PROLOGUE
KARTIK
“Have you ever seen a girl of greater purity, my prince?”
Those words were not meant for Kartik, but he heard them all the same. High Priest Hemanth stood with his head bowed close to the young prince’s ear. His voice was pitched low, but his words still carried. That could not be helped. The High Priest’s voice was rich and unmistakable—a vast thing, neither loud nor soft, butpervasive. It was a voice made for mantras, for song, for guidance. For pouring faith, like wine, into the cup of a waiting heart.
The two of them, priest and prince, were standing in the gardens of the imperial temple, birds trilling in the trees above them, and the wind swaying the branches. All of that noise was just loud enough to mask Kartik’s presence: his small, surprised stutter of breath, and the motion of his broom, scraping up a cloud of dust from the marble path.
He stepped back, into the shadows of the temple wall, his broom clutched tight in his hands. He hardly dared to breathe.
The High Priest spoke again. Gentle. Coaxing. His hand upon the young prince’s shoulder. The words reached Kartik’s ears like leaves falling onto steady waters: a soft collapse followed by a ripple of motion that ran right through him.
“Will you protect her? Will you guide her, so that she may keep her goodness?”
That was how priests often asked questions, Kartik had learned. Questions mildly phrased that demanded answers clawed from the marrow of a man’s bones, the deepest blood of his heart. And sure enough, the young prince nodded slowly and said, “Yes. Of course I will. What kind of brother would I be, if I didn’t save her from tarnish?”
Kartik waited for them to leave. Finished his chores in a kind of numb, ecstatic haze. His hands were steady, but his vision was a blur of lights and color. He walked across the temple floor, seeing everything with new eyes: the sandstone of the walls, carved with flowers; the gossamer curtains that filled every door and alcove, billowing in the wind. On every surface he saw the High Priest’s words echoed back at him, rewritten, remade, calling him.
Have you ever seen a girl of greater purity?
Kartik should not have heard those words; should not have carried them with him in the aftermath, inked indelibly into his own skull, as shining and constant as prayer song. But he had a mind made for knowledge, or so he had always been told. When he had been only a boy, and a disciple in a lowly Saketan temple to the faceless mother, his ability to recite hundreds of mantras and prayers from memory—and the Book of Mothers in its entirety—had drawn High Priest Hemanth’s attention, and led the High Priest to pluck Kartik from his old life. His mind had led him here: to Harsinghar, and its jasmine-veiled palace, and the imperial temple where he now served.
To the temple garden where a boy in training for his faith may stumble, unwitting, on the second prince walking alongside the High Priest, speaking of the imperial princess herself, and feel a truth reverberate through him that he did not yet fully understand.
She was here, at this very moment. In the temple hall, the young princess was kneeling before the statue of Divyanshi. All five mothers of flame—every single noblewoman who had willingly burned, giving her life to break the power of the yaksa and bring an end to the Age of Flowers—were depicted in the prayer hall. Four of them were arrayed in a crescent, their figures carved from gold: Ahamara, with her long hair loose around her, coiling like flame; Nanvishi, a star of fire blooming from her forehead, her palms outspread; Suhana with a broken bow in her hands and her face upraised; and Meenakshi, face lowered in prayer, hands clasped.
Divyanshi stood at their center, her statue taller than the rest, grandly wrought, with silver flowers trailing her arms. She stared forward, proud and beautiful, her golden face serene. The princess, kneeling at her feet, was entirely in her shadow.
The princess pushed a garland of flowers toward the statues of the mothers. The garland was deftly made, each blossom pierced through the heart with pristine white thread and gathered close to the next. Jasmine, a mingling of yellow and white, caught between weighty pink roses. He had seen those roses left as offerings so often that he recognized them as the ones the emperor’s wife grew in her own private garden.
Even in the vicinity of the temple, people gossiped. As if they did not know how their voices wafted in through windows.A beauty, they called her.One day she’ll break hearts. The emperor will want to watch her closely.
But he didn’t listen to gossip. He listened to truths and secrets. Kept them, and learned from them.
He listened now, as she bowed her head and whispered to the mothers. She could not see him, where he stood in the shadow, his broom still in hand. But he could see her. Hear her, and know.
It was then—when he was only a boy—that he began to see the shape of the future in a way even the High Priest did not. And though the High Priest’s question had not been for him, in his heart he answered it.
No. He had never seen a girl of greater purity. Never, in all his life.
MALINI
A rider returned from Ahiranya on the day Malini first glimpsed the sea.
An army on the move had a particular, unpleasant stench: of horseflesh and elephant dung, sweating men and the tang of iron under hot sunlight. Malini had hoped, over weeks of travel, that she would grow accustomed to it. But she had not. Every time the wind blew, and the thin curtains surrounding her chariot billowed back and forth, Malini smelled it all anew.
The breeze that carried the ocean with it cut through the smell like a shining knife. It was a sharp scent, bitter with salt. She stood taller in her chariot when she felt it touch her cheek—reached to draw her curtain aside and let the wind reach her unimpeded by cloth.
Without the fabric clouding her vision, she could see the army that surrounded her: warriors from Srugna, with maces hefted over their shoulders; Saketan liegemen with liegemarks emblazoned on their sashes, and whips coiled at their waists; Alorans with chakrams at their wrists, riding alongside Dwarali archers on their white stallions with blood-red saddles; and her own Parijati forces, ringed around her, dressed in imperial white and gold with their sabers bare, the steel gleaming beneath the sun. This was her army, the combined forces of the city-states of the empire, that would help her unseat her brother and seize the throne.Herthrone, by right of blood and of prophecy.
And over their heads, she could see the thinnest trace of blue.
The sea.
She had known she would see it eventually. Before Aditya had rejected his birthright one time too many—before Malini had been named empress—the handful of lords who had stood in staunch support of Aditya had made plans for their forces to meet and follow the path to Dwarali, keeping to a route along the coast wherever possible, land that was under the purview of those less loyal to Chandra. They had intended to make their way to the Lal Qila: a fort on the edge of the empire, built to withstand attacks from the nomadic Babure and Jagatay who lived beyond the empire’s borders. A fort, they hoped, that was strong enough to keep Chandra at bay too.
Malini had seen no reason to alter plans long in the making; plans thatshehad helped to form, with carefully placed suggestions and cajoling letters, in her time as a princess of Parijatdvipa under Chandra’s thumb. But still, there had been something viscerally satisfying about watching her army grow, as foot soldiers and elephant cavalry had joined them along the journey; as new lords had welcomed her arrival on their lands, swearing loyalty and opening their villages and havelis to Malini’s men, feeding them and arming them, and sending their own heirs and warriors to join the growing procession heading to the distant Lal Qila.
