She left the audience tent.
She paused, one breath, one heartbeat. That was all it took for her to see what lay around her, and how the landscape had changed:
The leaves of the fronded plants surrounding the tent had all turned toward her.
She could not save Srugna from the rot. But there was something else she could do.
She could dream.
When Malini returned to her tent, shaking and strange, she smelled something sweet on the air. Something like green things after the first flush of monsoon rains. No incense had been lit, and Swati had left no flowers in bowls of water to fragrance the room. The scent was a beckoning, a call.
Priya.
You knew I would come for you after all, Malini thought.How could I not, after what you have done?
Malini did not sleep. For some reason, she knew she didn’t need to. She remembered the way Priya had reached for her magic at times; the closed eyes, the slow deep breaths. She kneeled on the ground, on the softness of a rug over tent canvas, and closed her own eyes.
Inside her skull lay a door. The distant sound of rushing water.
She stepped through it.
She was not in the imperial court. She was in a shadowy place where leaves rustled and insects whined, a place where Priya kneeled in front of a vast lake, black in a dreamlike darkness beyond day or night.
The lake was covered in a thick carpet of blue lotus flowers.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Priya said. She turned her head and met Malini’s gaze. “I’ve never seen anything like them. But I will soon.”
Malini walked toward her. There was still distance between. Too much to cross with hands, touch. Malini kneeled down, soft grass beneath her.
“You killed people you once claimed as your allies,” Malini said. “People who were your friends.”
Priya flinched. She turned back to the water.
“I could have died because of you, Malini,” Priya said. “That weapon you have could have killed me.”
“I ordered them to capture you alive.”
“You can tell a man what to do with a weapon,” Priya said. “That doesn’t mean he’ll obey. You know that.” Her shoulders bowed forward a little. “They should have killed me before I could kill them. Why didn’t you tell them to?”
Malini’s heart thundered in her chest, a roar in her ears.
“You know why,” she said. She didn’t know what emotion seeped into her voice. Only that it made Priya’s hands curl against the ground and her head tilt forward, as if she could shelter herself from it.
“What would you do if you could see me again, Malini? Touch me?” The water rippled. The blue lotuses glowed. “Would you kill me? Imprison me?”
Malini said nothing. If she spoke, she would say something she did not want to—something that revealed her rotten, wanting heart.
“I think we should find out,” said Priya.
Malini returned to her body with a gasp.
She knew of those lotuses. She’d studied the geography of Parijatdvipa, marked on maps of war and maps of famine, in the course of her rise to the throne.
Utpala Lake. Alor. That was where Priya would be.
RAO
His luck was rotten. A flood had struck Alor. “Strange rains, my lord,” one of his soldiers had told him, after interrogating a lone farmer walking along the edge of the road they were traveling on. “He says no one will travel until the ground dries and the river recedes fully.”
