He cleared his throat. “I’ll leave you to it,” he said. “I think it won’t be long before we’re ready to move.”
After Rao’s departure, Malini summoned a guard.
“Is the fort still silent?”
“Yes, Empress.”
“Good,” she said. “Take me to Prince Aditya.”
Aditya’s usually sparse tent was full, for once, of the kind of chaos Malini had grown used to in her own space: maps of Saketa and detailed sketches of the flowering maze of Saketa’s fortress. Military officials, imparting information at rapid speed—the intended formations of troops, the supplies that would remain here or travel with Malini’s larger force of men. She was surprised Mahesh was not here already, bowing and kissing at Aditya’s feet.
An unkind thought. She allowed herself the joy of it.
“Brother,” Malini said. The room fell silent.
She looked at the watching officials. “Leave us,” she said, and they departed swiftly—paper, ink, ledgers all left in their wake. In the midst of it all, Aditya looked at her with an air of utter calm. Aditya was in mussed robes, sweat-stained. He wore his blade at his side.
He looked so much like his old self—like the crown prince brother she had grown up with—that it made her heart ache with affection. And that angered her in a way she could not make sense of.
“I have a gift for you,” she said.
She had stopped at her own tent to collect it—had ignored Lata’s questions, and Swati’s timid offers of tea or sherbet—and picked up the onyx box, and carried it with her. It was heavy in her hands. Aditya took it from her, a faint frown on his brow. Opened it.
“Ash,” he said cautiously.
“This contained so-called mothers’ fire,” said Malini. “You saw what I told the men. It was the truth. But this…” She pushed the box forward. “This is my assurance to you that it truly wasn’t the fire of the mothers. That it is not impossible to defeat.”
Aditya nodded. Passive, waiting for her to speak.
“I am going to defeat Chandra,” Malini said. “I will move on Parijat as swiftly as I can. I have great strength behind me, and the mothers, and the nameless also. I will defeat him. You need only survive until then, and then the full might of the Parijatdvipan empire will support you.”
“I’ve already elected to stay,” he said, laying the box over his knees. “I am not afraid of death.”
“You should be,” Malini said swiftly. “A man who fears death fights to survive. And the longer you fight, the better for all of us, so if you will not survive for yourself, survive for all of us. For me.”
“I will fight with all that I have,” Aditya replied.
“You have been told what our forces can spare here,” said Malini. “But if there is anything you need…”
“No.” Aditya shook his head. “Sister, I’ll do well enough.”
“Well enough,” she repeated. “This is battle.”
“I know,” he said. “I was trained for battle.”
“Then you must do more thanwell enough. You must do everything. Did you spar with Rao? Was that enough to win his confidence? It is not enough for me, Aditya. Now I know war, I beg you to remember your old self, and go to battle as him. Not as the priest who could not bring himself to light an arrow.”
“You’re angry I’m not as I once was,” Aditya observed.
“I’m not angry with you.”
“You are,” he said. “You can barely bring yourself to visit me. And when you do, sister, you look through me—seeking the man I no longer am. You are not alone in that. You are not the only one who misses him.” Did he mean that he missed himself? Or that Rao did? She did not ask.
“But you should not be angry,” he went on, keeping his eyes steady on her own. “Because if I became that man again—that rightful heir to the throne of our empire—you would lose everything you have gained. Your army. Your waiting crown. For all your strength and ambition and will, you know as I do, how easily men are swayed by what they think they know.”
Malini said nothing.
“Will you ask me to give up this task?” Aditya said, into the silence. “To travel with you and fight like a prince of Parijatdvipa at your side, knowing all the risk it brings to you?”
