Chapter 17 Priya #2
“I’m just pleased to see you,” Bhumika said. “It’s been too long. I was worried.”
“Is everything alright in Hiranaprastha?” Priya asked. “Padma’s fine, and—Rukh?”
Bhumika inclined her head.
“Everyone is well,” she said. “Just as they should be.” Bhumika reached out and touched a hand to Priya’s face—the shadow of it shaping Priya’s cheek. “Go back to yourself,” she said. “We’ll see each other again soon enough.”
“We may not,” Priya said urgently. “Bhumika, don’t you understand? I… I’m not sure if I’ll always be able to reach out. If you send a messenger it’ll take weeks, but if something’s important you will, won’t you? If you can’t reach me here, like this?”
The shadow of Bhumika’s mouth—the shape of her teeth—
“Of course,” Bhumika said. “I’ll find you when you’re needed. I promise you that. Don’t worry about using your strength to call me in the sangam. Focus on what lies ahead.”
“But—”
“Just do as I say, Priya,” Bhumika said. Her words were gentle, but they were also an order. “Now go.”
Priya returned to her body. Stared out at the dark, breathing unevenly now, feeling odd and unsteady, some sense of wrongness grappling at the edges of her consciousness.
Eventually, she slept.
By the time she woke in the morning, and broke her fast, and heaved herself once again onto her horse, the strangeness of it all had dissipated like nothing more than a bad dream.
The army encampment was marked by banners on the horizon, all of them the gleaming white and gold of imperial Parijatdvipa, blazing in the light of the setting sun.
Despite the fact that they had traveled weeks to get here, Yogesh insisted on stopping and making camp.
“I think we should continue,” Priya said, trying to channel Bhumika’s effortless command. It didn’t seem to be doing her much good: the men kept on setting up camp, ignoring her. “We’re almost there. The empress is waiting for us.”
“It would be better to take a moment here,” Yogesh said, with exquisite awkwardness, his eyes darting anywhere but to her. “Night is almost here, elder.”
“All the more reason to join the empress’s camp,” Priya retorted.
“No, no,” Yogesh said, wringing his hands. “It will give you time to prepare, elder. You look—out of sorts.”
“You do smell,” Sima muttered, when they were alone.
“Well, so do you!” said Priya.
“I’m not Ahiranya’s representative,” Sima pointed out. “You are. I’m just a maid.”
“I could tell people you’re my bodyguard,” Priya said.
There was an incredulous silence from Sima.
“If I could emulate Elder Bhumika at all, I hope you know I’d be raising an eyebrow at you right now,” Sima said. “One devastating look of judgment, that’s what you’d get.”
“Well, you’re not just a maid. Certainly not my maid. Isn’t that the point of this—coming here with me? You’re a representative of Ahiranya.” Priya shrugged. “Maybe that’s enough.”
“You know that isn’t how things work for highborn,” Sima said. “They need names for things. They like everything and everyone to have their place.”
Sima was right, of course.
“Advisor,” Priya said, after a beat. “We can call you my advisor.”
“Advisor,” Sima repeated. She sounded skeptical.
“It’ll mean more to the Parijatdvipans than ‘friend who helps me kill Parijati soldiers’ will.”
“Fine,” Sima said. “Advisor it is. Now go wash yourself, Pri, and leave your advisor alone.”
Priya had only just finished bathing—with a cloth and bucket, behind a hastily erected sheet, Sima on guard—when she heard hurried footsteps.
“Priya,” Nitin called out. “Elder Priya,” he corrected himself quickly. “You have to come. She’s here. The empress is here.”
Her heart gave a strange thud in her chest. From the side of the sheet, Sima turned and met her gaze, eyes wide. “I’ll be there in a moment,” Priya called out, and tried to make herself presentable.
Her sari was a little damp, her skin faintly shiny with water, when she emerged and drew a shawl around her shoulders to hide the worst of the damage. There was a chariot coming to a stop. Soldiers alighting from their own mounts.
The soldiers parted. A parasol was raised—beaded with darts of silver, it gleamed even as it shadowed the figure that alighted from the chariot, protecting her from the fading sunlight.
Malini.
She was not as thin as she’d once been. And her hair—always so knotted and curling, when Priya had known her—had been carefully tamed into a braided bun, bound high at her scalp.
But her face was the same: the same dark gray eyes, almost black.
The severe eyebrows. The fullness of her mouth, not quite shaping a smile.
“Empress,” Yogesh murmured, and bowed low. His men followed his example.
Around Priya, Jeevan’s men hesitated. But when Priya bowed they followed suit.
Priya raised her head. Malini was watching her.
Once, her expression would have been unreadable to Priya—a blank mask, all perfection and stillness. But she knew Malini’s face now—had once watched every flicker of her eyelids, every exhale from her lips, and learned them like language.
Beneath the shadow of her parasol, Malini’s dark eyes were taking in every inch of Priya’s form—her damp skin, the tuck of her sari at her waist. Her trailing hair, draped over a shoulder.
Priya’s face. Malini was looking at nothing and no one else.
Only Priya, with her mouth a little parted and her eyes a little wider than normal.
Malini had missed her, too.
“Elder Priya,” said Malini. “I have come to speak with you. If we may have privacy…”
“Of course. Empress.” Priya nodded at her men and Sima, who nodded in return and stepped away. Yogesh was murmuring something, shaking his head.
“There is no need for a formal record of this conversation,” Malini replied.
“Empress,” Yogesh protested.
Malini gave the lightest flick of her head. And Yogesh swallowed, and bowed, and stepped back to join the other men.
Priya looked at Malini. Simply looked at her. The chariot was all gilt and silver behind her. There were flowers in her hair, carved from jewels and ivory. Earth and bone.
