The Oleander Sword, page 46
“You won’t burn,” said Rao. “It’s not so simple. You have no oil—no lac—”
“The mothers will guide me.”
“You can’t.”
“Ah, Rao,” Aditya said. Soft. “I can.”
The lanterns were flickering to life all around them—flame after flame. The air felt like a swelling wave—a roiling storm, boiling up, up, up.
As if they sensed Aditya. As if they were doing it for him.
“I know now,” Aditya said. “Why I dreamt of you as I did. Don’t forget what stars are, Rao.”
Then he raised up a hand. Touched it to the flame.
It raced over his body like a falling star against the night sky. And Rao held him and felt nothing—only skin. Only his own body untouched, a sacrifice unwanted, a sacrifice unasked for.
“Prince Rao,” Lord Mahesh gritted out. “We have witnessed. We have seen. Now we must survive. Come!”
“I’ll stay with you,” Rao said raggedly. He was crying, he realized. “Aditya, I’ll stay. I won’t leave you alone.”
Aditya could not respond. The fire was climbing over him, darting and arcing, trailing as sweetly as flowers climbing a vine. But it burned, and burned, and Rao could smell smoke. Could see—could see Aditya’s skin—
The fire turned on them with wild life. The chakrams on his arms were spinning circles of gold. And Rao saw light, light, light. A hand grasping at his back.
Then, nothing.
MALINI
With Chandra her prisoner, and the priesthood her allies, there was no need to siege Harsinghar, as Saketa’s fortress city had been sieged. The gates could simply be opened.
The priests and their own warriors were accommodating. They welcomed Malini’s army. Bowed their loyalty to her, before a makeshift audience. The servants—terrified at first—soon found some semblance of calm when Malini ordered that they be left unharmed. She asked for a feast to be prepared, and the mahal was soon bustling with the noise of impending celebration.
“Your brother is imprisoned in a cell,” Kartik said, with great priestly calm, once the pomp and ceremony was done with. “Do you wish to be taken to him?”
“Of course,” said Malini. “I would be very grateful.”
Once, she’d wanted to give him a slow death. She’d wanted to see him humiliated before all his peers: before kings and princes, highborn and warriors—and her court of women, who would never have been equals in his eyes but would stand above him from now on. For so long, she had comforted herself with the vicious thought of how it would feel to rip his false sense of self, his overblown pride, to pieces.
But she’d had a taste of that victory when the priests had turned on him, and it had done nothing to slake her rage. Now, she simply wanted him gone.
Chandra had been chained, but his prison cell was sumptuous. There was a fine bed. A carafe of wine. It was far more than he deserved.
He watched her with ugly, barely banked fury as she entered the room.
“I went to my old chambers,” she said casually, and gestured at her own clothing—the shining silk of her sari, the gold at her wrists and her waist. The saber clinking against her hip. “I hadn’t expected them to remain untouched.”
He was silent, eyes narrowed.
“I considered what must be done with you,” she said. “I don’t think you fear being powerless. I don’t think you have ever considered how it would feel, to be small, to be helpless with a knife at your neck. You think there is natural order to the world. A rightness. But there is not, Chandra.”
“If you kill me, your name will be tarnished,” he said evenly. “Everyone will know you are the impure woman who murdered her own brother.”
“Chandra,” she said. “Brother. Nothing would give me greater joy than driving this sword through your body myself. I am not a strong woman; nor am I well-trained in use of a blade. I would do a poor job of it. It would, I think, take you a long time to die.
“Now you,” she went on, filling the silence he’d left. “You know how to use a saber. I think if you are brave enough, you could run yourself through now and save yourself the indignity of the slow, unpleasant, humiliating death I am going to give you. Let me tell you about it.”
She took a bottle from her waist chain.
The bottle was small. Its contents were dark, almost oily. She placed it on the table beside his bed with an audible clink.
