Chapter 43 Malini
MALINI
The temple was so large it was visible even from quite a distance. The sight of it struck an old memory in her. She knew this place: its golden sandstones, its ivory inlaid domes. Something about it felt familiar. She didn’t know why.
Beneath the light of sunset, it would glow like burning embers, like the finest temples in the city of Harsinghar itself. But those temples were by necessity awe-inspiring: They served Parijat’s highborn and royalty, and reflected the grandeur of the empire, the importance of the faith.
There was no reason for a temple surrounded by swathes of barren land and sparse, bedraggled copses of trees to be so ornate.
As the chariot jolted forward along the dirt track, Malini raised a hand to protect her eyes from the glare of the sun and surveyed the land around them.
It was not farmland as she’d first assumed, but a wasteland.
The soil was largely arid and strangely jagged.
Rock formations roiled like waves, fossilized in the act of breaking on a shore. Holes pitted the ground.
“This was a battleground, once,” Lata murmured from her place beside her.
“I thought it a possibility. Or the site of some terrible natural disaster,” Malini agreed, looking down once more at the great gouges in the earth.
She thought of Priya then—her gifts, the way she could reshape the earth—and wondered with a strange feeling in her chest if the temple elders had fought here during the Age of Flowers. “You can tell from the ground alone?”
“I am not reading the soil, my lady, although I wish I had the skill to do so,” Lata said, with a slightly embarrassed smile. “I recognize the temple’s architecture. Look between the domes. There.”
Lata raised a hand, pointing, and Malini followed her guidance. Between the domes of the temple stood a tower. It was no watchtower, no edifice made for practical use. It was thin as a blade, thin enough to cut only the faintest scar against the blue-white sky.
Ah.
Now that she had seen it, she remembered the tale.
The battle that ended the Age of Flowers was preceded by a meeting of the highborn of the subcontinent’s city-states.
Called together, they shared their sorrows and their angers—their great fear of the yaksa, and how their land had changed under the touch of those immortal spirits.
And then the yaksa had come.
It had been a massacre. All of the most venerable of kings and princes had been killed, including Divyanshi’s own highborn father. The land never recovered from the deaths, but a temple was erected there, marked with a “tower like a blade”—or so the Book of Mothers said.
Malini knew its words very, very well.
Only one priest awaited them at the entrance of the temple. He was a small figure—narrow shouldered with large eyes, sharp bones.
“My name is Mitul,” the slight man said, by way of greeting, when Malini alighted from her chariot.
His eyes were oddly pale—the almost-green Malini had only ever seen in the faces of Dwarali soldiers who carried blood of the Jagatay and Babure tribes that harried Parijatdvipa’s borders.
“You have been eagerly awaited, Empress.”
“And who awaits me?” Malini asked.
“You followed a message here,” Mitul replied, eyes politely lowered. “I am sure the empress knows.”
The words verged on insulting, but Malini allowed them to pass. But she could not hide her anger when Mitul shook his head and stood before the door, barring the way when Malini’s followers approached: her highborn, her guards. Her women. Priya.
“All of you cannot enter,” the priest said. Apparently unfazed by the armed men at Malini’s back, he said, “This is a holy place.”
“All temples are holy,” Malini said, watching the priest with intent eyes. “And all temples, surely, welcome the highborn of Parijatdvipa.”
“Only you, Empress,” he said.
“I would be a great fool to enter even a holy place unprotected,” Malini said evenly.
“True faith demands risk,” Mitul replied.
She stood for a moment, still and silent. The men behind her were equally silent—unwilling, it seemed, to argue with a priest of the mothers.
“A maid or a guard,” Malini said, after a moment. The priest shook his head.
“Faith,” he repeated again. “Just as Divyanshi acted with faith, so must you, Empress.”
Faith that demanded mindless acts, acts with no grounding in logic, in what could be risked and what could be gained—ah, she hated to be asked this, just as she’d hated releasing the priest at Saketa, when he had more than deserved a slow death.
