There was a trick to holding a proper blade. Confidence, a shape to the grip. Malini extended the knife in front of her and felt a strange, blazing feeling unfold in her chest. She smiled.
“Let’s protect our wares,” she said.
She was pretending to be a Babure bandit, standing on the edge of a high rockery, waving the knife in front of her, when Narina and Alori—standing below her, yelling up at her valiantly—fell suddenly silent.
Malini was a sensible child. She lowered the knife to her side and straightened. Turned. Behind her, she saw a man’s figure rising, limned to shadow by sunlight. But she knew the shape of those shoulders; that turban, with pearls around the edge and a single peacock feather stitched to the crown. The slippers of gold and richly dyed vermilion on his feet.
Chandra stood before her. He was young, only a few years older than her. But he already had a hardness around the eyes, a stony quality of someone furious with his lot in life. He looked down at her with disdain, and Malini was suddenly conscious of her uncovered hair, her bare and dirty feet. Her weapon.
“Malini,” he said. “Where did you get the knife?”
Malini said nothing. Her palms were hot.
“I heard you in the corridor,” he said, approaching her. “Oh, you thought you’d gone unseen, I know. But I wasn’t in the practice yard with the others. I was praying at the family altar. Speaking with the high priest.”
“About what?” Malini asked.
Perhaps if she pretended that nothing was amiss—that she couldn’t see the curl of his lip, the narrowness of his eyes—his anger would melt away. Such wild hopes, she had.
Somehow his mouth thinned further.
“Give it to me,” he said.
Alori had told her, with a laugh, how a jab beneath the hollow of the ribs could kill a man. How she could cut a tendon. How she could slice a throat.
She’d said it all mildly, easily. Those were all things Alori’s brothers had revealed to her, as if a girl had equal right to weapons and knowledge, as if they expected her to spill blood by her own hands.
Chandra had taught her how fear felt. And shame. The way they could settle in your stomach, heavy as a stone. How they could alter your nature to something bidden and chained.
Malini thought of all the ways a knife could be used to kill or maim, her palm itching with bloodlust. Then she offered it blade first to her brother. Chandra took it.
“What did I tell you,” he said, “the last time you behaved improperly?”
“I’m sorry,” Malini said.
“Bow your head,” he replied, as if he hadn’t heard her.
He gripped her by her hair.
And then he began to cut.
“I told you,” he said, sawing through her braid, his other hand roughly gripping her roots, “that women are a reflection of the mothers of flame. You were born to be holy, Malini. I told you if you refuse to behave properly, you’ll have tolearn.”
Malini could see Narina right near them, her face red, her hands in fists. Alori had moved beneath the cover of the trees and was utterly still. Watching.
She’d never forget the look on her friends’ faces.
She tried to shove him away—shoved hard, with both hands. He’d merely wrenched her head back and cut harder. She’d felt a piercing pain. He’d cut her flesh. There was a sting, and the heat of blood trailing down her skin.
She’d felt it then, as she’d feel it many times over, in the years that followed: the dizzying sense that when he hacked at her hair he wanted to hack her neck clean too. That hurting her made him love her more intensely and want to hurt her all the more intensely too; as if destroying her was the only way to keep her pure.
She began to weep, then. She wept because fighting had not helped, and she couldn’t bring herself to beg. And his cutting gentled; as if her tears were a submission, a sign of defeat, and so he could afford to be kind to her. As if this was what he’d wanted all along.
She learned. Tears were a weapon of a kind, even if they made her fury smolder and rot and writhe inside her.
“Chandra,” said a voice. And her brother’s blade paused.
Malini’s eldest brother, Aditya, stood on the veranda to the garden. He was still dressed for the practice yard, bare-chested in nothing but a dhoti, no turban to hide his sweat-slicked hair. He crossed the garden, his tread quick. Behind him, in the shadows, stood their mother. Her pallu was drawn over her face, her head lowered.
