She had herself.
Fate was closing around her. False, false fate. And yet she gloried in it, because this—this was an opportunity to be seized. And Malini was not fool enough to let it slip by.
The men were watching her. Her Aloran prince. Lords of Saketa and Dwarali, Srugna and Parijat.
Her brother, grief in his eyes.
She waited for him to speak. She gave him one heartbeat, and another, and watched him lower his eyes without a word.
“It would be a great sacrifice on my part, to rule this land,” Malini said, slow and solemn, as if her heart were not a burning coal, a thing of joy and rage. “I am only a woman, with brothers still living. If I am to rule… my lords, I must rule in the name of the mothers. I must rule as a mother of Parijatdvipa.
“I have not burned, as the mothers burned,” she continued. “I know it isn’t their will. But I burned my goodness upon the monastery’s flames. I burned my gentleness. I made a fitting empress of myself. My lords, if it is the will of the mothers and the nameless both, then I will take the throne of Parijatdvipa for the good of all of us. I will do it, as the prophecy demands.”
Silence. And then, a roar. An exultation.
Rao, shoulders trembling, did not rise.
“My empress,” he said. And his voice was not exultant, but empty.
She touched her knuckles to her chest.
The flower bloomed still, as if no water could kill it, no fire could burn it. Her needle-flower.
Priya’s face against Malini’s palm. The steady, piercing light of her eyes.
I know you. I know exactly who you are.
She let her hand lower.
She knew herself. She knew what she was beneath the artifice. But these men did not know her. They looked at her and saw the mother of flame she claimed to be. Some looked at her with calculation, considering her worth and her biddability, the potential benefit of rule beneath a woman of Parijat instead of an imperial son.
Some looked at her with real faith burning in their eyes.
Others—like the archers she had stood beside when she had loosed her own arrow and burned the monastery down—looked at her with something akin to respect.
All that, she could use.
She saw Aditya watching her. There was a bleak, accepting look on his face. No joy. He looked at her as if he saw her death upon her.
Well, let him. Let him. She would not grieve.
She could make something new of Parijatdvipa.
She could make herself something monstrous. She could be a creature born of poison and pyre, flame and blood. She had told Aditya that when the opportunity to seize power came—to wield it—the opportunity had to be taken and held and used. If he would not wield it, she would.
If he would not take their brother’s throne, in that room of sweet falling jasmine where the sisters of her heart had burned, then she would do it.
She was going to build a new world.
All this she would do, when she sat on Parijatdvipa’s throne.
But first, she thought quietly, savagely, to herself, as the men around her kneeled and shouted her name. Malini. Malini. Mother Malini. Empress Malini.I am going to find my emperor brother. I am going to make Chandra kneel before his peers, humiliated and broken. And I am going to watch him burn.
PRIYA
After the coronation, Priya went to Rukh.
There was a makeshift sickroom, for all the people who had been injured protecting the mahal. Rukh had his own bed. It was by the window, under a fall of sunlight. He was lying on his side, and the leaves of his hair had all turned, seeking the sun.
