When Malini saw him she cried all the more furiously, great heaving sobs even as her heart stayed spiteful and furious inside her.
“Leave her,” said Aditya. He sounded tired.
“She had a weapon. A woman should know better.”
“She is a child. Let Mother deal with her discipline.”
“Mother would ruin her if she could,” Chandra muttered. “The priests say—”
“I don’t care what the priests say,” Aditya said. “Come with me, Malini.”
She didn’t have to be told twice. She ran to his side.
Aditya guided her to the veranda. After a moment, Narina and Alori followed.
“No one else thinks like he does, little dove,” Aditya said gently. He lightly brushed the shorn ends of her hair. “This is a more enlightened time. But you’ve no need for a knife. You have guards enough to protect you, and two brothers who love you.”
“And who will protect me from my brothers?” Malini asked.
“Chandra didn’t really want to hurt you.”
Malini knew Aditya was wrong. Chandra had wanted to. And he’d managed to.
But Aditya wouldn’t understand, if she tried to explain it, so she didn’t.
That night, when she and Narina and Alori had curled up like pups under one blanket, Alori tucked a sheathed blade between them. Another one of her brother’s knives.
“He wants us to have it,” Alori said. And: “He’s sorry, Malini.”
But no prince of Alor was responsible for Malini’s pain.
She learned that day to turn to a carapace of meekness rather than showing the true mettle of her fury. She learned, when Chandra hacked her hair, that there was a way she was expected to be, and if she failed to be it, there would be a price to pay.
Only her mother knew what she was about. Once her mother sat beside her on the bench swing in the same garden where Malini had learned her lesson.
“I am going to tutor you and your girls,” her mother said, after a long silence. “It’s high time you learned. The philosophy of military strategy and leadership, the teachings of the first mothers—these are things a princess should know of.”
Malini was silent. She had never been given the impression by anyone, not least her subdued mother, that such knowledge was for princesses.
“When I was a girl, my father arranged for a female sage to educate me,” her mother continued. “I will try to provide the same to you, my garland child, but until that day, I can give you what I have. Such things will help you survive as a daughter of Parijat. A blossom with a thorn heart.”
“I am not thorny,” Malini said. “Icried.”
“Weeping does not make you any less yourself,” her mother replied. She touched her fingertips to Malini’s shorn hair. “Be careful with your tears,” her mother added, in a voice of cultivated restraint. “They’re blood of the spirit. Weep too much, and it will wear you thin, until your soul is like a bruised flower.”
Her mother had been wrong, though. Weep enough, and your nature becomes like stone, battered by water until it is smooth and impervious to hurt. Use tears as a tool for long enough, and you will forget what real grief feels like.
That was some small mercy, at least.
The walls were breathing. When she’d left the cloister room, slow in the guttering dark, she’d seen vines force their way through the walls, moss unfurl through the spiderweb cracks in the floor. Now those roots and leaves pulsed along with Priya’s breath. Priya lay unconscious on the floor. Malini could see her eyelids flicker, restless, but never quite opening.
The catlike tilt of her eyes; the crooked nose and the sharpness of her bones. You couldn’t dress this one and make a highborn woman out of her. She was unlovely and strong. She was exactly what Malini needed. Malini had known that, the first moment she’d laid eyes on her through the lattice in the dark.
She’d been sure of it when she’d heard screams from across the corridor, pressed her hand to her cell door, and felt the lock release as if it had been waiting for her touch. When she’d slipped free and watched Priya take the rebel’s life.
Priya was a possibility, a hope. The only one Malini had.
“Priya. Wake up,” Malini said firmly. She looked beyond the vines to the end of the corridor. All it would take was one guard seeking her here—or mothers forbid, Pramila turning the corner.
