She’d known about the paths before the rider came. She hadn’t understood what the dream meant until he spoke, but still. She’dknown.
She could see Priya. Reach Priya. Whatever the dreams were, they held some truth. Truth she could use.
Perhaps more than truth lay in her dreams.
No one questioned her desire to pray in solitude again. She banished her guards, and she went to the room where the yaksa’s arm lay on its plinth; she lit an oil wick lamp and looked at it.
The lamp flickered. Shadows congealed on the arm’s length—the overlong fingers, the gold-green veins at the wrist. Her chest, her healed wound, throbbed.
Without allowing herself to flinch, she stepped forward and touched the arm.
The moment her skin touched wood-flesh, something rushed through her. It raced through her veins, her muscles, her bones. It was a pure burst of energy, stealing her breath and filling her with something greater than air.
Power.
She snatched her hand back. She clutched it to her chest, fingers tingling on the verge of pain.
“Turn to me,” she whispered to the arm on the plinth. “Toward me.”
The wrist… twisted. Fingers splaying toward her. Then it shuddered and went utterly still.
The air smelled of flowers under rainfall, and Malini’s chest throbbed, and Malini covered her mouth and laughed, and laughed.
VARSHA
Vijay loved sunlight. At night he was fretful, weeping and weeping, his cries insistent enough that Varsha could only weep with him. It was only when her maid Parul suggested lighting oil lamps—enough to brighten the room and draw every flying insect to its walls—that he quieted.
So Varsha began to make a point of carrying him around the mahal, to every single veranda or rooftop or garden that she could find. She had never moved freely during Chandra’s reign—she had been far too frightened to risk angering him—but the empress had told her she could go where she wished within the mahal. She’d told Varsha she was part of the imperial court.
Well, then. Varsha would test that.
She found that one of Vijay’s favorite places was the garden of the imperial temple. Here, the light was soft—turned gentle and shadow-touched by the high walls of the temple and the low, wide-branched trees that seemed to be constantly fragrant and flowering.
She was in the gardens, seated on a bench beneath a tree, when a priest approached her.
“Lady Varsha,” he said. He leaned forward, gazing down at her son. His eyes crinkled in the corners as he smiled. “He is a fine boy, my lady. A true scion of his father’s line.”
He did not sayHe looks like his father. But she wondered if that was his intent. Her stomach curdled. She had looked at Vijayagain and again and searched for his father in his face. He had her brother’s nose, and her father’s ears; her mother’s eyelashes and her own mouth. He was heir to Parijatdvipa, to be sure, but he was a Saketan child through and through. Or so she had convinced herself. Perhaps she was wrong.
“Thank you, priest,” she said, and lowered her eyes.
He sat down beside her. “May I bless him, my lady?” he asked. “Simply a mantra for his good health.”
“Of course.” What else could she say?
“If your maid could give us privacy,” he said cordially. Varsha raised her eyes to meet her maid’s. Parul, gray with terror, nodded and bowed—and stepped away.
The priest touched his fingertips to her sleeping son’s forehead and began to murmur a mantra. She held her son and listened to the cadence of the prayer, waiting for it to end.
“The empress will die, Lady Varsha,” the priest said. His tone, his cadence, did not alter. He could still have been praying. “She will burn, as the mothers demand she must. She will see, one day, that she must rise to the pyre. She cannot be an ally to you. For your son’s sake, you must ally with us. Trust in the priesthood, Lady Varsha, so that you may raise your son to glorious rule.”
She could not look at him. Her maid was not far, and her son was beginning to stir.
“Return here tomorrow,” he said, rising to his feet. “And we will talk, you and I.”
That night, in the lamplight, she rocked her son and pondered her choices.
The priest claimed the empress would die. If he said so, perhaps it was true. And in her absence, her son would be under a new power: the priesthood.