“Needle-flower tincture,” she said. “A dose like this would kill you. Small doses, over time, will destroy you. And there will be doses, brother. To be placed in your wine. Your meals. You will die in slow increments, your mind rotting in your skull. The poison will kill you unhurriedly, and by the time you face the kings and warriors of Parijatdvipa—by the time I drag you before the court—you will be a shadow of your old self.” She leaned forward. “I will allow you your old princely finery, so that all the men who once bowed to you will be able to see how emaciated you have become. You will look a pitiable sight, I promise you, stumbling into the court in your gold and your turban, with your skin sticking to your ribs. I will ask you to plead your case, and all those men will hear you stumble over your words. They will laugh at you, brother. I will steal everything from you, as you tried to steal it from me.”
His throat worked. He said nothing.
“I would never, in the normal course of things, condemn any being to such a fate,” said Malini. “But you condemned me to it. You condemned me to public shame. You dragged me into the court to be broken and killed before all the powerful highborn men of our empire. You tried to murder me, and when I would not die at your bidding, you tried to take my mind from me. Oh, you may shake your head now. You may have convinced yourself you acted for a higher purpose, for Parijatdvipa, but you know the truth.”
“You have a monstrous mind, sister,” he said. His voice dripped with disgust, but there was a hunted look to his face—to the way his hands shook in their manacles, as if he could barely contain the urge to get his fingers around her throat. “If I could live my life again, I would take yours from you when you were a girl. I would spare the world your tarnish. I would tell our mother to whelp a better daughter.”
“Would you kill me now, if you could?” She cocked her head, inspecting him as if he were dirt. She hoped he felt it—that he would remember being nothing but dirt in her eyes.
“The only worth you have is in your death. Even the priests see it. You are just a tool to them,” he spat out, savage. “They just want to use you. Mark my words, Malini, you’ll burn as I wanted, whether I am here to watch it or not. It is your purpose, your fate. It was written in the stars of your birth.”
“Ah, but I’ll burn for my own glory, not yours,” she said, baring her teeth in a feral smile. “And I will be remembered as a mother, a goddess, and you—you will not be remembered at all.”
She stepped away from him.
“You have a choice, brother,” she said, kindly now. She could afford to be kind. “The needle-flower lies beside you. Do what you will.”
Then she turned and left him behind. Locked the door behind her.
And pressed her back against the wall. And waited.
CHANDRA
He stared at the vial of needle-flower. The blood was beating like a drum in his skull. He thought of running a saber through his sister’s stomach. He thought of her on the pyre burning and screaming in agony, begging for mercy, and felt a despair so encompassing it was like a wave, like drowning.
He would never see her die. He could not lie to himself. Hemanth had turned from him, tears in his eyes. With regret. With love, he’d said.
Chandra reached for the vial and grasped it. Raised it up.
He did not want to die.
The memory of a blade at his throat lanced through him. Humiliation made him grit his teeth, the taste of blood on his tongue.
Had Hemanth ever truly loved him? When the High Priest had told him he was destined for greatness—when he had given Chandra hope and purpose—had he known that one day he would betray him?
The world was flawed, decayed, rotten. And Chandra was the only noble man left. Betrayed by all the men who should have kneeled before him. Humiliated and condemned by the sister who should have died for him.
Chandra deserved to live. He needed to live. Parijatdvipa would fall without him.
He clenched his hand tight around the vial. The urge to fling it against the wall and watch it shatter was a powerful thing. He wanted the paltry pleasure that destroying it would bring—the sight of glass and needle-flower smeared against the floor and walls.
His hand was shaking. His arm did not want to lift it. It felt as if he were looking at the vial from a great distance. He could not throw it. He could not drink it. He was frozen.
Wetness, miserable and weak, was streaming from his eyes. These were not his tears. This was not his heartbreak.
Hemanth, he thought. How could you betray me?
He thought of lowering the vial back to his bedside. He thought of trusting in the gloriousness of his own fate.
He thought again of Hemanth, and felt his own faith wither.
