“Rao,” he said. “You know Aditya needs us. You know Parijatdvipa needs us to make sure the right brother sits on the throne. Emperor Aditya. Imagine that.”
Rao said nothing. He had imagined it. But it was Aditya’s fault that that vision hadn’t yet come to pass.
“Just…” Prem exhaled. “I’m going to him. As soon as the festival falls. You should come with me. He’ll need you. You’ve done all you can to save her. And so have I.”
“Have we?” Rao said.
“Yes,” Prem said. He smiled again, something sad in the uptick of his mouth. “We have.”
Rao wanted to argue, and he knew Prem was ready to respond in kind, but Lata interjected.
“Prince Prem,” she said. “Let my patient rest.”
Silence. Then, “I’ll be back later, Rao.”
Rao lay back and closed his eyes as Lata moved around the room, murmuring to herself about clean linens and boiled water.
He thought of Malini, up in that prison. So close, but too far for any of them to reach her.
He thought of the letter she’d written to him. A hasty, tear-stained scrawl, not in court Dvipan, not even in the shared common Parijatdvipan tongue of Zaban, but in the modern, city Aloran his sister had taught her. The letter had been delivered by a handmaiden with haunted eyes. She’d been bribed with Malini’s last scrap of gold. Her mother’s wedding bangles.
The letter had ash upon it. Salt and ash.
Chandra is sending me to Ahiranya.
And there, underlined, a quiet desperation in the curve of every letter:
Save me.
Lata kneeled down beside him. He opened his eyes. She looked pinched and tired.
“Will you leave, then?” Lata asked quietly.
“What do you think?”
She said nothing for a moment.
“I think we need to bandage your ribs,” she said finally. “Hold still. This will hurt.”
“Don’t worry,” Rao said, swallowing. The roses stared back down at him, so red upon the ceiling that they resembled spatters of blood. “I’m very good at following orders.”
PRIYA
There were prison cells beneath the mahal. Priya had never had reason to consider that reality before. But she had good reason to now.
The guards had been gentle enough with her. They’d allowed her to make her own way down the Hirana’s surface—by necessity, more than anything else, she suspected—then bound her hands and guided her beyond the general’s orchards, the near-overflowing stepwell, and into a separate iron-gated staircase that led down into the bowels of the mahal. They had locked her into a cell, bid her to sit and rest until she was called upon, and then left her.
There was only one window in her cell: a high slat, covered in a filigree of bars, that seemed to let in barely any light but allowed the rainwater in freely. It had stopped raining finally,finally, but the water still poured through the slat in a slow, steady stream, as everything the soil couldn’t swallow up rolled down the sloping earth and into Priya’s chamber.
She wondered if the design of it—the slope, the window, the water pooling unavoidably at her feet—was intentional. After an hour of standing in the murky chill, too numb with shock to do anything more, she decided grimly that it probably was. She edged her way to the farthest corner of the space. Sat, curling forward, her head upon her knees.
The minute she sat on the ground, her body began to shudder. She couldn’t control it. She clutched her own palms to her elbows, struggling to control her breath, and felt a wild kind of panic tighten her chest.
She’d wanted to remember, hadn’t she? Oh, she could admit that to herself now. She’d wanted more than fragments of memory. Well, she’d achieved her wish. More than achieved it. For a moment, as she’d fought Meena, she’d been the Priya who was a temple child. She had seen the sangam in her mind.
And she’d killed a woman.
Meena had been trying to kill her, of course. But that didn’t make her feel any less shaken now.
