Priya met her gaze, head tilting up.
“So you would live,” Priya said simply.
Explain, Malini wanted to command.Tell me why. Tell me everything.But Priya was drawing closer to her. Malini tensed instinctually, waiting for a knife through the ribs, that moment of pain that she had dreamt of over and over, like a wheel that never stopped turning. But Priya only curved her hands around Malini’s arms and pressed her face to the crook of Malini’s throat. She bowed into Malini, like a woman at prayer before an effigy, like a creature taking shelter from the storm.
Malini should have shoved her away. But she pressed her forehead against Priya’s hair instead. She closed her eyes and let her lips touch Priya’s forehead.
“This isn’t real,” Malini lied. To herself, to Priya. If this wasn’t real, she could allow herself to have this: Priya in her arms. Priya loving her.
“I said I’ll never see you in the flesh again,” said Priya. “But I know this is real. All our dreams are real. They wouldn’t hurt so much if they weren’t.”
Priya rose up and pressed her mouth to Malini’s. Unbearably gentle, unbearably tender. Her mouth tasted of salt, of life. She was cold like she’d been swimming—like she’d been wading through water, laughing with her sari knotted to her knees, then climbed onto the bank to press a kiss to Malini’s mouth. It was like an image plucked from another life they would never live, sweet and bitter all at once.
Malini touched her hands to Priya’s back, palms flat, and drew her closer. Priya was thin, all corded muscle under soft skin, and she came to Malini’s hands easily, wrapping her arms around Malini’s shoulders. She made a thin noise—an almost soundless gasp—when Malini’s hands moved over her body. Her hips, her buttocks, her waist, the softness of her stomach. The hollow of her thighs, warm under her river-tangled cloth. Her nails dug into Malini’s shoulders. She tipped her head back, and her eyes were brilliantly bright—shining brown under gold-hued lashes, full of want and wonder.
“Malini,” she gasped. No tears now. “Malini.”
Malini saw light ripple over her own arms—a green lattice glowing under her skin, a flowering of want in her chest, her belly. It felt like worship. It felt like coming home.
She leaned forward and slotted her mouth over Priya’s again.
She woke. Aching, between her thighs, with want. Tears in her eyes.
Some instinct grasped her. She struggled out of her own clothing—sleep-soft cotton parted easily and there was her own bare torso. Her stomach, her breasts—the knot of the scar at her chest. In the dimness of her sleeping she touched her hand to her chest.
She felt the sting of it when her fingers met ruptured skin over her heart. Not her scar, which stood untouched, complete—but a new wound. And through it…
A flower. A single flower, black in the dim light and lustrous andalive, growing from her own flesh.
Her heart lurched. She heard, through the rush of her own blood in her skull, a distant noise, and saw a light.
“Empress,” said Swati, setting the lantern down. “It’s time to wake.”
Malini saw her move through the curtains that surrounded the bed. In a moment, Swati would peel the curtain back, and then she would see.
She could not see.
“Leave me for a moment,” she ordered, forcing her voice to remain even. She felt like an animal searching for human speech—her mouth better suited for the scream that wanted to rear out of it. “I’ll rise on my own.”
It was an unusual request. But after a heartbeat of hesitation, Swati obeyed. “I’ll bring your breakfast, my lady,” she said. Malini heard the sweep of the tent’s curtain, a slice of birdsong—then silence.
She covered her mouth with her hand, struggling for breath. In, out. In. Out.
There was no time, and no one she could turn to. Alone, she drew on her blouse and dressed, and prepared to meet the world.
The mahal of King Lakshan, ruler of Srugna, was a squarish, colonnaded set of buildings set on different tiers hewn into a cliff face. An easily defensible home for a king. Once, every tier of the palace had been decorated with flowers, or so Prakash told her as they approached its entrance. But the fast spread of the rot had made the king cautious, and he had ordered all vegetation to be hacked away. Without it the mahal looked severe—cold, with its bare stone unmarked and lacking in beauty.
Inside the mahal, his court was little better. The courtiers were tired and frightened, and King Lakshan had the exhausted look of a man who had not slept in months and did not expect respite to ever come. One feast of welcome was all it took for her to judge that the rot, the new unnatural paths that had carved their way through his lands, and the constant threat of the yaksa had drained hisresources and his will. He spoke anxiously about his army. “It is not that we lack men, Empress,” he said. “It is that they are cowardly and run from their duty. They fear the rot and they fear death.”
“I have brought soldiers to help you,” she said soothingly. “You have not been abandoned. The empire does not forget your aid in the war against my brother.”
A little of his tension eased at that, but it returned with a vengeance when she delicately dipped her hands in attar and wiped them clean, leaving her plate of appam, and said, “I do have questions about the treatment of the rot-riven on your lands. I have heard troubling reports…”
All through it her chest ached. A sore wound.
When she was alone once again in her rooms she refused the offer of a bath or the assistance of her maid, and opened one of her trunks herself. She withdrew from it everything she thought she’d need: bandages, thread. Liquor of a high enough potency to be used on a wound.
Then she lit her oil lamp, sat upon her bed, and removed her blouse.
