She woke.
It was still daylight. She could see the sunlight pouring in through a gap in the tent curtain. Distantly, she heard Sahar’s voice in muted conversation. The air was heavy with the heat that gathered and settled after midday. It would break by evening.
She clenched her hands in front of her, pressed them to her eyes. She heard her own voice. Poison.
I can hurt you. I love to hurt you. Can’t you feel it? All I want is your throat under my hands.
One day, I will take great joy in seeing you dead.
That was good. That, at least, was good.
“You cannot act so impetuously,” Raziya said, her voice infuriatingly calm. “Lord Prakash was correct. If an emperor stood in your place, rather than an empress, he would have been offered the same counsel.”
“In any normal war I would agree,” Malini said. “But this is no normal war.”
“In the battle against your brother Chandra you allowed yourself to become his prisoner,” Lata said helpfully. “You could have died.”
“That was also no normal war,” Malini said.
“Tell me the shape of a normal war so I can ensure I recognize one when we meet it, Empress,” Raziya murmured. She touched a hand to her creased forehead, then lowered it. “I am sorry for my rudeness, but youcannotrisk your life in this manner again.”
“Elder Priya has the power of the yaksa,” Malini said calmly.“I was sure she would recognize me and attempt to harm me through the forest itself. I was proved correct, and it allowed me to inflict harm in return. Sometimes a calculated risk is necessary.”
Raziya still looked unconvinced, but there was no more time to argue. One of the guards—a new Parijati addition named Sanvi—announced that Malini’s advisors were all arrayed in the council tent and waiting to receive her.
Malini had barely seated herself on her dais in the council tent when a single soldier rushed in. Her guards moved to protect her, but there was no need; he was Parijati, in her own colors, smoke and blood on his tunic, turning the white a dull rust in patches.
His eyes were wild and bloodshot. He was breathing shallowly, rapidly. For a moment his mouth moved without making any sound. Then finally, the words emerged.
“There are bodies,” he said. “And—something else.”
“Something else?” One of her military advisors had his brow furrowed. “Boy, what do you mean,something else?”
“Things are growing,” the soldier said helplessly. “Please. I only know what I saw.”
Malini heard the distant sound of a conch. She rose to her feet.
“Show us,” she said.
To put Raziya’s worries to rest, she allowed Lord Khalil and his warriors to provide her an extra layer of defense as she approached Ahiranya’s forest. When she saw what waited for them, she was—despite herself—glad she had.
Soldiers had been impaled beyond the lines of trees.
Hundreds of bodies. She did not try to count them all. Even through thick soil and growing vines, their Parijati white-and-gold armor was visible. They hung skewered on living stakes of wood like festival flags—wavering, just slightly, in a breeze Malini could not feel.
One of their commanders had been pinned to a tree near the border of the forest, where fire had splintered a dozen trees to ruin. His body still wore his helm, but the face beneath it wasn’t visible.Leaves were growing from his eye sockets, lush and green. Where his jaw should have been were strangely pale ashoka flowers.
“Careful,” murmured Khalil. He tilted his head sharply to the right. Malini followed the line of his gaze.
There, the forest had grown thicker, darker, more expansive. Before her eyes, new trees emerged—narrow, twisted things.
Even from a distance she could see the rot on them. They were flesh-and-wood—their stench was carried on the breeze.
To touch them, to move through them, was to court the rot and a terrible death.
She could not send her soldiers in. She was not sure anything could compel them to go. No faith could blot out the carrion stink of blood and meat.
There could be no real siege of Ahiranya. Not with the weapons they had. Clearly no fire could burn the forest faster than Ahiranya could regrow and overgrow, flourishing with violent speed.
