Lady Bhumika?she thought.Priya?She had hoped. Hoped—
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
The man looked too awestruck to talk, so Rao said, gently and firmly, “Tell the empress.”
Priests, he told her, ruled now in Ahiranya. No, not priests—temple elders, like the days of old. Or people who claimed to be temple elders. Two women were among them. “Some say the High Elder was once the regent’s wife,” the rider said.
“Who told you so?” Rao asked.
“People talk,” he replied. “Merchants and—people in the city. People on the road.”
“You did not see them directly?”
“No.” He hesitated. “But…”
“Go on,” said Rao.
Everyone knew, he said, that the temple elders were truly what they claimed to be, because since their rise to power the forest around Ahiranya had grown stranger than it ever had been. He’d heard tales of trees turning and twisting as if they were alive,watchingpeople pass them by. Emperor Chandra had apparently sent a small group of scouts, then another, to test Ahiranya’s borders. A fruitseller, who regularly traveled in and out of Ahiranya, had found a dozen imperial soldiers dead, speared on thorns as thick as a man’s arm. The rest were simply never found.
The rider himself had never seen any violence. Only Ahiranyi living their lives as they normally did. The merchants he’d seen—a reluctant handful at most, who went out of desperation and necessity rather than desire—had traveled through Ahiranya unharmed. And the rider had gone unharmed himself, of course. But he had seen new soldiers on the streets—not the regent’s men in Parijati white and gold, but groups of men and women in plain, mismatched armor, carrying sickles and bows instead of traditional Parijati sabers.
Malini could feel Rao watching her. He knew something of her relationship to Ahiranya, if not everything. No one, not even Rao, was owed everything. But he knew she had been saved by the Ahiranyi; knew she had a bond with them.
“Thank you,” she said to the rider. “Go with Yogesh, and you’ll be rewarded.”
Coin, and a warm bed to sleep in and food; and she would make sure he was watched, to see if his information was handed to anyone else.
When she returned to her tent, she called Lata to her side. “I’ll need you to scribe for me,” she said.
As Lata sought out ink and paper and lit a candle, Malini began to search for the right words; the politically expedient words—something to affirm her support for Ahiranya, something that would tell Lady Bhumika and Priya, and anyone they had allied with, that she had not forgotten what she had promised them, once she had her throne.
The best emphasis she could give her words, of course, was action. Once this letter was done, she would send others to her allies in Srugna and the estates that bordered Ahiranya, encouraging them to maintain strong trade ties with the new temple elders. The forest might have grown strange—stranger even than when she had known it—but the rider had made no suggestion that it was dangerous to anyone but Chandra’s men. Surely, then, the forest and all its strength lay in Lady Bhumika’s control, and Priya’s. And Priya, at least, she trusted. She could not entirely help herself.
She wanted to tell Priya that she had not forgotten her.
But forgetting or not forgetting Priya was not a political concern. It was a thing of her heart: the husk of a flower she wore on a chain around the throat. It was the memory, preserved green and shining in her mind, of the two of them lying by a waterfall, gazing at one another, water glinting on Priya’s dark hair, her smiling mouth.
She should have banished the thought. But she did not. Instead, she decided she would ask Rao for his rider again. She would send a discreet message.
One for the elders of Ahiranya. And one… not.
She told Lata what to write, and Lata did so. This letter, exquisitely formal and written in Lata’s careful, elegant script, would pass under the eyes of a military administrator, and the lords who served her.
But the letter for Priya would not. And she wanted to write it with her own hand.
“I can write this message for you too, my lady,” Lata said, when Malini took up ink and paper.
“This one will not be seen by the lords tomorrow,” Malini said.
Lata was silent, but her silence was pointed. It made Malini laugh faintly. She raised her head.
“I know there are no true secrets,” she said. “But there will be nothing to trouble them in this, should it fall into their hands. And even an empress may send a kindly letter now and again, to an old ally.”
If anything, Lata’s face grew graver. She had spent a great deal of time with Malini on this journey. She knew more of Malini’s heart than anyone, though Malini had not spoken of it.
“There is a saying, among the craftsmen and women of Parijat who turn bronze and gold and stone into effigies of the mothers,” Lata said. “They say, when a statue is first wrought, it shines so brightly, any man may look upon it and see a mother divine. But all things tarnish, when the rain falls upon them.”
“Poetic,” Malini murmured.
