“I don’t want to discuss politics,” said Malini swiftly.
Rao’s expression was only faintly frustrated.
“You’ll rarely have the opportunity to do so, with me, with your brother, without watchers,” he pointed out.
“You’re going to tell me I have Alor’s support,” she said. “I know that. You’ll tell me Srugna chafes at the cost of war—the supplies they send us, the unglamorous drudgery of it—but they will stand by me because the nameless and the mothers have both chosen me, and I’m better than Chandra. And you’re going to tell me that I need to do something about Mahesh.” She took another sip of wine. Heady. “I’ve been told as much before. Find me a Parijati lord who can take his place, and I’ll gladly remove him.”
“I was going to talk about a lot of things, wasn’t I?” Rao said mildly.
“I’m not wrong,” Malini told him. “You would have said it all eventually. But I don’t wish for that. Right now, I would simply like a moment of peace.”
“I am not sure this is as peaceful as you hoped,” Aditya murmured.
No. But it was a peaceful place for Rao. And mothers knew she needed Rao to remain strong. Right now he looked fragile, as if the war had leached something from him. For all the strength of his body, the new sun-darkened deep brown of his face, his arms leanly muscled beneath their bracelets of chakrams, he was… reduced. Pared down by the ceaseless drumbeat of battle.
“We’ve spoken of what we need to,” she said to Aditya.
“Then we should drink and do something to pass the time,” Rao said. “We could play a game of five stones, if you like.”
Malini laughed. She couldn’t help it.
“The children’s game?” She and Alori and Narina had played it time and again as girls, throwing colored stones in batches of twos, threes, fours, fives, up in the air and catching them with the same hand. Malini had always been awful at it.
“I even have painted pebbles for it,” he confided.
“Fine,” she said, holding out her hand. From the corner of her eye she saw Aditya smile too, shaking his head.
She lost, of course. Soundly. But at the end of it, she felt a little more relaxed. A little more herself. A little more human.
The bodies were, by tradition, kept distant from the main camp. Bodies were polluting: a source of sickness and stench. But there were always priests attending to the corpses, preparing them for the pyre, blessing them with prayers and ointment and garlands of funerary flowers.
In the very first weeks of battle—when Malini and her followers had begun to face Chandra’s forces, on the great mountainous crags of Dwarali—her followers had brought priests from their own city-states and lands. But those men had not remained for long. Priests of the mothers held great respect for the dead, but death in war was hard and ugly. She did not blame them entirely for departing.
The priests maintaining the funerary tents now were not trained in Parijat. They were the keepers of small Saketan village shrines and humble temples to the mothers. In Saketa, there was a minor sect that worshipped the mothers as one being—the faceless mother, who they claimed was all women who had burned as one, joined in a single great consciousness. Small and looked down upon by Parijat’s central priesthood, the sect were not afraid of hard work, and had quickly become the bulk of the priesthood serving her army.
As she approached the tent, flanked by Lata and Swati, Malini could see two men near the entrance. They were thin, tired looking, ash-marked roughly at the forehead and chin, their knot-worked hair bound back from their faces as they shared a carafe of water between them. When they saw Malini approaching, one leapt to his feet and slipped back into the tent. The other waited.
“Empress.” The priest bowed low to the ground, then straightened. He did not have the tranquil, gentle gaze the priests of the mothers had all possessed in Harsinghar. His mouth was puckered, his eyes surrounded by shadows. This close, she could see that the ash at his forehead and chin had faded with sweat.
“The man who saved me was a priest,” she said. “I wish to see his body.”
The priest did not argue, though he apologized profusely as he guided her into the tent. “There is little we can do about the smell,” he said, voice trembling. “In this heat… Empress, you would do well to carry attar of roses with you to mask it.”
In the normal course of things, the man’s body would have been burned immediately after the battle that had killed him. But Malini had quietly arranged for orders to be sent to the funerary tents, and to the unlucky soldiers who guarded them, that this particular body should remain untouched until she had the opportunity to see it herself.
“When I next visit here, I will do so,” she said, although she could not imagine why she would ever need to do so again. Still, he nodded, mollified.
The body lay under a white sheet. Flowers had wilted at its feet. He warned her again that it would be unpleasant, before he drew the cover back.
It was.
Swati made a small miserable retching noise and rapidly backed out of the tent. Lata averted her eyes, but remained.
Malini stepped forward.
He was young. Deep brown skin. Closed eyes. No ash on his forehead any longer, but he had the braided hair of a priest of the mothers, and the air of tranquility, even in death.
Bracing herself, she rolled up his sleeve.
