The Oleander Sword, page 44
“I know,” she said. “It’s been a long time, brother.”
He released her.
Slapped her, openhanded around the face. Her ears rang. Her mouth tasted of blood.
“Emperor,” the High Priest said, alarmed. “You cannot—”
“She’s barely hurt,” Chandra said, eyes cold. “She could take more. I could break her legs and her arms, and she could still burn. It would be no less than she deserves, wouldn’t it?”
“If you want me to burn for you,” she said, feeling the cut on her lip with her tongue, “this is a poor way to convince me.”
He hit her again. Of course he did.
Another noise of alarm from the High Priest. She raised her head, and for a moment stars danced across her vision. Standing to the High Priest’s left, she saw Kartik. His gaze was intent. Solemn. Very subtly, he offered her a tilt of his head.
“I could throw you in the fire pit now,” Chandra was saying. “The fire there was born from the deaths of thousands of pure, good women. Perhaps it would purify you in turn.”
“Wrong,” Malini said. “Ah, Chandra. You do not see it. Perhaps your priests do. I am pure. I am pure in a way you cannot touch, a way that is inviolable. It lies in my heart. It lies in my blood, beyond the dirt of your mortal ambitions.” She bared her bloodied teeth at him. “You cannot alchemize me into your glory. I will not allow it. My glory is my own.”
“Your life has never been your own,” Chandra said. “Your life has always belonged to Parijatdvipa. You refused to sacrifice it. I’ve given you the chance to reflect, and repent, and choose your rightful death. So many chances. And you still never learn, never change.”
“Ask your priests the worth of an unwilling death,” Malini said. “See what they do if you try and burn me now.”
He grasped her by the hair hard, wrenching her neck.
“Just like a spoiled boy,” she gasped out. Did he think he could humiliate her? Shame her? She had suffered so much worse. These petty games could not harm her any longer. “You know nothing of true cruelty, Chandra. Perhaps one day I’ll teach you.”
He stood abruptly and dragged her forward. Her scalp hurt. Her legs were slipping against the ground, hands chained before her. And still, she refused to be silent, her voice echoing off the walls, as the heat of the fire grew stronger. “The last time you had me here, I humiliated you,” she forced out. A jolt of her hip against marble. Her knees. “I told all your highborn rulers what you are. My words are sharper than any of your swords.”
“Then I will rip out your tongue before I burn you,” he said furiously, spittle flying from his lips. “I will do whatever it takes for Parijatdvipa.”
“Perhaps,” she managed to say. Forced herself to breathe. “Perhaps you wish to. But you cannot. Only I can burn willingly. Only I can do what is needful. And I will not,” she said loudly. “I will not do it unless I have my throne.”
The silence was vast, impenetrable. The fire crackled. And Chandra looked down at her. The same eyes as her own. The same brows.
“Emperor Chandra,” said the High Priest. His voice was distant. “I am so very sorry.”
Chandra froze. A sword tip was at his throat.
“Step away from Empress Malini,” said Kartik calmly. The soldier holding the sword to Chandra’s throat never wavered.
Nothing. Nothing for a long moment.
The sword pressed harder. A bead of blood welled up.
“Step away,” the priest repeated.
Chandra turned his gaze on the High Priest, face painfully still. His eyes were pleading.
“I have always done what was right for Parijatdvipa,” he said. “I did what I was taught. What—what is this?”
The High Priest exhaled. Closed his eyes.
“Release your sister, Emperor,” he said. “With regret. With love. Release her.”
Chandra did.
Malini remained where she was. Hands still chained before her. Watching the look in her brother’s eyes—watched the horror rupture him as his world was upended. All his life, he had worshipped staunchly. Followed the High Priest with the loyalty of a slavering dog, rabid to anyone save his master.
Now his faith had turned on him.
His own saber was taken from him. He stood, suddenly powerless despite his priestly soldiers, his men. His throne.
The High Priest was weeping.
He stepped back. Kartik stepped forward.
