Malini smiled.
Later—much later—she sat with no company but Lata, and thought of how else she might protect herself from men who had stopped seeing her as a living god.
“When this began,” she said quietly, watching Lata raise her head, attentive. “I believed I would have the empire in my grasp by now.”
Or that I would be dead.
Sometimes she thought she would spend the rest of her life like this, on broken roads surrounded by armed men, always negotiating webs of politics and power with allies who bowed and bristled and measured her worth to them as she measured theirs in turn. She would always be one step away from success or from ruin. She would never see Chandra dead.
Could something be achieved by sheer force of want alone?
Lata sat on the ground, cross-legged, back straight. She sat in the pose of a sage at debate, ready to help Malini unravel the thorny knot blooming in her own skull.
Malini calculated a new path forward.
“Bring me Yogesh,” she said, lighting the oil wick lantern by her papers, collecting her writing instruments close; ink, a thick sheaf of paper. “Try not to draw any attention to yourself, Lata.”
Lata nodded and left without another word.
Malini thought of the power of a tale—the way it could splinter into shards and cut the throat of its own maker. The tale of a crown prince turned priest, a firstborn son, still held more sway than the myth she’d wound around herself from prophecy and fire and her own sheer ambition.
She needed a weapon no one else had. She needed—she wanted—someone she could trust. Someone who had loved her even after a knife to the throat; who had held Malini’s face in her own two hands, warm and alive, and said,I know you. I know this face, and it is mine.
She had dreamt of writing to Priya again so many times. Shehadwritten to Priya so many times.
I am always thinking of you. I think of you in battle. I think of you in the dark of night. When my mind is silent or full, you wait there for me.
It galls me that I want you as much as this. That my heart so thoroughly belongs to you. The power you have over me, Priya. Why does it refuse to fade?
I think of the way the earth would yield to your hands, flowering for you. I think of what you could do for me, if I put you to use. And Ishouldput you to use. Somewhere, you must wonder why I haven’t.
I think of how you could have made a weapon of anything.
Do you think of me, in the quiet? I wonder—
No more. She could not think of it any longer.
She wrote a different letter. Not for Priya, or at least, not for Priya alone. She wrote as empress, with all the weight of her status behind her words, and none of her heart.
She hoped Priya would understand anyway. She hoped Priya would come. For the sake of the alliance between the empire and Ahiranya. And for the sake of what still lay between them, or at least lay inside Malini, turning forever to the memory of Priya like a thing of the earth seeking light.
RAO
Rao had arrived at the war council late, and had been greeted by chaos—shouting, yelling, Lord Mahesh leading and claiming the empress was too overwrought to attend. Rao should have spoken for Malini—had wanted to. But he had met Lord Khalil’s eyes; seen the lift of an eloquent eyebrow and the faintest shake of a head. And Rao had kept his calm and his silence, even as his frustration grew.
Malini had to have a plan. Malini always had plans.
He had kept his calm as he saw to his men and made an accounting of the injured and the dead. Hadcontinuedto be calm when one of his own Aloran military officials begged to speak to him, and told him that Yogesh had been ordered to carry a message for the empress, and was already gone.
And yet here he was, in Malini’s tent, trying desperately to keep a level head in the face of her quiet amusement. As if his worryentertainedher.
Maybe it did.
“You sent a message to Ahiranya,” Rao pressed on. “An imperial missive, placed in a military official’s hand.”
“You’ve found spies of your own, Rao,” she murmured. “That’s good.”
“My men are just loyal,” he said. “What did you say? What orders did you send?”
