Chapter 31 Malini #2
What she would not—could not—say to Rao was this:
She felt relieved. Horribly relieved and unburdened, and guilty for feeling so.
She was glad she would not carry the danger of him with her to Harsinghar; that she would not always have to think of him hiding in a dark room, meditating and praying, and waiting for a different future to come for him, while she waited for men to rally around him and slit her throat.
She had not tried to kill him. She had done him a greater service than any other sibling vying for a throne would have done, when she allowed him to live. She owed him no more than she’d given.
He had given her a gift, her brother.
“Will you remain here with him?” Malini asked.
“Are you asking me to, Empress?”
“None of that,” Malini said softly. “There’s no one listening to us now.”
Rao huffed out a sigh. Then said, “Malini.”
“Yes.”
“Would you allow me to remain with him if I asked?”
She could hear the vulnerability in his voice—like a fracture in glass. She kept her eyes off him, offered him that small mercy as she said, “I have named you a general of my army. If you want Alor to have a voice in the battle ahead…”
“One of my own brothers, perhaps,” he said quietly, as if he knew there was no point in suggesting it, but had to try regardless. “If I send a missive to Alor. To my father, one of them will perhaps come.”
“There’s no time.” As you well know, she thought. “And I need your men. I need you.”
“Then I won’t ask,” Rao said.
Silence fell between them, and Malini couldn’t stop herself from turning away from him—from pacing, her whole body alive with a panicked, jittery feeling that she couldn’t contain. So he didn’t want to stay with her, help her—what did it matter?
“Malini,” he said, finally.
“Don’t,” she said in return. “Mahesh will be trustworthy support for Aditya.” As he was not for me. “He will be someone Aditya can rely on. Take peace in that.”
“I will,” he said. “As I take peace in knowing you’ll see this war won before he is harmed.”
Strange, she thought, how compliments from his lips so often sounded like despair.
As if he looked at her every success—every battle won, every highborn enemy circumvented, and felt fear.
Sometimes—often—she wanted to pry that fear apart and see its working.
She wanted to ask him: You, who named me and gave me the opportunity to seize my crown.
What do you fear? Is it me and my choices?
Is it what will become of me? Or what will become of men like you?
“I’m going to see Aditya,” she said, instead. “Is he well?”
“We sparred. It was…” He stopped and shook his head minutely. “He’s well.” There was something in his voice. Something that was not for her.
He gave her a look, and she smiled at him. She knew him. It was worth reminding him, now and again, just how well she understood him.
He cleared his throat. “I’ll leave you to it,” he said. “I think it won’t be long before we’re ready to move.”
After Rao’s departure, Malini summoned a guard.
“Is the fort still silent?”
“Yes, Empress.”
“Good,” she said. “Take me to Prince Aditya.”
Aditya’s usually sparse tent was full, for once, of the kind of chaos Malini had grown used to in her own space: maps of Saketa and detailed sketches of the flowering maze of Saketa’s fortress.
Military officials, imparting information at rapid speed—the intended formations of troops, the supplies that would remain here or travel with Malini’s larger force of men.
She was surprised Mahesh was not here already, bowing and kissing at Aditya’s feet.
An unkind thought. She allowed herself the joy of it.
“Brother,” Malini said. The room fell silent.
She looked at the watching officials. “Leave us,” she said, and they departed swiftly—paper, ink, ledgers all left in their wake. In the midst of it all, Aditya looked at her with an air of utter calm. Aditya was in mussed robes, sweat-stained. He wore his blade at his side.
He looked so much like his old self—like the crown prince brother she had grown up with—that it made her heart ache with affection. And that angered her in a way she could not make sense of.
“I have a gift for you,” she said.
She had stopped at her own tent to collect it—had ignored Lata’s questions, and Swati’s timid offers of tea or sherbet—and picked up the onyx box, and carried it with her. It was heavy in her hands. Aditya took it from her, a faint frown on his brow. Opened it.
“Ash,” he said cautiously.
“This contained so-called mothers’ fire,” said Malini. “You saw what I told the men. It was the truth. But this…” She pushed the box forward. “This is my assurance to you that it truly wasn’t the fire of the mothers. That it is not impossible to defeat.”
Aditya nodded. Passive, waiting for her to speak.
