“I’m sorry.”
“No.” She did not want to accept. Did not want to contemplate it. Ah, by the mothers, did she really have room for more grief in her?“No.”
Rao’s eyes were red, his voice scratchy. She had never seen his face like this before. Haggard beyond his years, and full of a grief so palpable it made her whole body want to recoil, to curl in on itself as if it could ward off the pain of that look, the pain that was seeping through her own blood and bone.
“It was—fire.” He stumbled. “In battle. He made. Mothers’ fire. True fire. He chose it.”
He was still speaking to her, but she could not hear it. Noise. Nothing but noise. She turned her face away.
“The priest,” she said thinly.
“The priesthood will want to speak with you eventually,” he said. “They’re demanding war with Ahiranya.”
Of course they were. Malini did not think it would be difficult to give them what they wanted. Ahiranya, it seemed, wanted war with them too.
“Leave me, please,” she said. He was silent for a moment. “Please, Rao,” she said.
She would be herself tomorrow. She would don all her lies and armor tomorrow.
He touched his fingertips against her own. The lightest, kindest touch. And then he departed.
Her chest was bandaged. It hurt to move. And still, she pressed her hands to her eyes, her mouth, and wept.
She had never cried like this, guttural, full-throated sobs with nothing sweet or soft about them, nothing that would engender pity. She was howling like a beast. She wanted to rip apart the room. Rip apart her skin. The empire was hers, Parijatdvipa was hers, a pearl in her hand. She was empress of Parijatdvipa. And it was not enough. It would never be enough.
She’d wash her heart clean with grief. Wear it down to stone. And then tomorrow, and ever after—
A true war awaited her. She intended to meet it.
RAO
The men who had been in the fortress with him—the men who had watched Aditya die—were already spinning tales.
They told everyone that they had won the fortress because of Aditya’s sacrifice. The fire howled its way through the halls, the men said. It burned the High Prince and all his men and all those loyal to him to death in agony, cleansing the maze fort, leaving nothing but Prince Aditya’s loyal followers behind.
Rao had no choice but to believe them. He couldn’t remember any of it. Only hands on his arms, guiding him along. Only salt on his own face, as he wept. Only silence, in the aftermath, where his heart had once been.
Prince Aditya was called by the mothers, the men claimed. The flames reached for him with the mothers’ own hands—firm, loving, implacable. There had been no pain for Prince Aditya. The mothers had raised him up, as no man had ever been raised.
He had named his sister empress. Just as Rao had named her empress. Prince Aditya had died for her, just as a priest in Harsinghar had died for her, protecting her from the vile yaksa that had returned—perhaps they had even died in the very same moment, two holy deaths shielding Empress Malini from harm.
None of it was a lie. None of it was true, either.
Rao had been carried partway back to Harsinghar. Slumped in a chariot, no good to anyone. The severed yaksa arm rattling in its case beside him, a constant reminder of what he’d lost.
And then, somehow, he’d found the strength to sit up. The strength to drink himself into a stupor. The strength, then, to ride on his own horse, head pounding, his body riven with misery.
A day later, he’d learned from Mahesh how—and when—Chandra had died. Once Rao understood that Malini had seized her throne before he and Aditya had sieged the maze fort, before Aditya had turned the flames on himself, sure of his own destiny, his inevitable fate…
Well, Rao drank a great deal more after that. The journey was a blank space for him—a void where grief lived, and nothing else.
He did not even dream anymore.
Alori. Prem. Aditya.
He thought of Prem grinning at him over a bottle of wine. The shawl knotted at his throat.Remember when were boys? Remember the games we played?
Aditya, staring at him with peaceful eyes. Ready to leave him behind.
