But the water—she could not hold every mote of it steady forever. So she did the only thing she could. She let it go, and sent it where it would do the most good to her.
She saw everything in pieces:
The men on the opposite bank collapsing, snared by the ground around them.
The water roiling toward them, faster and faster, all of its weight driven by nature and by her unnatural hand.
The water hitting the bank with a roar, a beast swallowing them whole as wind whipped her hair and her magic howled through her, fiery thorns in her blood, her bones.
She heard. Screams.
The yaksa’s voice, a croon that rose in her skull like a song, drawing them out:
Good, sapling. Good. Just so.
Good, Priya thought nonsensically in turn.Good. It’s done.
And then she let her eyes close, and her body fell once more.
MALINI
Across the ford, in a gleaming expanse of sunlight, stood Chandra’s army.
“They have more men than we thought,” Prakash said in a grim voice. In the chariot beside her own, he stared out at the army with a set, determined look on his face. “This must surely be the bulk of Chandra’s forces. But…”
“He isn’t there,” Malini said, answering Prakash’s unasked question. “I can see no sign of his chariot. His banner.”
“He may not wish to be conspicuous,” suggested Prakash.
“Oh no. My brother always wishes to be noticed. If he were here, we would know. Clearly, he refuses to face me in open battle.” She felt the derision in her own voice like venom. “How little he thinks of his own kin, and the men who stand against him.”
She watched the movement of distant flags on their staffs, white and gold just like her own. Imperial versus imperial. But where her army was made up of Parijati and Srugani and Dwarali, dressed conspicuously in their own colors with their own weaponry to hand, Chandra’s forces were Parijati through and through.
Why had he sent so many men? Did he truly have a large enough army to hold Harsinghar without them?
It wouldn’t matter, of course, if these men defeated Malini’s right here, at the Veri, where their superior numbers would decimate her own.
“We hold here,” she said. “We offer to negotiate.” The longer they bided their time, the longer it would be before they would have to fight, and the longer Rao and the Saketan forces would have to cross the river and attack Chandra’s forces from behind. She would lose plenty of men—she was aware that her strategy made that an inevitability—but keeping the count of her own dead as low as possible was a worthy endeavor.
“Of course,” said Prakash. He opened his mouth to speak further.
A sudden cry cut through the air. And then another. Next to her, Raziya leaned forward, eyes narrowing, “Empress.” Raziya said it sharply. She raised one hand, pointing. “Look.”
Malini tightened her hands on the edge of the war chariot’s walls and turned her head.
The Veri was a curving river, but so flat that it was like a silver scar across the landscape. The curve of the river, where Priya and the others were crossing, was half-hidden by the dips and swells of the landscape—well suited for the ambush that they hoped to carry out. But Malini still saw what came next. It was impossible to miss: Farther along the Veri—in the direction Rao and Ashutosh’s forces had traveled at the fire light of dawn—streaming black shadows were falling in an arc across the water. They could have been birds: They moved gracefully enough.
But they were not birds. They were arrows, a huge swathe of them, released by archers in Chandra’s service.
Rao, thought Malini, numbly.Priya.
Oh, how much of a fool she’d been to allow two of the people most precious to her to fight without her, so she could not even witness their deaths. Had they entered the water? Were they crossing, or being warned back? More arrows fell and she clenched her hands so tightly that she could feel the bite of the chariot’s edge into her palms, the sweat rising up on her skin. She’d been such a fool.
There were cries of jubilation from across the water, and the sound of weapons being readied, armor jangling, elephants lowing as their reins were pulled to draw them forward. There would be no negotiation. Chandra’s forces had known what Malini’s gambit would be—or guessed it a possibility—and they had prepared for it.
They needed only to face her now on the ford—no enemy at their back, and a depleted enemy before them—and their numbers would eventually overwhelm her own.
More arrows fell.