But what use would it be to turn away, and not see what was being offered to her?
She turned.
“I will return within an hour,” Malini said.
Lata inclined her head. Her jaw was set, her eyes watchful. Deepa looked worried but said nothing, and Raziya was frowning.
Priya’s eyes were strangely distant.
“There are flowers in the temple,” Priya said, in a voice quiet enough that Mitul would surely not hear it.
There were weapons, then, within the temple. There was comfort in that thought, even though Malini knew well enough that there was little anyone could do for her—not even Priya—if someone simply decided to slit her throat.
Malini ascended the steps alone, and followed the priest inside.
There was another priest waiting for her.
He waited in a room that had the look of every private prayer room Malini had seen in her life.
Plain walls. One latticed window that allowed a fracture of light in.
There were statues of the mothers arranged on an altar, their bodies half a man’s height and wrought in silver, garlands of pale flowers at their feet.
The room itself was lit by warm candlelight and perfumed by incense that was strangely fresh rather than cloying.
Its scent reminded her of the wind that had reached her from the ocean, sharp with salt yet faintly sweet.
And the priest himself, when he turned to look at her, was just as unremarkable as his surroundings.
He was of average height, with a mark of ash on his forehead and no ink limned onto his arms or hands, which were bare, his shawl draped only loosely at his shoulders, in deference to the heat.
His hair was tied back from his face, each braid bound with thread to keep it at bay, leaving his features exposed.
His face was unlined—he was, perhaps, only a few years older than her.
He bowed as she approached, then rose in one fluid motion from the floor cushions where he had been seated, by all appearances meditating.
“Are you the one called the faceless son?” Malini asked.
He inclined his head. Yes.
“What is your name?” Malini asked.
“Kartik,” he said. “You do not remember me.”
“Should I?” Malini asked.
“You were a girl when I met you,” he replied.
His voice was deep, and inflected with an accent she did not quite recognize.
Saketan, perhaps. “Many, many years ago. You came with your brother to the imperial temple. You laid flowers at the feet of the mothers and whispered to them. Made promises to them. I was only a boy then, training in faith, and swept the floors when you departed.”
She could not recall the moment he spoke of, but it seemed…
possible. Likely, even. She had gone to the imperial temple alone, from time to time, as a girl.
For all that she’d had little room in her heart for faith, she had found the temple itself comforting—its silence, its relative privacy, compared with the noise and bustle of the mahal, where there were always courtiers and warriors and other highborn streaming through the corridors.
How long had he held this memory close, preserved perfectly in his mind’s eye? Did he know what this one tale—this one brief insight into his past—revealed about him and his desires to her, all in one fell swoop?
I know you, his words had said. I remember you. You matter to me.
I want to matter to you, too.
“You are a royal priest, then,” she said, mildly. Had he been one of the men who had prepared her pyre and prayed over her, and waited to see if she would choose to burn? The day she should have died was crystal clear in her memories, in some ways, and blurred in others. “And yet—the faceless son?”
“Names have power,” he said. “Your Aloran prince could tell you so. You would not have come on the bidding of Kartik, who serves the High Priest loyally, but is not the High Priest. Kartik is not your brother’s closest confidant and the power behind the throne.
But for the faceless son, who has power in the temples that lie at the farthest reaches of the empire, who holds power among the priests who do not rise under Chandra’s rule, who has men who will die for him—for him, you have come. ”
“I did indeed,” Malini agreed. She let warmth touch her voice; let it draw him, as light draws moths.
“And I am glad to be here. You cannot know how glad. I thought the priesthood stood entirely against me. I witnessed priestly warriors turn upon me, at Saketa’s maze fort—priests who used the fire born of dead women to win my brother’s battles for him.
And it pained me. Because I am a scion of Divyanshi.
Because I know the mothers set me upon this path.
And the very priests of the mothers themselves, it seemed, could not see it. See me.