Kartik smiled at her, the faintest upraising of the corners of his mouth. For a moment he did not move. Only looked down at her.
One command. That was all it would take, to see Malini’s life ended, or Malini locked up once more, and the priesthood in power. It was more, perhaps, than Kartik had even imagined he could achieve for himself. It was enough power to compel a sensible, cunning man to act upon his ambitions, his hungers.
She was entirely powerless. The cold knowledge of that washed over her. She allowed it to show on her face. The faintest weakness—a trembling of her hands as she looked up at him. So he needed to believe he had power over her? Well then, let him. It was not untrue.
That wouldn’t be the case forever. She’d make sure of it.
She either had the measure of him, or she did not.
I will only give you what you want if I have my throne, she thought, keeping her eyes on his. Even if I fear you—if you wish to see me burn, and the yaksa die by my fire, you must raise me up.
His gaze flickered.
Then he bowed low to the ground. All the priests and soldiers around him followed suit.
“Empress,” he said. “We welcome you to Parijatdvipa. May you lead us always to unity and greatness.”
“Priest,” Malini said, holding her hands before her. Smiling, as if she had known fate would carry her here all along. “Free me, and I promise greatness is exactly what you will have.”
PRIYA
Water all around them. Above, below.
“Here again, sapling,” the yaksa whispered, smiling, her teeth more pearl than thorn. This time the yaksa was not wearing Bhumika’s face. Instead, she gazed at Priya with a mirror of her own face wrought beautiful and strange, lustrous wooden bones pressing against fragile skin, leaf-thin and glowing from within. “Here at last.”
Priya gazed at it. Her thorn-and-pearl mouth, her flowering eyes.
“What do I owe you, yaksa,” she said, “that I haven’t given?”
“Oh my darling one,” the yaksa crooned, as if Priya had delighted her. “What else? Your heart.”
“I… I hollowed my heart.” Priya remembered it, now that she was here. The pain. The wood of her ribs, the flowers within her. “You have it.”
“Not all of it.” The yaksa’s mouth parted. A needle-flower bloomed between her teeth, then withered. Faded. Then she smiled. “Not all of it,” she repeated.
Malini.
It was with Malini.
“I will give you a knife to carve it,” the yaksa murmured. “A knife to hollow it. A knife to make you ours.”
Horror ran through her.
“No, yaksa,” Priya whispered. “Please. No.”
“You already promised me this,” said the yaksa. “You promised me your heart.”
“I didn’t think you meant this,” Priya said, horrified, helpless. “If I had known I would never have agreed.”
“I know,” the yaksa said, soothing. “You have done so much for her sake, after all. I have seen it all, sapling. Left your people. Bowed before her gods. Fought her wars. Lain with her. Made promises with your dreams you cannot keep. All you needed was the flimsy excuse of a message—a vow, an alliance—and you let yourself be entirely hers. But you made a promise, and you cannot break it now.”
Priya could only shake her head in mute denial.
“Did the women who burned to destroy my kin know how it would feel to die? Did they know the pain the fire would inflict upon them? No.” The yaksa shook her head. Golden petals fell to the water around her; swirled and faded into darkness. “They chose their sacrifice with a warm cloak of heroism, of goodness, of virtue, draped around their foolish shoulders. They did not know how unutterable the pain of such a death is until it was too late. They chose their path unknowing, just as you chose yours—with no way back, only forward.”
Does a sacrifice have the same power if you don’t know what you are sacrificing? If you cut out your heart so flowers could grow, so magic could wind its roots in your yielding lungs, without understanding that you would end up here, kneeling before a thorn-mouthed god, being told you must kill what you love? Surely not. Surely the way of things couldn’t be this cruel.
“I… I won’t,” Priya said. Everything in her rebelled. She thought of Malini—the reverent touch of her hands, and the shape of her smile when she was unguarded, vulnerable, lying by Priya on a bed in a spill of soft shadow. “I won’t.”
