“Bhumika, Elder of Ahiranya,” said a voice. Another. A song of voices. An exultation.
“Priya, Elder of Ahiranya.”
“Elders. Elders of Ahiranya!”
Bhumika removed the crown mask from her face and realized she was weeping. And smiling. And that Priya’s face was a reflection of her own.
MALINI
The true name of an Aloran prince was no small thing. She did not think any highborn present failed to understand the importance of what was happening before them. Even the soldiers had fallen deathly silent.
“What,” she said, “has your name to do with me?”
He released a breath, as if she had struck him.
“Everything, Princess Malini,” he said. “Everything.”
He stared at the ground. Closed his eyes in pain and reverence, and when he spoke, it was in Aloran. Ancient, archaic Aloran, a melodic language that even Malini had never learned. But Aditya knew it, and she judged the weight of the prophecy by the way her brother’s face paled, and his eyes closed, and his head tipped back to the bleeding dusk.
“When she is crowned in jasmine, in needle-flower, in smoke and in fire, he will kneel before her and name her,” repeated Rao, in common Zaban. And suddenly Malini was shivering, every inch of her afire with a mad elation that rose up, up in her blood. “He will give the princess of Parijat her fate: He will say…” He swallowed. Raised his eyes, which were fierce and wet. “Name who shall sit upon the throne, princess. Name the flower of empire. Name the head that shall reign beneath a crown of poison. Name the hand that lit the pyre.” The silence was deep; a drumming tense silence, drawn taught as a bowstring. “He will name her thus,” finished Rao. “And she will know.”
Malini could not feel her feet beneath her. It was as if she were floating in her own skin, on a wave of something that wasn’t quite fear or quite joy but burned in her, headier than liquor, more potent than needle-flower.
“I lit the pyre,” Malini said jerkily. “I lit the monastery. It was me.”
She saw in his face then, that he had realized the same thing.
“Yes,” he said.
The moment was on a knife edge. How easily it could turn.
Malini looked once more at Aditya.
Aditya, who had rejected the throne over and over again. She had given him the tools to become emperor and he had discarded or lowered them, over and over again. She had told him the way power worked, and the price it demanded. He had not given power its due. When power had come, he had turned away from it.
But she had taken the arrow. She had set the monastery aflame.
And here—here was her chance to take power for herself. A terrible chance. If she took the crown Rao had placed in her hands, if she turned the noose of his words into a weapon…
It would be foolish to try to take what was not hers to take. Royal sons were the ones who wore the crown. Royal women were…
Well.
She thought of her fellow princess Alori, and of highborn Narina, and how they had screamed when the flames had touched them. How they had smelled as they burned, as their crowns of stars splintered around their skulls, as even the sweetness of perfume and flowers could not blot out the acrid scent of burnt hair and silk, or the smell of flesh, fat, marrow burning and burning and burning.
Royal women are only crowned in death, Malini thought furiously.
She did not want to die. She wanted her crownnow. She had politicked for it; played for it and lost for it and nearly died for it. And yet here she was. Alive.
And here was Rao, an unnamed prince of Alor, his birth name a prophecy whispered in his mother’s ear. Here was the prince who had given her a crown and a throne and told her she had the right to grant them where she would.
Here he was. Kneeling before her.
It could not be done. She knew it could not be done. Her whole life, she had been told it could not.
But she had seen the look of hope and loyalty in the eyes of the men when she’d ordered them to battle. She had seen the way their faces changed when she had told them she was a mother of flame made flesh—a lie like a lever, a chain for their throat, a hand curled around the sinew and thick blood of their beating hearts.
She had Alor. She had a pact with the usurpers of Ahiranya.
