“This is no temple to the nameless, but the nameless speaks everywhere,” said Mitul. “You have named and crowned your empress. You have followed her through months of endless war. And now she finally turns her face to Harsinghar and the throne. It is the nameless god’s voice—and the mothers alongside it—who tell me it must be you. And you know it too, Prince Rao. You hear it in your heart.” He held the box forward again once more. “You know what must be done.”
Rao stared at him.
“Does the nameless not speak in your heart?” The priest’s voice was kind. “Does the nameless not show you the way?”
Rao knew what his heart said. But he couldn’t do what it urged him to do.
He had a duty here, on the path that lay before him, in the battle that awaited Malini at Harsinghar. If there was a voice in his heart, always tugging him away, turning his footsteps back, back, back, then he had no right to listen to it. No right to follow it.
But he held out his own hands and took the box of stone, and the yaksa’s severed limb with it. It fit into his waiting hands like it belonged there.
He stepped out into the central gardens of the temple. They were no monastery gardens of the nameless, no gleaming grasses and fruit-heavy trees, no water-laden plinths for seeking visions. There were flowers, and only flowers: gently flowering jasmine blossoms, vibrant pink roses, and sunbursts of yellow oleander, lovely and poisonous. And across from him stood Malini.
Malini was standing under the cover of the temple’s columns, in soft shadow. Whatever the priest had said to her had left no mark—she looked as calm as ever, the wind catching the pale folds of her sari, a few stray flower petals from the shrine caught in her hair. She was looking down at him, and as she stared and he stared back, a slight frown creased her brow.
He wondered what she could see in his face.
“I did not expect to find you here,” she said. She swept forward, unhurried. The frown had settled, fixing in place. “Did you come in search of me?”
“Malini,” he said. “I. No.”
She said nothing. She looked at him and looked at him, with those dark eyes that were a mirror of Aditya’s and Chandra’s.
“I am going to Aditya,” he said. The words wrenched their way out of him. “I must…” He tightened his hands against the box. He could not lie to her. He owed her this: the truth. The reason for his fractured loyalty. “The priest told me the yaksa are returning. He gave me…” He could not explain, so he simply opened the box, and she peered in. Her face went very still.
“A limb of wood,” she murmured.
“A message,” he said. “Proof that Aditya’s visions are true. And proof to me, that I should follow my instincts. What the nameless has been telling me in my heart.” He let out a shaky breath. “Malini,” he said. “I. I have to go back to Aditya. I have to go back to Saketa.”
“You are my Aloran general,” Malini said. “If you are not here, who will lead your men?”
“My commanders are wise and able,” Rao said. She would not part with his soldiers, then. He was not surprised by that. “I trust them to you. My father would support me in this.”
“Would he,” Malini said noncommittally. She looked at him, measuring him up. There was a new coolness in her tone when she said, “A priest spoke to me of yaksa too. Rao. Tell me truly. You believe danger is coming for us? A danger greater than even Chandra presents?”
“I do,” he said.
“And you think the answer lies with Aditya? Not with me?” A strange urgency to her tone.
“I think there is something Aditya must do,” he said. “I think he has a purpose. And if the crown is your purpose, then his is something else altogether. And I… I must help him find it.”
“Ah, Rao,” she murmured, bitterness and fondness twining together in her voice. “Always the helper.”
“If that is my role in life, it isn’t such a bad one,” he said. “I only ask—Empress—that you give me permission to fulfill it.”
“If I deny you, won’t you simply slip away in the night?” Her mouth curled—not quite a smile. It was too knowing for that.
“I don’t believe I would,” he said, after a brief hesitation. She caught it. Of course she did.
“Then you don’t really know yourself,” she said. “You followed your name across the empire. You sought me out for its sake. And now you’ve been handed a new purpose…? You’ll follow it pitilessly, no matter what demands I place on you. So I shall not place any.”
He could say nothing. It was true—the kind of true that struck him through swift and brutal as an arrow.
“You may only take the bare minimum of men you need to reach Saketa safely,” Malini said, after a moment.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “You must do what you have been guided to by higher forces. And so, apparently, must I.”