He thought of his sister’s threats: Of slowly administered doses of needle-flower. Of wasting away. Of being jeered at and mocked by Parijatdvipa’s highborn, as his mind betrayed him, and his body followed. The terror that thought instilled in him was vast. He could not breathe around it. He felt like a child again—trapped under a sea of dark emotion, entirely adrift. But now, there was no one to raise him up. No one to show him the way. There was only the fear. And the vial.
I will die as myself. I will die with my pride and my honor.
This was the brave path. The only path.
A swift death. A clean death.
Before he could dissuade himself, he quickly poured the needle-flower into his mouth with a hand that shook so wildly his grip on the vial almost slipped. Then he grasped the carafe of wine and drank deep from it, draining it too. The wine’s richness washed away the taste of the needle-flower, leaving nothing in Chandra’s mouth but the taste of overripe fruit and the bitterness of his own panic.
He flung the carafe hard at the wall. It collided with stone with a clang, then tumbled to the ground, rolling to the edge of his bed. He let out an awful sob, muffled by his own hand.
Mothers condemn his sister. Let her rot and writhe. He was meant to be emperor and die an old man in his bed, surrounded by his sons and heirs. She had condemned Parijatdvipa by condemning him. She had—
He.
His hands were growing numb.
His heart was pounding. Faster, and faster still. As the room began to waver, and his vision lurched, and his body slid from the bed, awkwardly hooked by the chains at his wrists, he thought, That was not needle-flower.
He vomited. Violently. Once, and again.
His stomach was still roiling when he heard the door open once more.
“Malini,” he rasped out. Retched, again. “Malini.”
She sat down on his bed and folded her hands on her lap.
He looked up at her. Her calm face. The light in her eyes.
Traitor, he thought. Whore. Monster.
He tried to claw his way up from the floor. But all he could do was grasp the hem of her sari. His hands were slick with sweat. His heart would not stop pounding faster and faster, and he could not breathe around the thrum of his own blood.
Malini made a humming noise, thoughtful. She leaned down.
“Tell me,” Malini said, placing her hand over his own. He could not feel her fingers. His skin was tingling, growing leaden. “Does it hurt?”
He opened his mouth. Nothing but a rasp left it. He felt something dribble from his lips.
She nodded as if he had spoken.
His sight was beginning to go gray. He could not breathe. And the twisting nausea in his stomach was growing, gouging him from the inside out. He was being clawed open. Eviscerated.
The ground beneath him was ash, and what lived in the ash was eating through him, heat and cold and bitter, scrabbling finger bones.
Surrounding him were faceless brides, their blood-red saris brushing his writhing body. Flames leapt from their clothes to his skin as they laughed and hissed his name, watching him from beneath crowns of molten kindling and starlight.
He was burning and burning, his skin peeling from the inside, fire blistering his soft flesh, his organs. He could not run from it. The fire was him, and he was the fire, and in the void that yawned before him there was only more fire still.
Yes, it hurt. It hurt, and he would have paid any price to end it. Anything at all.
“Good,” Malini said, from a long distance. Her voice was an echo. “I’m glad.”
MALINI
She waited until she was sure he would not survive. His grip on her had fallen lax. He lay facedown in his own bile and sickness, his breathing no more than a wheeze, wet with his own blood.
She stared at the opposite wall, stained with a little wine. She felt curiously empty, hollow and light as air. The feeling would come for her later, she knew. Like the tide ever returned to the shore.
She stood and left the room.
There were guards at the end of a corridor. She’d commanded them to keep their distance so that she could speak to Chandra privately.
“He’s resting,” she said, now. “See that he isn’t disturbed.”
“Empress,” the soldier acknowledged, bowing.
She walked away.
She went to the women’s quarters of the mahal. Lata was waiting for her, expression tense and intent.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Lata said, which was as close to asking Malini where she had been as Lata would allow herself in the presence of strangers. Malini had no interest in answering that unsaid question.
“Chandra’s wife,” she said, instead. “Do you have her?”
