Show me—
No. There was no point remembering that.
It was only sensible, she told herself, to help him. She didn’t want the image of him, standing before her, to haunt her. She didn’t want to remember a starving child, abandoned and alone, roots growing through his hands, and think,I left him to die. He asked me for help, and I left him.
“You’re in luck,” she said lightly. “I work in the regent’s mahal. And his wife has a very gentle heart when it comes to orphans. I should know. She took me in. She’ll let you work for her if I ask nicely. I’m sure of it.”
His eyes went wide, so much hope in his face that it was almost painful to look at him. So Priya made a point of looking away. The sky was bright, the air overly warm. She needed to get back.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Rukh,” he said. “My name is Rukh.”
MALINI
The night before they were due to reach Ahiranya, Malini was not given her usual medicine. There was nothing in the wine Pramila handed her to drink before she slept—no aftertaste of cloying sugar that signaled she had been dosed with needle-flower.
“You will need to be alert when you meet the regent,” Pramila told her. “Alert and polite, princess.”
The words were a warning.
Malini did not know what to make of the new clarity of her mind. Her skin felt too tight over her bones. Her heart—finally allowed the freedom to grieve without the blanket of needle-flower to smother it—was a heavy throb in her chest. She felt as if her ribs ached with the weight of it. She crossed her arms around herself, and felt each indent, each hollow. Counted them.
After weeks muted by the needle-flower, the world was a painful ricochet of sensation. Everything was too loud, too hard, the light of the day too painful. The jolt of the carriage made her joints hurt. She was a sack of flesh and blood.
For once, she couldn’t drown out Pramila’s reading of the Book of Mothers. Pramila sat next to her in the carriage, stiffly upright, reciting with painstaking slowness. First, Divyanshi’s childhood. Then, the crimes of the yaksa and their terrible devotees, the Ahiranyi. Then, the ancient war. Then, how it ended.
Then, the book closed, and turned. And reopened, and repeated over again.
It made her want to scream.
She kept her hands still and calm in her lap. Maintained the measure of her own breath.
She was an Imperial Princess of Parijatdvipa. Sister to the emperor. She had been named at the feet of a statue of Divyanshi haloed in flame and flowers.Garland weaver, they’d called her.Malini.
She had woven her first crown from roses shelled from their thorns, as her mother had taught her the words of the Book of Mothers with far more sweetness and verve than Pramila’s dry voice could ever muster.
The mothers ended their lives willingly in holy fire. Their sacrifice was an old, deep magic that lit the weapons of their followers with flame and set the monstrous yaksa alight.
That was the point in the book when her mother had often pretended to wave a sword in front of her, bringing the tale some much-needed levity. Malini had always laughed.
Their sacrifice saved us all. If not for the mothers, there would be no empire.
If not for the mothers’ sacrifice, the Age of Flowers would never have been brought to an end.
Sacrifice.
Malini looked out of the chariot at the land of Ahiranya. The air smelled wet and rich from rainfall. The thin curtain surrounding her concealed nearly everything, but through the gap that billowed with the movement of the wheels she could see the shadows of cramped buildings. Empty streets. Broken trees, splintered by axes, and the charred remains where some had been burned away entirely.
This was the nation that had almost conquered the entirety of the subcontinent in the Age of Flowers. This was what remained of a once great power: a dirt track so uneven that the chariot jolted violently every few seconds, a few shuttered stalls, and scorched earth.
And Malini had not seen a single brothel yet. She was oddly disappointed to realize that all those highborn boys who had boasted to her brothers about being able to bed a dozen women the moment you set foot in Ahiranya for the price of a single Parijati pearl had been grossly exaggerating.
“Princess Malini,” said Pramila. Her mouth was thin. “You must listen. It is your brother’s will.”
“I always listen,” Malini said evenly. “I know these tales. I was properly raised and taught.”
“If you remembered your lessons, neither of us would be here.”
