He tried to claw his way up from the floor. But all he could do was grasp the hem of her sari. His hands were slick with sweat. His heart would not stop pounding faster and faster, and he could not breathe around the thrum of his own blood.
Malini made a humming noise, thoughtful. She leaned down.
“Tell me,” Malini said, placing her hand over his own. He could not feel her fingers. His skin was tingling, growing leaden. “Does it hurt?”
He opened his mouth. Nothing but a rasp left it. He felt something dribble from his lips.
She nodded as if he had spoken.
His sight was beginning to go gray. He could not breathe. And the twisting nausea in his stomach was growing, gouging him from the inside out. He was being clawed open. Eviscerated.
The ground beneath him was ash, and what lived in the ash was eating through him, heat and cold and bitter, scrabbling finger bones.
Surrounding him were faceless brides, their blood-red saris brushing his writhing body. Flames leapt from their clothes to his skin as they laughed and hissed his name, watching him from beneath crowns of molten kindling and starlight.
He was burning and burning, his skin peeling from the inside, fire blistering his soft flesh, his organs. He could not run from it. The fire was him, and he was the fire, and in the void that yawned before him there was only more fire still.
Yes, it hurt. Ithurt, and he would have paid any price to end it. Anything at all.
“Good,” Malini said, from a long distance. Her voice was an echo. “I’m glad.”
MALINI
She waited until she was sure he would not survive. His grip on her had fallen lax. He lay facedown in his own bile and sickness, his breathing no more than a wheeze, wet with his own blood.
She stared at the opposite wall, stained with a little wine. She felt curiously empty, hollow and light as air. The feeling would come for her later, she knew. Like the tide ever returned to the shore.
She stood and left the room.
There were guards at the end of a corridor. She’d commanded them to keep their distance so that she could speak to Chandra privately.
“He’s resting,” she said, now. “See that he isn’t disturbed.”
“Empress,” the soldier acknowledged, bowing.
She walked away.
She went to the women’s quarters of the mahal. Lata was waiting for her, expression tense and intent.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Lata said, which was as close to asking Malini where she had been as Lata would allow herself in the presence of strangers. Malini had no interest in answering that unsaid question.
“Chandra’s wife,” she said, instead. “Do you have her?”
“It was lucky,” Lata said, without inflection, “that Queen Varsha’s maids brought her directly to me. If she had been found by the wrong soldiers…”
“Show me to her,” said Malini.
Queen Varsha. The High Prince’s daughter—a thin, big-eyed thing with wild clouds of hair, oiled back into a curling braid—was huddled at the edge of a room with the two women who clearly served her. They were all weeping. She looked up, and when she saw Malini, she flinched.
Malini felt suddenly nauseated. She removed her saber and laid it aside. Entered the room.
“Please!” Varsha fell to her knees, dragging the two women down with her. She was crying. Great big miserable tears streamed down her face. “I’ve done no wrong, Empress. I’m a loyal daughter. I obeyed my father and wed as I was bid. Is that a crime?”
“Do you think I will harm you?” Malini asked.
This caused another bout of weeping. “Please do not,” Varsha begged. “Please spare me.”
“I have done you a great kindness,” said Malini. “I doubt my brother was a worthy or useful husband.”