“It was lucky,” Lata said, without inflection, “that Queen Varsha’s maids brought her directly to me. If she had been found by the wrong soldiers…”
“Show me to her,” said Malini.
Queen Varsha. The High Prince’s daughter—a thin, big-eyed thing with wild clouds of hair, oiled back into a curling braid—was huddled at the edge of a room with the two women who clearly served her. They were all weeping. She looked up, and when she saw Malini, she flinched.
Malini felt suddenly nauseated. She removed her saber and laid it aside. Entered the room.
“Please!” Varsha fell to her knees, dragging the two women down with her. She was crying. Great big miserable tears streamed down her face. “I’ve done no wrong, Empress. I’m a loyal daughter. I obeyed my father and wed as I was bid. Is that a crime?”
“Do you think I will harm you?” Malini asked.
This caused another bout of weeping. “Please do not,” Varsha begged. “Please spare me.”
“I have done you a great kindness,” said Malini. “I doubt my brother was a worthy or useful husband.”
“No, Empress,” Varsha said tearily. “He was not a good husband at all.”
Noise, from beyond the doors. Malini turned at the noise. Lata drew them open, and two soldiers strode in. One was shaking visibly, his face damp with sweat.
“Empress,” he said. “The emperor—your brother—he…”
“He drank poison,” the other guard said. “He must have hidden it upon his person. Empress, we offer our most sincere apologies; any punishment we must face, we will face.” He prostrated himself on the floor. The other soldier followed suit. “He—he is dead.”
Behind her Varsha abruptly stopped crying.
“Dead,” Malini repeated. She stared at the soldiers. Dead. The world ran through her like the wail of a conch. “Are you certain of this?”
“Yes, Empress.”
“By his own hand?”
“There was a vial in his room. And wine. Empress, please—please show us mercy.”
“You are not responsible for this. Calm yourselves,” Malini said. “Summon a physician to confirm it. Call upon a priest, also. Can you be trusted to do this?”
“Yes, Empress,” one said hurriedly, then the other.
“Then get up off the floor,” she commanded. “And go.”
They scrambled to their feet. Left as quickly as they had come. There were hushed noises behind Malini. Gasps of shocked breath.
She placed a hand over her eyes and felt her whole body begin to tremble, overcome. Finally relief struck her, vast and strong. He was dead. He was dead. He was dead. Part of her had believed that she had imagined it; dreamt it, even though she had been the one to frighten him and taunt him with the possibility of his own slow demise. Even though she had left him a poison of oleander and aconite, a poison that would burn him from the inside, and had told him it was a simple tincture of needle-flower. A soft death like sleep.
She wanted to laugh.
She did not laugh. Did not scream with the joy of it, either—the sudden lightness in her chest. The savage beauty of it.
Needle-flower indeed. What a fool he’d been to believe she would make it so easy, or half so swift.
She felt a hand on her arm. Lowered her own hand from her face and saw Lata touching her, watching her. There was concern in Lata’s eyes, but knowing, too.
“What can I do for you, Empress? How can I ease your burden?” Lata asked.
“Inform my general,” Malini replied. “And deal with—this.” She gestured at her brother’s widow. The women around them. She could not stomach being wept at any longer. “I need to be alone.”
“Of course,” Lata murmured.
Malini slipped out of the room. Her body felt light and leaden all at once. She did not grasp her saber again. Instead, she walked away from the women’s quarters, through the grand corridors of her mahal. She walked under ceilings inlaid with glittering stones; beneath columns limned in emeralds and pearls, and over flowers embellished in traceries of gold, sunbursts of liquid light.
The soldiers—as she had suspected—had not been subtle when they had run to inform her of Chandra’s death. They had not been subtle, in the aftermath, in their search for a physician and a priest. Already, the news of Chandra’s demise was spreading through the mahal. The few servants she saw lowered their eyes when she passed, or bowed. The warriors she saw—her warriors—lowered their heads and touched their hearts in gestures of respect. The emperor was dead. She had won them a war.
