“Find the deathless waters. Remember who you are and be strong, Priya.” And then, when she refused to look at him, when her head remained lowered, he said, “Priya. You had to know.”
He reached for her but she stumbled back from him—rejected him, with a savage noise that was not words, only feeling. She flung herself back into the water, unspooling into nothing. Running from him, and from the truth.
Distantly, he felt the flicker of Bhumika. Of one of his rebels, the scant few left who’d drunk the waters to fight at his side. He closed his eyes and lowered his own face beneath the rivers.
PRIYA
Flung back into her body. A moment when she felt the waters of flesh and immortality and soul rising in her throat choking her and she grasped her own neck gasping, gasping. Her flesh burned—she did not know where the earth began or the sky ended, she did not know the way up,out. It was drowning, this feeling, or something so close to it that it did not matter if water surrounded her or if part of her lay ensnared in the sangam still, rended by Ashok’s fury.
“Priya.” A voice. “Are you injured? Speak to me.Quietly.”
Priya’s eyes cracked open. Malini kneeled by her. She was not once-born or twice- or thrice-born: She was entirely mortal, gaze focused on Priya, her lips pressed tightly together. Priya was no longer in the sangam, then, and Ashok was not here. He could not harm her.
Ashok had tried to harm her.
Her hand went to her chest. Hehadharmed her. The place where he had hurt her was like a burning star within her center, and she could not breathe around it.
“Priya,” Malini said again. Her voice was calm, utterly calm, but it was a serenity that Malini wore like armor. Her eyes held Priya’s steadily. “You need to stop this.”
Stop…?
It was only then that Priya realized they were surrounded by moss and flowers, vines twisting across the stone of the walls, unfurling through the cracks. In fact, the stone almost seemed to have moved, reshaping itself to let the greenery twine around it.
“Pramila,” she gasped. “If she sees—”
“I don’t know where she is,” said Malini, “or when she will return, and that is why you must bequiet.”
“I’m sorry,” Priya gasped out, even though she had nothing to be sorry for, and Malini hadeverything. She tried to concentrate, to lift her head, but she could feel Ashok’s fury as though his fist were still in her chest. She breathed—and faded into blackness.
Malini’s face, cold and resolute, was the last thing she saw.
MALINI
The first time Malini learned how to hold a knife was also the day she learned how to weep.
She and Narina were playing in her mother’s flower garden, profuse with both lilies and water lotuses in small ponds, zinnia and hibiscus. They were being Dwarali merchants, crossing the borders of Parijatdvipa into the dangerous wildernesses of nomadic Babure and Jagatay territory. For that, they’d needed thick cloaks—for some reason, Narina was insistent that merchants always wore thick cloaks—but they also needed weaponry.
“To protect our wares,” Narina explained.
“I would expect we’d have guards to protect our wares,” Malini had said.
“Not everyone has guards, Malini,” Narina huffed.
“I see,” said Malini. “We’re not very good merchants, then. Or we’d be able to afford guards, wouldn’t we?”
Alori gave a small sigh.
“Don’t argue, please,” she said. “Anyway, I know where we can get weapons.”
Alori was the only daughter of the king of Alor, who had enough sons to constitute his own small army. Alori was quiet and small and had a gift for vanishing from view, fading into insignificance. But her quiet wasn’t timidity, and she guided Narina and Malini confidently to the room where the youngest of her nameless brothers slept. On the way through the corridors, they could hear the sound of thudding wood and the clang of chains below. The sound was assurance enough that the imperial princes—Malini’s brothers—and their attendant lords were busy sparring in the practice yard.
The girls went into the room and rooted through the trunk at the foot of Alori’s brother’s bed. He didn’t keep his mace or his saber or any of his more impressive weapons in the room. But there were twin katara, sheathed in leather at the bottom of his trunk, and two daggers with carvings of beady-eyed fish at the hilts. It was only as they were leaving the room that Malini had the sudden thought to look beneath the mattress. That was where she stored her own treasures, and her instinct rewarded her when she grasped a simple knife. It wasn’t a fine enough thing to be a dagger. There was no sinuous curve to the blade or decoration on the hilt. It was plain and brutal and sharp. Malini pocketed it.
They raced back to the garden, where they collapsed into fits of laughter.
It was Alori who offered to show Malini how to use the knife.
“My brothers taught me,” she said. “Here, this is how to hold it.”
