“I did what was necessary to remind the Ahiranyi of their place,” Santosh said, after a pause. His voice was suddenly oily, cloying. Bhumika tightened her hand upon the balustrade and listened to the cadence of it—the warning his sudden obsequiousness carried with it. “You’ve long been absent from the heart of the empire, General Vikram. Perhaps you do not understand the kind of governance Emperor Chandra expects of you. When brutes like these Ahiranyi kill our own, they must be crushed with greater might. They mustallface justice.”
“You clearly do not understand Ahiranya, Lord Santosh,” Vikram said, in a level voice that did nothing to hide his fury. “You do not understand its people. Not as I do. You do not know how to handle them. Your way will turn them into rabid dogs, biting the hands of their masters.”
She heard a grunt, a noise of agony, as he adjusted himself on the bed. When she had left him, he’d been leaning back against the bolster cushions. Now, hearing the intentness of his voice, she could well imagine the way he was leaning forward, pulling his wound, his eyes upon Santosh. She wished she were in the room, where she could read their faces and their bodies. But she could stand and listen, measuring her husband’s strained breaths and the weight of Santosh’s heavy silence.
“Here is something I know about the Ahiranyi,” Vikram said. “When a rebel is put to death—be he a scribe or a poet or a murderer—the Ahiranyi people say to themselves, ‘The man broke the law. Perhaps he deserved to die.’ When the women burned, the people said, ‘She was a rebel, was she not? She must have done something that brought her fate upon her. What happened to her will not happen to me.’ They look for reasons, for rules, and through those rules, they learn that as long as they are obedient, they will be safe. Their fear trains them. But tonight, Lord Santosh, you killed men and women who werenotrebels, who knew nothing of what happened to Lord Iskar, who saw a lord of Parijat—you, Santosh—attack them without provocation. Those Ahiranyi will look at your work and they will be frightened. Angry. They will believe an injustice has been done to them. Highborn and commoner alike.
“When the temple children burned,” he added quietly, “I learned exactly how far the Ahiranyi people can be pushed. How an apparently senseless act can make enemies of them. And you, Lord Santosh—you have pushed too far. You have united the Ahiranyi. The emperor will not thank you for that.”
Santosh said nothing. But oh, Bhumika could well imagine the expression he wore.
You’ve said too much, husband, she thought.
Santosh was not a man who would take well to being chided. His pride was far too overblown, and Vikram had shattered it. She was afraid Santosh would gather the wreckage of it, all those splinters hewn off by Vikram’s words, and make knives of them.
And her husband had not stopped speaking quite yet.
“I will have to be lenient, to make up for your lapse in judgment,” Vikram went on. “I should shut the city, for the sake of safety. But the Ahiranyi will want to celebrate the festival of the dark of the moon.”
“A heretical festival,” Santosh said, in a thin, petulant voice.
“A festival of value to the Ahiranyi,” Vikram said, still deliberate and level, “that I will allow them to celebrate despite the actions of the rebels, as a demonstration of the emperor’s benevolence, andmybenevolence. I will not make new rebels out of Ahiranya’s citizens, Lord Santosh. I will let their gratitude soften their outrage.”
Santosh made a noise. A laugh. Sharp, high. Oh, she wished she could see his face. The look upon it.
“I see,” he said. “You’ll make friends of them, will you? Of course you will. You, with your little Ahiranyi wife and your precious Ahiranyi highborn allies. You’ve practically become one of them.” Disgust dripped from his voice.
She heard the thud of footsteps. For one moment, she wondered if he would storm out on the balcony, and readied herself, softening her shoulders, widening her eyes—she would make herself seem small, unthreatening, anything but the intent listener she was—and then heard him stop, and speak. His voice was more distant now, as if he had crossed the room.
“Ahiranya will not be yours forever,” Lord Santosh said. “It is barely yours now. Try to win the favor of the Ahiranyi, if you like. Let them run their whorehouses and worship their monstrous gods. Let them! But winning their favor won’t save your regency,Vikram. The emperor is the one who will decide who rules. The emperor sent me here. He will give me Ahiranya.”
“Whatever the emperor asks of me, I will do,” Vikram said. “Whatever he demands, I will give. But he has not named you as my replacement yet.” A beat. “It has been a pleasure seeing you as always, Lord Santosh.”
She heard a door slam. Santosh was gone.
When she was sure that he would not return, she stepped back into the room. Vikram was leaning back once more, eyes closed, his mouth slightly parted as he breathed through the pain. She moved beside him, already considering what consequences that unfortunate conversation would have for her husband’s regency. For Ahiranya.
She carefully did not think of how her husband had spoken of her people. There were a great many things she was careful not to think about around her husband.
She poured the wine into the cup.
“Drink,” she said, and placed the cup against his lips. She kept her voice tender, her expression compassionate, as if the conversation had meant nothing to her at all. “You need your rest. Let your wife take care of you, just this once.”
Without opening his eyes, with utter trust, he drank.
PRIYA
It was one of the easiest things she had ever done. She prepared all the food, after all. She was the one who made the evening meal, the parathas, the pickles, the little pots of dhal or yoghurt if any happened to be available. She assembled a plate for Pramila and placed the smallest dose of needle-flower into Pramila’s tea. The sweetness of the sugar she’d heaped into the cup would hopefully hide the taste.
With hands that shook far less than they should have, considering how nervous she was, Priya prepared the rest of the food. The maidservants had left bags of rice and wholemeal flour on their last visit, purses of ground spices, and bags of onions and ginger. As Priya heaved one bag of flour, she saw a piece of paper flutter to the floor. She leaned down and picked it up.
It was a letter written in indigo ink, smeared from long being folded between two sacks, though someone had gone to some trouble to dry it and had pressed a cloth between the two edges to blot the color. She recognized it as Sima’s hand, crude Zaban. Sima was not a habitual writer, and her knowledge of written script was shaky.
Stay safe. Thinking of you.
Beneath it, Sima had drawn a little bird—a fat fledgling dove, marking in its dark eyes and fluffy down with painstaking care.
She thought of Sima sitting and carefully capturing words on the page for Priya’s sake, and a lump rose to her throat.
