Distantly, through the high windows and from remote corridors, she could hear weeping and song. Prayer and music, and the beating of mourning drums. Would the mourning have been so ostentatious if the rot was not flowering across the empire, if rumors of the yaksa rising and walking once more had not begun to spread? People needed something to have faith in.
“High Priest,” she said, loud enough for the waiting men to hear her. Her voice was clear as a bell. “Show us how to revere him.”
Chandra’s funeral had not been like this. It had been swift, and small. Ignoble. No one had been willing to burn his corpse during her sickness, and by the time she had recovered from her wound his body had rotted. Even the flowers and perfumes laid on his pyre, and the attar of roses dashed from small silver filigree jugs by the priests onto his remains, had not been enough to cover the smell. So there had been no public display of mourning for the people of Harsinghar to wail or cheer over. Instead, there had only been members of her council and the priests, and Malini herself. And the corpse, of course, swathed in white cloth to conceal its decay.
But for Aditya’s funeral there was weeping and wailing. The people of Harsinghar had left sheaves of flowers outside the mahal’s walls. And Aditya’s funeral pyre—with no corpse to burn—was heaped with garlands. Pink, red; the rich, profuse gold of marigolds; the delicate white, too, of needle-flower.
She kneeled, prostrating herself before the bodiless pyre. All the people around her followed suit, and their prayers were a roar like waves, a billowing storm in her ears. Their grief was so ostentatious it was more akin to a celebration: of death, of sacrifice, of the faith of the mothers.
Of Aditya. Not as she had known him—not her brother, with all his infuriating flaws, his gentle eyes, his unbending morality—but as the immortal thing he’d become. Not a mother of flame, but a son of one—dying for Malini’s empire, Malini’s throne, Malini’s fate.
She could not complain, could she? By the time she’d clawed her way from her sickbed, his tale had fused with her own, nourished her power even when sickness should have leached authority away from her. So empress she continued to be, crowned anew in the flames of his death.
She closed her eyes as Hemanth spoke his name.
Prince Aditya.
She couldn’t remember the last thing she had said to him. She’d searched her memory, racked it. But the more she thought about it, the less she could recall: the more the memory writhed and twisted, evading her. Her mind, punishing her, or showing her compassion.
Malini opened her eyes, blinked as Aditya’s face wavered before her swimming gaze.
Hemanth had fallen silent. He stepped forward and, with reverence, lit the pyre.
As the flames caught and rose, the sound of prayers rose with them.
The jasmine oil was a mistake. She realized that now. She could smell nothing but flowers: rotting flowers, burning flowers, flowers turning to smoke and flowers on her own skin, and the absence of burning flesh was almost more awful than the presence of it. Her stomach roiled. She almost wavered where she sat; almost slipped like all her bones had melted and she was nothing but wilting flesh. She felt the possibility of it like nausea, vertigo, and held it—somehow—at bay.
Maybe she was slipping. Losing her grasp on herself, on authority; maybe she was unraveling.
She hunched forward. A tear slipped free. That was fine. A little grief. A respectable amount of grief. A grief like worship. That could be allowed. That could—perhaps—be a necessity.
After the prayers ended she felt Lata’s hand on one arm and Raziya’s on the other. They raised her up. She found her feet and moved, the crowd moving with her.
She walked from the court to a veranda overlooking the city.The sky was painfully blue above her, and her skirt began to billow, caught in a sweet breeze.
She looked out at the city. At its people, so many of them that she could not discern individual faces, only the movement and sway of bodies, all palely dressed, exultant and mourning and joyous in their grieving under the rise of the beating sun.
Empress Malini. Mother Malini. Empress, Empress, Empress.
She felt the tale settle around her, written in smoke and in death.
And her ribs still burned, and burned, and burned.
RAO
“There will be war, of course.”
The snap of a flask. Liquor being poured. The scent of it was sharp—iron-rich, so close to blood that Rao could only turn his face from it and stare at one of the lamps along the wall. The flame inside it flickered orange and yellow.
A flame could burn blue, if it burned hot enough. Rao knew that now.
He kept silent as another voice muttered, and then another. War, yes. There would be war. The Ahiranyi had sent an assassin, after all, to murder Parijatdvipa’s holy empress. There would have to be vengeance. No—justice. The Ahiranyi would learn Parijatdvipa’s strength once more.
An assassin. The word rattled strangely in Rao’s head.
Priya had saved them all at the Veri river. She’d fought for them, nearlydiedfor them. He’d dragged her flower-riven body from the riverbed himself. Without her the empress would have no throne at all.
But there was no denying that she had stabbed Malini, in the end.
