I never forget my debt to you.
Her men huddled in tents and drank wine and played games of chance by lamplight. And her women gathered with her and played their own games. One of the women from Dwarali—Sahar, a broad-shouldered archer with a particularly filthy sense of humor—suggested the singing game, a mischievous light in her eyes. “One bawdy song begins, then the next starts on the syllable that the last ends with, and so on, until there are no more songs, or the players are too drunk to remember them,” she said, and cracked a grin at Malini’s expression. “Empress, what good is a game if it doesn’t allow its player to speak a little filth?”
“I like strategy games,” Deepa offered faintly, looking mildly horrified. Raziya poured her a particularly large glass of liquor and slid it over sympathetically.
“I promise you, all the young lords and soldiers will be playing the same game in their own tents,” Raziya said, sharing a brief, amused look with Sahar. “And their songs are much less refined than ours shall be.”
“As long as I am not required to join in with them, they can do as they like,” Malini said dryly.
“But you will play with us, hm?” Raziya said, raising an eyebrow.
Malini could not bring herself to refuse.
It was difficult to remember songs over wine—and more difficult still to find common ground between the songs from Dwarali and the bawdy songs from Parijat. Lata turned out to be the best of them. When Malini woke in the morning, she found herself laughing, at odd moments, at the memory of Lata passionately reciting a full range of rude verses about mothers-in-law from across the empire.
In the daylight hours, as the rains crept on, Malini tried to soothe her aching head and focus on writing letters that brought her very little joy but were nonetheless necessary to achieving her goals.
Experience had taught her that the most successful battles were the ones won by words. Phrases, carefully chosen, could be like a knife: threatening, promising, wounding. She had learned from Lord Narayan, one of the loyal Saketan nobility who had accompanied her from Srugna, that the rot had spread through Saketa. “The rot,” he’d said carefully, “is not simply an Ahiranyi problem, as it was once was. The High Prince is a man driven by fear, Empress. Fear of the loss of his throne. Fear his people will starve. But his fears are… not unfounded.”
So she set the blade of her words carefully to the High Prince’s weaknesses. She wrote to him with the offer of crops from Alor and Srugna to feed his people. The restoration of the loyalty of the low princes who had abandoned him to serve her. New trade with Dwarali. Food and prosperity and a future.
I cannot betray the rightful emperor, his scribe had written in return.The only hope Saketa and my people have lies upon a righteous path. A path carved long ago, for all of us, by the mothers. I will not stray from it.
Weeks passed, as her messengers traveled to and fro from the High Prince’s fort in pouring rain; as her pile of unsent letters to Priya grew, the language blooming wilder and stranger with honesty.I miss you, she wrote to Priya, and to herself.But not as you miss me, I think. I miss you because I let myself care for you. For a brief time, I let you into my heart. And I find now that I am empress, now that the world lies at my feet, my heart is a closed door. I am meant to be someone beyond mortal feeling—someone shaped by fire and prophecy into more than flesh and bone and want.
What I was with you, I can never be again.
To the High Prince she replied,I am the mother’s chosen, prophesized by the nameless god. Following me is a choice blessed by the mothers and the nameless god alike.
Trust me, and all will be well.
On the day the rains cleared, Malini finally received the response she had been waiting for:
He would surrender to her. He would return land to the low princes who had turned on him.
He would trust in the will of the mothers, and in her.
More often than not Malini woke up exhausted, dreams tangled in her skull, Narina’s and Alori’s voices fading in her ears like distant storm winds. But today she opened her eyes long before the dawn chorus of birdsong to the unfamiliar feeling of hope blooming open in her chest.
Today—if she was lucky, and clever, and all her politicking worked as she had intended—she would take Saketa from her brother’s grasp. His last ally would finally yield into her hands.
Malini met the day by bathing from a cold bucket bath. She kneeled to have her hair oiled and combed and plaited to the now familiar sounds of her army awakening: the clatter of pots. The grumbling, low voices of men. The crackle and spit of vats over fires, as the camp cooks prepared the morning meal. As her maid Swati knotted ivory flowers into a crown at her head, as she tucked the pleats of her own sari to knife sharpness, she waited for the familiar rhythmic thump of dozens of booted feet against the hard soil. When she finally heard the soldiers on night duty pass her tent on their final patrol, she released a slow breath and said to her maid, “Prepare the tea and bring the map, Swati.”
The women began to arrive, the guard beyond Malini’s tent announcing them as they entered: Raziya and her attendant women; then Deepa, with apologies from Lata. “She’ll be here soon, Empress,” she said. “She was working late into the night—preparing for your meeting with the High Prince. I—I saw her with the Prince from Alor earlier—”
“Thank you, Lady Deepa,” Malini said, before the girl could continue.
There was a large table installed in her tent—large enough for the map of Parijatdvipa to be unrolled in its entirety. The map was made of a thick cloth, the borders of each city-state and the farmland and villages that surrounded them embroidered in weighty darts of thick silk. It was an old piece of work, one gifted to Malini by the Sultan of Dwarali himself. The maze fort of Saketa—the High Prince’s ancient home—was drawn in swirls like a multi-petaled flower, its thorns held within its bloom. Malini considered it, and considered too how close her goal now was.
Once she had the High Prince’s surrender, she would be able to turn her army toward Parijat with no risk of an enemy army at her back. The Saketan low princes and lords who had chosen to serve her would have their loyalty rewarded with new wealth, and with the lands they had lost to the High Prince when they had refused to accept Chandra as their emperor. Her army would have a taste of victory, and Saketan gold, and the promise of a clear and shining path toward Chandra and his army—and the throne.
Once the High Prince was dealt with, she could finally destroy her brother.
The tent curtain rustled once more.
“My lady,” one of her guards said, a crescent of his helmed face visible through the gap between curtain and tent. “Prince Rao and your sage are here.”
“Let them in,” Malini said.