“My kin and I are the source of all your strength. You are just meat, flesh, a vessel for a higher power. That is all mortals are—and it is a blessing, a beautiful thing, but it also makes you nothing without us, nothing of consequence, nothing worthy of love. I cannot take what you refuse to give,” the yaksa said, with utter merciless kindness. “I cannot turn your knife upon her. I cannot make you cut out the heart you gave her. But I can use you as the vessel you are. I can wear your skin like my own. I can murder her. Perhaps under your hands she may live. But not under mine.”
A shudder worked its way through Priya—unnatural, strange, like an insect working its skittering way over skin. She lifted her shadowy hands before herself and watched the not-flesh of them split open—ashoka blossoms, blood-red and saffron, worming their way free. The yaksa inside her. The yaksa showing her exactly how much of Priya belonged not to Priya, but to the spirit she’d given herself to.
“Your loved ones are waiting for you in Ahiranya, sapling,” the yaksa said. “And I do not need them as I need you. I can kill them all, and splay their entrails beautifully before you, and accept your tears as my due. That is your choice to make. You have shown time and time again that you love them less than her. You can be my weapon, empty, and lose everything. Or you can take up your knife, and act as you must.”
Priya shuddered again. Quailed.
It wasn’t true. She did love her people. She thought with sickening, terrified horror of Bhumika demanding that Priya return home; Padma’s weight, solid and warm in her arms; Sima holding a shield up to protect her; Billu laughing, and Ganam lifting her out of the marsh, and Rukh hugging her fiercely, all sharp bones and awkward affection. They were home, and she could not lose them. Could not.
How do you stand against a god that lives inside you?
“Please,” she whispered.
“This has always been inevitable,” the yaksa told her. Priya’s hands moved, as if of their own volition, to take the blade. The hilt bloomed under her hands, seeking her skin: great flowers, red as blood, gold as a rising sun. “I would always need you completely. I would always want you completely. And you’ll be mine. With me, you will find wholeness.”
“But not my beloved,” Priya whispered. Malini. Beloved and betrayed, although she did not know it.
“Do not worry,” the yaksa said, smiling, smiling. “I’ll be beloved enough for you from now on.”
The kiss the yaksa placed on her brow rippled through Priya.
“I am Mani Ara, sapling,” said the yaksa, framing her face in hands of flowering gold. “And you are my priestess.”
Priya woke beneath the earth, in a hollow she’d carved with her own magic, her own hands.
Someone was calling her name. A small voice through the dark.
“Sima,” she called in return, weakly. “Are you okay?”
“I am.” A pause. “I think we both are.”
She heard the groan of their charioteer, with some relief.
There was a burning ache between her ribs. She shifted under the soil, moving, feeling it hollow to accommodate her.
The knife had existed in the sangam. The knife was not here in the world. The knife—
A certainty settled into Priya’s bones.
She touched her own ribs. Felt her skin part, strange and unnatural, a softness that should not have been there.
She pulled the blade free. The skin closed behind it.
It was hot against her palm. She gasped raggedly, hands shaking around the blade.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” said Priya. “Nothing.”
“Do you think,” Sima called out, in the dark, “that the battle’s been won or lost?”
Priya’s hands were sticky with sap. She pressed the thorn blade into the knot of her chunni against her hip. A clumsy movement, made clumsier by the dark.
“I don’t know. But there’s only one way for us to find out.”
She opened the soil. Clasped Sima’s hand and dragged them all free, back into the light.
BHUMIKA
They went into the forest. Deep, dark trees enfolded them. The branches seemed to turn to meet her. The undergrowth rustled at her feet. Above her, the leaves were dark as lacquer, the light bleeding through them.
The last thing she had done before leaving the mahal was write a letter.
Priya,
Perhaps you’re dead and gone, and I have done you the cruelty of not mourning you. But I think you live. I hope you live. And though I also hope you will never return here, I know that if you are alive, you will.
When you do, I hope you can forgive me for leaving you behind.
