“I didn’t know you then,” Rao said heavily, “as I know you now.”
You were not so spellbound by love for my brother then, Malini thought.And not so led astray.
But she would not speak of things he could not see.
“I’m not his keeper,” said Malini. Though in another world, another time, he would have been hers.
“If you truly didn’t plan for this…” Rao paused, exhaling. “You could have refused him. Given the task to someone else. You still could.”
“I could have,” she said. “I could have belittled him. Refused him and shamed him. Would that have been the act of a kind sister?”
“Don’t mock him, please,” Rao said, jaw tight.
“I am not mocking him, or you,” Malini said evenly, forcing herself to be calm. “I am telling you he is still his own man, able to make his own choices.”
What she would not—could not—say to Rao was this:
She felt relieved. Horribly relieved and unburdened, and guilty for feeling so. She was glad she would not carry the danger of him with her to Harsinghar; that she would not always have to think of him hiding in a dark room, meditating and praying, and waiting for a different future to come for him, whileshewaited for men to rally around him and slit her throat.
She had not tried to kill him. She had done him a greater service than any other sibling vying for a throne would have done, when she allowed him to live. She owed him no more than she’d given.
He had given her a gift, her brother.
“Will you remain here with him?” Malini asked.
“Are you asking me to, Empress?”
“None of that,” Malini said softly. “There’s no one listening to us now.”
Rao huffed out a sigh. Then said, “Malini.”
“Yes.”
“Would you allow me to remain with him if I asked?”
She could hear the vulnerability in his voice—like a fracture in glass. She kept her eyes off him, offered him that small mercy as she said, “I have named you a general of my army. If you want Alor to have a voice in the battle ahead…”
“One of my own brothers, perhaps,” he said quietly, as if he knew there was no point in suggesting it, but had to try regardless. “If I send a missive to Alor. To my father, one of them will perhaps come.”
“There’s no time.”As you well know, she thought. “And I need your men. I need you.”
“Then I won’t ask,” Rao said.
Silence fell between them, and Malini couldn’t stop herself from turning away from him—from pacing, her whole body alive with a panicked, jittery feeling that she couldn’t contain. So he didn’t want to stay with her, help her—what did it matter?
“Malini,” he said, finally.
“Don’t,” she said in return. “Mahesh will be trustworthy support for Aditya.”As he was not for me.“He will be someone Aditya can rely on. Take peace in that.”
“I will,” he said. “As I take peace in knowing you’ll see this war won before he is harmed.”
Strange, she thought, how compliments from his lips so often sounded like despair. As if he looked at her every success—every battle won, every highborn enemy circumvented, and feltfear. Sometimes—often—she wanted to pry that fear apart and see its working. She wanted to ask him:You, who named me and gave me the opportunity to seize my crown. What do you fear? Is it me and my choices? Is it what will become of me? Or what will become of men like you?
“I’m going to see Aditya,” she said, instead. “Is he well?”
“We sparred. It was…” He stopped and shook his head minutely. “He’s well.” There was something in his voice. Something that was not for her.
He gave her a look, and she smiled at him. She knew him. It was worth reminding him, now and again, just how well she understood him.