“I am sorry to come to you so suddenly, without warning,” Malini said, after a moment. “If I had warned anyone, my courtiers would have followed. And I wanted…”
Malini trailed off, but Priya knew.
“We’re still watched,” Priya said softly.
“I know,” Malini said. “But some modicum of privacy is better than nothing.”
Malini, she wanted to say. Wanted to shape that name in her mouth. She took one step forward. Just one step. But Malini shook her head, subtly, and Priya took no more.
“I wanted you to see,” Malini murmured. “Before I faced you in front of all my men. I wanted you to see what I am now.”
Priya found some breath inside herself. “You certainly look like an empress.”
“And you—you look like an Elder of Ahiranya,” said Malini.
Priya couldn’t help but laugh. Almost noiseless, almost breathless, like the sound didn’t want to leave her. “I look like a mess,” she said.
“No. You look…”
“What?”
“More alive than I remember,” Malini said softly. “I didn’t think such a thing was possible. But here we are. Priya. Are you well? Happy?”
It makes me happy to see you, she almost said. But that wasn’t quite right. Seeing Malini made it feel like there was something fragile in her chest. Something that could wither or flourish at a single word, a single touch. “I… I am. Are you?”
Malini smiled in response. Tight-lipped.
“That’s a no, then,” Priya said.
“I am. But. Priya…” Hesitation. “In the eyes of my men, Ahiranya is not yet free,” said Malini. “Ahiranya is still subordinate. And you will be—unwelcome.”
The fragile thing in Priya’s chest splintered, just a little. Malini’s words were a reminder that there was so much more at stake than her soft feelings for Malini, or Malini’s for her. Politics and war and history all stood like a chasm between them.
“You summoned me,” Priya pointed out.
“Yes,” Malini said. “I did. Because I am on precarious ground. Because I need someone I can trust. And because…” She stopped, and then said, carefully, “Because you are you. To me.”
Priya felt a pang. Ah, Malini.
“But you are going to need to trust me in turn, Priya,” she went on.
“You will need to do what I guide you to do, and trust that I will not harm the interests of your people. That when this ends you will have what I promised you. That I wish to give you—all that is rightly yours.” A hitch in her words. A stumble. “Can you obey me?”
What was rightly Priya’s?
Are you rightly mine? Can I keep you too?
“Do you ask all the kings who serve you to obey you?” Priya asked.
“Not so directly,” said Malini. “With them I play the necessary games and niceties. I write pacts and bargains. I flatter and dole out power as required. But you—you are not them. And I am asking you.”
“Will you believe me if I say yes?” Priya asked.
“You’ve placed your life in my hands before,” Malini said softly. “The deals we have struck between us have always held true. I’ll trust you again, as I always have, and always shall.”
“Don’t say such things,” Priya said, voice smaller than she wished it to be.
Malini’s response was silence. She stood tall, elegant and untouchable in her green sari, her flowering crown, her eyes pinning Priya through the heart.
This isn’t how I thought it would be, Priya thought. She had the absurd desire to reach out and unspool Malini’s hair—to trace her eyebrows, her jaw, her mouth, with a fingertip. To feel her skin—to touch her—maybe that would make Malini real. Maybe it would knot them back together again.
“I wish,” Malini began. And then she caught herself—almost visibly. A slight sway of her body. A flicker of her eyelids. As if she felt it too—the urge to move closer to one another. The urge to touch. The urge to say You’re here, you’re here and I’m here, at last.
Priya swallowed, steadying herself. She pushed her shoulders back. Straightened herself, grounding her feet against the soil. If Malini could wear a mask, then so could she.
“Empress,” she said. Louder, clearer, drawing the eyes and ears of the men around them. “Ahiranya is loyal to you. That has not changed.”
Malini straightened too. Inclined her head.
“I am glad, Elder Priya,” she said. “So glad.”
Priya and Sima both worked together to make something presentable out of Priya.
A salwar kameez, in the Aloran style that better suited horse travel, with the chunni knotted neatly at her hip.
Priya’s hair bound back in a long braid that Sima hastily wound in place using a long, deep blue tasseled paranda.
By the end, Priya at least felt presentable. It would have to do.
They rode to join the army.
When they entered the camp itself, Priya tried not to allow herself to be overwhelmed by the size and sheer scale of it: the milling swathes of soldiers in their bright armor. Saketa’s great maze fort, looming over everything, dark-stoned and austere. The canopied tents, the elephants, the weapons.
The waiting highborn. Their cold, watchful eyes. The way they stared as Priya rode forward on her horse, and alighted, her braid whipping behind her as she hit the soil.
Let them stare. She was a temple elder. She had more power in her bones than any of them had in their titles.
Priya walked forward. Awaiting her, beneath a canopy of gold, on a dais that clearly served as a throne, sat Malini. Empress Malini, in all her glory, legs crossed and hands upon her knees. The softness in her was all gone. What remained was hard and beautiful, as bitterly sharp as a blade.
I wanted you to see.
Malini had shown her a little of this mask: the edges that made an empress out of a woman. And here, now, was the rest of it.
Yogesh stepped forward first. In a clear voice he announced Priya, Temple Elder of Ahiranya.
“Come forward,” another official announced, repeating his words in both court Dvipan and common-tongue Zaban. “And pay your respects.”
You’re Ahiranya’s representative, Priya told herself. Think of what Bhumika would do and try to do it. Do not make a mess of this.
She walked forward. Bowed low. Lower even than she had before. I am a servant of Parijatdvipa, every inch of her body said. I am loyal. I am here for your sake, and I will obey.
“Welcome, Elder,” Malini said. “I welcome you to Saketa.”
With the light of the sun behind her, Malini looked like a stranger. And that was, Priya supposed, exactly how things were meant to be.
“Empress,” she said. “It’s my honor.”