now she felt no shame or regret. She wanted simple things: to savor this moment—stone digging into her hip and all—as long as she could. To have the time to memorize the shape and feel of Priya’s mouth, to learn her skin by blind touch. To laugh with her and talk with her and learn her, no pacts or painful debts between them.
“You know this doesn’t make you a monster,” Priya murmured. She lay facing Malini, sun on her deep brown skin, her hair a loose sheet of darkness around her. “Wanting me. You know that, don’t you?”
Malini wanted to explain that being monstrous wasn’t inherent, as Priya seemed to believe it to be. It was something placed upon you: a chain or a poison, bled into you by unkind hands.
But that wasn’t what Priya needed to hear.
“I know,” Malini said simply. “This part of me isn’t anything I’m ashamed of.”
She felt much greater shame at her own rage: the cold iron weight of it, ever present and ever steady in her heart. It shamed her, all the things she dreamt of doing to Chandra, but only because of how much pleasure the thought of his suffering brought her. He deserved to suffer. But to enjoy the thought of his pain made her more like him than she wanted to be.
“I think you may be a good person after all,” Priya said slowly.
“Oh?” Malini smiled. “You change your mind so swiftly?”
“Parts of you, then,” said Priya. “Parts of you want the world to be better. You want justice for yourself and the people you love, because your rights have been denied. You think the world owes you for that.”
“You need to work on your love talk, Priya,” Malini said dryly, and Priya laughed, a warm sound. “And I hope you realize you could be speaking about yourself, temple child.”
Priya shook her head. The laughter faded from the shape of her mouth, her eyes, as her expression turned contemplative.
“I’ve never wanted justice. Maybe I should have, but the thing I truly wanted was myself back. And now I just want to know—to prove—that the temple elders were wrong. Parijatdvipa was wrong. My brothers and sisters and I, we were never monsters. We didn’t deserve what was done to us. I want to believe that. I want toknowthat. I want that to be true, and if it isn’t, I want to make it true. But you, Malini,” she said. “You want to remake the world.”
“I just want to change who sits on the imperial throne,” Malini replied. But that didn’t feel entirely like the truth, even to her own ears.
Priya reached out, tracing Malini’s jaw with her fingertips. Priya was gazing at her with clear eyes and a furrow between her brows, reading her bones as if they were a map.
“This face. This face right in front of me. The face you’ve shown me, the fact that you kissed me. I know it. I know you,” said Priya. “I know exactly who you are. There are other versions of you that I don’t know. But this one…” Her fingers were against Malini’s lips. “This one is mine.”
For a moment, Malini felt as if maybe this was all that she was. There was nothing more to her, no princess of Parijat, no politician, no royal. She was just this, just herself, under Priya’s sure hand. Someone content.
She rolled over, placing distance between them. Priya drew her hand back, and perhaps she understood the gesture, because she rolled over onto her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows, no longer touching Malini. Instead, she lowered her gaze to Malini’s throat, where the cask of needle-flower hung on its chain.
“Do you have enough?”
Malini clasped her hand around the bottle. Its weight in her palm was heavy, the chain a cold shock of metal.
“I don’t need it anymore,” said Malini.
“Are you sure?”
“I have no physician to advise me, so no. Of course not. But I feel well enough now.”Well enoughwould have to do. She wouldn’t swallow needle-flower again unless she had no other choice.
“If you don’t need it any longer, why wear it?”
“You want me to discard it?”
“No,” said Priya. “But—I thought you would want to.”
“And you know me so well,” Malini said, without bite. She lowered her hand. “It’s a reminder.”
“Of what?”
She could have been flippant again. She could have denied Priya a true answer. But instead she said, “Of the price I’ve paid to see Chandra removed from his throne.”
“May I?” Priya asked.
Malini did not know what Priya planned to do. But she nodded regardless and said, “You may.”
