Malini had looked at its empty, glorious face and hated it with all the spiteful breath within her.
“Melt it down,” she’d said.
The man had bowed low to the floor, stammering apologies. He had not meant to offend the empress. The High Priest had asked him specifically to create a likeness of the prince. The High Priest had insisted—
“Destroy it,” Malini had ordered again. There, before her entire court, trembling upon her throne.
Shaking. Her hands had been shaking. She had laid them on her lap, one over the other, forcing them into stillness. “Melt it down,” she’d said again, with a calmness as hard as a blade, a calmness bitter with fury. “And I will select an artisan to remake his likeness.”
“Empress,” an advisor had begun tentatively. But she had not allowed him to continue.
“He was my brother. He died for the good of my empire. I will see him properly honored.”
And mothers help her, she had tried. She truly had.
Instead of gold, the statue that stood before her now was wood, lacquered to a dark sheen. Wood from a monastery garden to the nameless, offered up by his fellow priests. The statues of Alori and Narina stood in a private alcove, veiled in white cloth. But the statue of Aditya stood at the side of the mothers—close in standing to his own ancestor Divyanshi.
The effigy was complete and holy, with her brother’s gentle, piercing eyes. His soft, faintly curling hair, pinned back. His brows like her own, and his smiling mouth. She had not allowedthis statue of him to be dressed as a crown prince. Instead he was a nameless priest—garbed in folds of cloth, chest bare, palms open.
She kneeled, laying her final garland before the effigy of her brother. She closed her eyes and thought of nothing, and consciously felt nothing—only the cold marble beneath her knees, and the weight of the jewels in her hair. She held her position for a long moment, and then, with a final bow of reverence, stood.
“Empress,” Lata murmured behind her, and Malini turned.
Hemanth was waiting for her at the temple entrance. His jaw was tight, his mouth compressed. He bowed deeply to her.
“Empress,” he said.
“High Priest,” she said, inclining her head mildly in return. She walked toward him, skirts whispering against stone. “Are my advisors waiting?”
“Everything is ready,” he said.
“I am honored,” she said to him, in a voice that was low and warm, as if she liked him, “to have your guidance in this task.”
“It is my honor.”
I know how you hate me, she thought, and had to hold back the smile that threatened at her own mouth; that vicious thing, all teeth.
Instead she said, “You may walk with me.”
Chandra had carried out his executions on pyres. He had burned women in the mahal’s gardens. He had burned them in his own court.
But Malini would not do as he had done.
Her executions would be cleaner.
A training courtyard for the imperial guard had been commandeered, and men had been set at the entrances for privacy. Her generals stood waiting for her, beyond the shade of the veranda reserved for her throne: Lord Khalil of Dwarali, and Lord Prakash of Srugna; Lord Narayan of Saketa and Prince Rao of Alor, who refused to meet her eyes—who stared into the distance with golden sunlight a swathe and a mask across his face.Hemanth moved to join them, standing in the last dregs of shade thrown by the veranda’s columns. He had not asked if he could stand beside her in the shade, and she had not offered.
In the center of the courtyard kneeled ten men. They were all highborn and dressed in their finery: silk turbans pinned with jewels, sashed tunics. They had no weapons at their sides. They had lost that privilege, along with the privilege of a long life. Their hands were bound in chains, each chain looped to the next man’s cuffs, to keep them all imprisoned in place.
In her father’s day, executions had been a spectacle. There had been a grand execution ground and a mingled common and highborn audience gathered together to watch the parade of traitors and their just deaths: by dozens of arrows, or an elephant’s foot to the skull, or the neat cut of a blade to the heart or the throat. Malini had never witnessed those executions. It had never been considered appropriate for a gently raised imperial woman to view such things. But she had asked Aditya once what it was like.
He’d looked pained, a little haunted, but she had pushed him until, reluctantly, he had spoken:
“It was terrible,” he’d said. “Terrible, and I was not allowed to look away. I don’t understand how people chose to look upon it for sport.”
Today, she would not ask her allies to look upon sport, and she would not inflict it on the men who were fated to die.
For her traitors, Malini had ensured privacy and a sharp sword. For herself, Malini had ensured the shaded veranda and the presence of her closest advisors. Raziya and Deepa and Lata stood beside her.
