“A man will say anything when he is tortured,” Mitul managed to reply. “Any truth, and any lie. I told her nearly everything. I betrayed the High Priest. But I did not tell her of you.”
He was bleeding, her priest. His ring finger had been severed beyond the knuckle, and the digits surrounding it had been pulverized. His hands had been so elegant once. She wished she had held them even once in her own: traced their shape, kissed the knuckles. Not for love and not for desire, but so she would understand intimately what he had sacrificed here for the sake of Parijatdvipa and the mothers.
She wanted to hold every piece of his pain within her as she readied herself to face her own end.
“The High Priest will be safe,” she promised. There were other guards who loved the mothers as she did—who moved through the ranks of the Parijati warriors who served the empress. They would protect the High Priest. She had faith.
“Sanvi,” he said. “We who have no great destiny—our heroics may be forgotten, but the mothers will thank us when we lie in their arms.” His voice shook. “The mothers will know what we gave to see the world saved, and they will cradle us kindly. I will meet you there, beyond. You and the empress both.”
“I will lead her there,” Sanvi promised, blinking tears from her eyes. “I will show her the way.”
“Good.” He smiled at her—a ruined smile, shining from his wounded face. “You have my faith, Sanvi.”
“You’ve served the mothers well, priest,” she said. She reached for her belt. “Now close your eyes. Rest.”
He did as she had bidden him.
“Farewell,” he said.
“Farewell,” she echoed.
She held him against her chest, against her heart, and firmly, tenderly slit his throat.
She would have liked to return to her neighborhood shrine where she had first met him, where he had seen her faith and given her life a purpose. But the mahal was in tumult as the empress prepared her household to head for war.
She prayed in her room instead, by the bed she would never sleep in again. She clasped her hands and thought of his ruined hands, his ruined face. She thought of the empress with hatred and love and desperation that made her want to almost scream.You must become what the empire needs, she thought.
You must burn, you must, you must.
Later, dragged from her room by Shri, Sanvi mustered her strength. The priest had taught her so much in his time, and she would not grieve him any longer. The oil in her pack, the flint in her belt, would be her celebration of him.
She returned to work. Sahar was complaining, as she loaded a cart with weapons, about having even more people to guard and watch over.
“Some quiet lug of a man,” she was saying. “What am I supposed to do with him?”
He was some Ahiranyi man—a guard or a soldier. He was not technically a prisoner any longer, but no one felt comfortable letting an Ahiranyi man ride freely toward his home country on a horse with a saber at his side.
“Who is he?” Shri asked, nonplussed. “Another elder?”
“I don’t know,” said Sahar, lifting another crate of weapons into the cart. “But Elder Bhumika seems very worried about him.” A sigh. “More trouble.”
She did not complain about protecting the other Ahiranyi woman, Sima. But that one had been returned to Prince Rao’s care, so perhaps it was simply that she was no longer Sahar’s concern.
Sanvi had never liked Sima. She’d been so angry and so quiet—except with Sahar, who’d always challenge her to an arm wrestle and then insist on sharing the best wine with her. As ifsome Ahiranyi fool, abandoned like dirt by one of her monstrous elders, deserved such kindness.
Sanvi had kept her silence.
She watched the city as they departed. The peepul trees. The white marble. Her heart ached for it all, as it ached for Mitul, and for all the precious things she had chosen to leave behind.
If all went to plan, she would never see the city of Harsinghar again.
PRIYA
They were all not quite allies to Parijatdvipa and not quite prisoners, so Priya willingly joined Bhumika and Sima in the same veil-walled chariot, with one of Malini’s guards to steer their horse, and a retinue of soldiers in a perimeter on horseback to keep an eye on them.
Priya looked at her sister: at Bhumika’s tangled hair, at her solemn face. At the distant way she stared through the curtain gauze, not seeing the world around them. Seeing something, instead, inside herself.
“Would it help if I told you who you used to be?” Priya asked once. “Bhumika, if I told you about Ahiranya, about—about our family. Would that help?”