The bower of bones waited for them. Above them, bound into the trees with ribbons of yellow and red, the bones clicked against one another. But the bower was otherwise silent, without even the chirp of birdsong.
Ashok waited for her, standing among a riot of oleander blossoms that seemed to grow from nowhere—that twined through his hair, and wound at his feet.
“Why here?” Bhumika asked.
“It’s a space for travel,” he said. “From here, you can go far.”
The bower was both the entrance to a path carved long ago by yaksa hands, and a grave where rot-riven animals came to die. Cursed and strange, it did feel like a fitting place for Bhumika to leave her life behind. She raised her head and stared at the bleached bones hung above them, warning the unwary that they had come to a place where no sensible person should.
“What shall I do now?” she asked.
“Kneel,” Ashok said. “And then we can begin.”
Jeevan was silent, as Bhumika kneeled on the ground. She looked up at his face. His gaze was heavy, full of grief and unspoken things she did not want to contemplate. Not now.
“Don’t fear for me,” she said softly. “Jeevan.”
He said nothing. Only looked at her in return.
“You think I am being self-sacrificing,” Bhumika went on, straightening where she sat, so that her spine was a tall, unbroken column, her shoulders unbowed. A noble enough look, she hoped, from the outside. She did not want Jeevan to fear for her. She did not want to fear for herself.
“You are being self-sacrificing,” said Ashok. “That’s what the magic demands of you.”
Jeevan lowered his eyes.
“No. Sacrifice would be remaining here and trying to carve out a measure of safety for our people. My people,” she corrected. Because whatever Ashok was, he was no longer one of her own, no longer mortal and frightened, struggling against immortal strength vast enough to crush them with the faintest breath, the vaguest desire. “Sacrifice would be doing so day in, day out, even with the sure knowledge of my inevitable failure.
“The Parijatdvipans think they know what it means to sacrifice,” she went on. “Grand gestures of self-destruction, they think. They glorify it. But it’s not so. The slow way, fighting even when you know it may have no worth… that is sacrifice.” She thought of all her people in the mahal. And thought of Padma, laughing, Bhumika’s heart clutched in her perfect, tiny fists. Felt her heart turn and break, as she said, “And this? This is freedom. This is escape.”
This was a foolish chance.
Ashok snorted. “Call it what you like,” he said.
“I will not know what I have to mourn,” she said. “Not for a long time. Perhaps forever. What greater gift can I ask for?”
And then, undoing all her own work, she turned her head away from her brother who was not her brother, and covered her face with her hands. And wept.
She heard the sound of footsteps. Jeevan’s voice, as he said, “A moment. Just a moment—”
“A moment, Ashok,” Bhumika agreed, voice choked. “Then I’ll be ready.”
More footsteps. She felt it, as Jeevan kneeled before her.
“My lady,” he said. She did not answer. “Bhumika,” he murmured. “He’s gone.”
She looked at him through her fingers. His hand was held out, palm upraised. She forced the tears to stop—breathed through the simple grief that had overwhelmed her—and placed her hand against his own.
“Whatever you cannot mourn, I will mourn for you,” Jeevan said quietly. “And when your work is done, I will bring you back. I vow, as long as I’m living, it will be done.”
She stared at him: his severe face that concealed the gentleness that resided inside him, his straight back, and his steady gaze. Her breath caught for a moment as she looked into his eyes. She believed he believed it, and she was glad of that. That he could hope for her, even when she could not.
She leaned forward. Pressed her mouth to his.
It was the softest touch of her lips to his own. She felt the warmth of his breath; the sudden clench of his hand around her own, holding her as if he were afraid she would vanish if he let go. But he kissed her in return gently, with a tenderness that made her heart ache for what could have been, and what never would be.
She drew back.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Whatever ephemeral thing had grown between them deserved better than the kiss she had given him, kneeling in the dirt, on the verge of losing herself. But Jeevan only touched his thumb to her cheek, brushing away her tears. Then he released her hand. He stood, and stepped back, and turned his face away to stare into the woods, his face in shadow.
