The fire had burned Priya when she had stabbed Malini. Malini still remembered the smell of flesh viscerally—the sight of Priya’s face, traitorous and loved. The pain in it.
“There are other warriors joining us for battle,” she continued. “We must give them time to do so.”
Rao’s mouth had thinned. He nodded, and with a respectful murmur of her title, he rode away from her toward the blue horizon ahead of them.
His physical distance gave her an odd pang.
She had not allowed herself to see clearly how their shared grief had carved them into different shapes and cleaved them from one another. He had sat by her bedside as she’d healed, had wept with her, the scent of liquor on his skin and hair, his mouth an ugly twist of grief. But they’d exchanged no words that mattered, nowords of real mourning or blame, and the liquor had stayed as the closeness vanished. Now it seemed they had no words of any worth left at all.
The dust was rising in a cloud around her army—churned from gray to gold as it ate sunlight on its rise toward the sky. Malini watched him vanish into it.
Four nights on the road, she dreamt of Priya. She dreamt of Priya standing in the court of the imperial mahal; dreamt firelight casting flowers on her face, her throat. Dreamt the fire dripping like gold, hollowing Priya’s throat like a gourd as she wept and wept.I had no choice, Malini. Malini, I’m sorry, I had no choice—
Her chest ached as if the knife were burrowing into it all over again. As if the knife had left something there, seeded something.
Priya was in her head. In her wound. She could not seek help. She could not speak of it. But in Ahiranya, by the mothers—and by her own fucking fury—Malini would learn the truth.
On the fifth night she paced her tent until the entire camp was still, hushed with deep nighttime silence. She paced until she heard the noise of soldiers rising to swap shifts on watch, and the air was filled with low, muted voices and the thud of boots. When she slept, it was when pure exhaustion forcibly dragged her under, down to somewhere black and blessedly dreamless.
If Priya followed her there, she did not feel it.
The soldiers she was waiting for met her two weeks into the journey, on a sun-blasted road leading like an arrow to Ahiranya. One of her own warriors announced them—not by sounding his conch, which would have alerted her forces to danger, but by crying out, a high piercing cry that carried across the slow procession of cavalry.
“Parijati ahead!”
“Send a rider and archers,” Khalil commanded. “Then report.”
“My lord,” one of the Dwarali soldiers replied. He bowed his head, then rode off swiftly.
Malini did not have to wait long in her chariot before the news arrived: The soldiers ahead of them were indeed Parijati. They were the men she had been waiting for. Gladness rushed through her.
“So Lord Mahesh finally joins us,” she murmured. She turned to Rao. “Are we due to make camp?”
“Before nightfall,” he said. “We could travel for a few hours more, if you order it.”
She was tempted. Only reaching Ahiranya would put an end to the nightmares plaguing her. But there were shadows under Rao’s eyes, and even Lord Khalil looked exhausted where he sat on his mount. “Send out the order,” she said. “We rest until dawn. And have Lord Mahesh brought to me.”
Her tent was swiftly erected but still in partial disarray when she entered. Her maid Swati hastily lit a set of lamps. Guardswomen arranged themselves discreetly around the edges of the room, half concealed in shadow.
And Malini stood, hands clasped before her, and waited as the tent flap was raised and Lord Mahesh’s name was announced.
He entered and immediately bowed low to the floor. His armor was stained with dust from the road; his bared neck and his hands were dark from the sun and ruddy from exposure to wind and sand.
“Stand,” she told him. And he did so, meeting her eyes briefly before lowering them again.
“Empress,” he said. “You summoned me.”
“I thought you would join us sooner,” she remarked.
“There were—problems—upon the road here, Empress,” he said. “I apologize.”
“The High Prince’s fort is safely in Saketan hands?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice heavy. “My work in Saketa is done. But I will serve you however you require of me, Empress.”
After the end of the war for Malini’s throne, Mahesh had returned to Saketa to hold the deceased High Prince’s fort on her behalf. She had sent him there, unwilling to keep a highborn whohad betrayed her at her side. But he had gone willingly enough and had, she had heard, raised a shrine there to the memory of Aditya.
He’d been there when Aditya had burned. Had watched him die; had watched him, and made vows to him.