“I am going to defeat Chandra,” Malini said. “I will move on Parijat as swiftly as I can. I have great strength behind me, and the mothers, and the nameless also. I will defeat him. You need only survive until then, and then the full might of the Parijatdvipan empire will support you.”
“I’ve already elected to stay,” he said, laying the box over his knees. “I am not afraid of death.”
“You should be,” Malini said swiftly. “A man who fears death fights to survive. And the longer you fight, the better for all of us, so if you will not survive for yourself, survive for all of us. For me.”
“I will fight with all that I have,” Aditya replied.
“You have been told what our forces can spare here,” said Malini. “But if there is anything you need…”
“No.” Aditya shook his head. “Sister, I’ll do well enough.”
“Well enough,” she repeated. “This is battle.”
“I know,” he said. “I was trained for battle.”
“Then you must do more than well enough. You must do everything. Did you spar with Rao? Was that enough to win his confidence? It is not enough for me, Aditya. Now I know war, I beg you to remember your old self, and go to battle as him. Not as the priest who could not bring himself to light an arrow.”
“You’re angry I’m not as I once was,” Aditya observed.
“I’m not angry with you.”
“You are,” he said. “You can barely bring yourself to visit me. And when you do, sister, you look through me—seeking the man I no longer am. You are not alone in that. You are not the only one who misses him.” Did he mean that he missed himself? Or that Rao did? She did not ask.
“But you should not be angry,” he went on, keeping his eyes steady on her own.
“Because if I became that man again—that rightful heir to the throne of our empire—you would lose everything you have gained. Your army. Your waiting crown. For all your strength and ambition and will, you know as I do, how easily men are swayed by what they think they know.”
Malini said nothing.
“Will you ask me to give up this task?” Aditya said, into the silence. “To travel with you and fight like a prince of Parijatdvipa at your side, knowing all the risk it brings to you?”
She could well imagine it: Aditya at her side in battle, wreathed in glory on a white horse. Aditya racing his chariot into battle, every inch the noble crown prince. Every inch the man her highborn lords would want to see on the throne.
He was a danger. Mahesh had soundly proved that. And yet. And yet…
She said nothing, and nothing again. There was, after all, nothing to be said.
He smiled, his eyes sad but knowing.
“No,” he said. “You won’t ask. You’re glad I’ll remain here. So don’t berate me, sister, for choosing a path that protects you. From Saketa, and an army at your back, and from—me.”
“I did not ask for you to sacrifice for my sake,” Malini said in a low voice.
“An act of love does not require asking,” said Aditya. “But I promise you. I act for the nameless, as I do all things. It’s my god’s voice that guides me to remain here. I will remain. And who knows,” he said. “Perhaps I shall survive this war. Perhaps fate will see fit to release me.”
“And then? What of you then?”
“I’ll find a new monastery to take me in,” he said. “I’ll live out my days there. I will go to Alor itself, and seek the heart of the faith. A life of peace.” His smile deepened, a soft, wistful thing. “Your crown is your own, Malini. Sister. I will never seek to take it from you.”
She could not speak to him any longer. She’d hoped for… well. She did not know what she had hoped for, and that was her error. She did not want the return of her brother as he’d once been, and yet some part of her did. Or… no.
She wanted her brother as he had never been. A brother who had seen how she had been hurt and had shielded her when she had been unable to shield herself. She wanted a love from him he’d never been able to give and never could, because it was a love she had needed long ago.
She did not want him to die. There was no possibility, in death. Only an end.
She turned to go. But she paused at the exit of the tent. If she could not put that tangle of love and anger and resentment into words, she could at least tell him this.
“After your monastery burned,” she began.
“After, I dreamt of Alori and Narina. They told me I would kill both my brothers. And they forgave me. But I have never planned to harm you.” She paused.
“Your existence has been a thorn in my side. But I have not ever wanted to hurt you. I did nothing to guide you to this point, Aditya. I did not ask you to remain here in Saketa or tell you to volunteer for this. I have held no blade to your throat. And I have made no prisoner of you. I know what imprisonment is.” Her voice wavered, then—fury and hurt giving it a fine edge.
“I love you, brother. Though, perhaps, it would be easier if I did not.”
A silence. Then, Aditya’s voice behind her. “Safe travels, Malini.”
“Safe siege, Aditya,” she said in return.