“True faith demands risk,” Mitul replied.
She stood for a moment, still and silent. The men behind her were equally silent—unwilling, it seemed, to argue with a priest of the mothers.
“A maid or a guard,” Malini said, after a moment. The priest shook his head.
“Faith,” he repeated again. “Just as Divyanshi acted with faith, so must you, Empress.”
Faith that demanded mindless acts, acts with no grounding in logic, in what could be risked and what could be gained—ah, she hated to be asked this, just as she’d hated releasing the priest at Saketa, when he had more than deserved a slow death.
But what use would it be to turn away, and not see what was being offered to her?
She turned.
“I will return within an hour,” Malini said.
Lata inclined her head. Her jaw was set, her eyes watchful. Deepa looked worried but said nothing, and Raziya was frowning.
Priya’s eyes were strangely distant.
“There are flowers in the temple,” Priya said, in a voice quiet enough that Mitul would surely not hear it.
There were weapons, then, within the temple. There was comfort in that thought, even though Malini knew well enough that there was little anyone could do for her—not even Priya—if someone simply decided to slit her throat.
Malini ascended the steps alone, and followed the priest inside.
There was another priest waiting for her.
He waited in a room that had the look of every private prayer room Malini had seen in her life. Plain walls. One latticed window that allowed a fracture of light in. There were statues of the mothers arranged on an altar, their bodies half a man’s height and wrought in silver, garlands of pale flowers at their feet. The room itself was lit by warm candlelight and perfumed by incense that was strangely fresh rather than cloying. Its scent reminded her of the wind that had reached her from the ocean, sharp with salt yet faintly sweet. And the priest himself, when he turned to look at her, was just as unremarkable as his surroundings.
He was of average height, with a mark of ash on his forehead and no ink limned onto his arms or hands, which were bare, his shawl draped only loosely at his shoulders, in deference to the heat. His hair was tied back from his face, each braid bound with thread to keep it at bay, leaving his features exposed. His face was unlined—he was, perhaps, only a few years older than her. He bowed as she approached, then rose in one fluid motion from the floor cushions where he had been seated, by all appearances meditating.
“Are you the one called the faceless son?” Malini asked.
He inclined his head.Yes.
“What is your name?” Malini asked.
“Kartik,” he said. “You do not remember me.”
“Should I?” Malini asked.
“You were a girl when I met you,” he replied. His voice was deep, and inflected with an accent she did not quite recognize. Saketan, perhaps. “Many, many years ago. You came with your brother to the imperial temple. You laid flowers at the feet of the mothers and whispered to them. Made promises to them. I was only a boy then, training in faith, and swept the floors when you departed.”
She could not recall the moment he spoke of, but it seemed… possible. Likely, even. She had gone to the imperial temple alone, from time to time, as a girl. For all that she’d had little room in her heart for faith, she had found the temple itself comforting—its silence, its relative privacy, compared with the noise and bustle of the mahal, where there were always courtiers and warriors and other highborn streaming through the corridors.
How long had he held this memory close, preserved perfectly in his mind’s eye? Did he know what this one tale—this one brief insight into his past—revealed about him and his desires to her, all in one fell swoop?
I know you, his words had said.I remember you. You matter to me.
I want to matter to you, too.
“You are a royal priest, then,” she said, mildly. Had he been one of the men who had prepared her pyre and prayed over her, and waited to see if she would choose to burn? The day she should have died was crystal clear in her memories, in some ways, and blurred in others. “And yet—the faceless son?”
“Names have power,” he said. “Your Aloran prince could tell you so. You would not have come on the bidding of Kartik, who serves the High Priest loyally, but is not the High Priest. Kartik is not your brother’s closest confidant and the power behind the throne. But for the faceless son, who has power in the temples that lie at the farthest reaches of the empire, who holds power among the priests who do not rise under Chandra’s rule, who has men who will die for him—for him, you have come.”
“I did indeed,” Malini agreed. She let warmth touch her voice; let it draw him, as light draws moths. “And I am glad to be here. You cannot know how glad. I thought the priesthood stood entirely against me. I witnessed priestly warriors turn upon me, at Saketa’s maze fort—priests who used the fire born of dead women to win my brother’s battles for him. And it pained me. Because I am a scion of Divyanshi. Because I know the mothers set me upon this path. And the very priests of the mothers themselves, it seemed, could not see it. Seeme.
“And then I was saved,” she went on, quiet weight in her words. “Saved by a priest dressed as a soldier, who worshipped not as your brethren do in Parijat itself, but as Saketans do. With no less faith, but with different effigies. With marks on their skin. And I placed my trust in his Saketan fellows—who saw me, it seemed, as I knew I should be seen: as a devoted worshipper of the mothers. As someone who wanted to save Parijatdvipa. They asked me to obey, and I obeyed. And for my piety, I was sent here, to you.” She stepped closer to him. His gaze was steady and piercing, as all priests’ eyes were, but that did not mean she had failed to understand him and his wants. “It can be no secret, why I’m here. I want the support of the priests of the mothers when I take my throne. I cannot rule Parijatdvipa without you. Nor do I wish to.”
