Chapter 44 Rao
RAO
Rao watched Priya. She was standing out in the bare sunlight, arms crossed, her head lowered as if she were lost in thought.
Sima was standing next to her, worrying at the end of her own braid with her fingers.
If anything, Sima looked far more agitated than Priya.
But Rao had seen enough of Priya’s gifts to guess that Priya somehow—somehow—had her attention trained on Malini, wherever she was within the temple.
“The empress has made a fast friend of that one,” Prakash said. He found the heat harder than most, and had seated himself beneath a parasol with his charioteer fanning him.
Rao made a meaningless noise, and Prakash took it as encouragement, as Rao had expected he would.
“She keeps her even closer than the sage,” said Prakash, referring to Lata. “She keeps her constantly at her side.”
“Elder Priya was injured,” Rao murmured.
“She’s not injured anymore, Prince Rao,” said Prakash. He dabbed at the sweat on his brow with his knuckles. “There will be men who do not appreciate her holding an Ahiranyi witch in high prestige.”
“She has few women of similar status that she can talk to,” Rao said in response. “When her court is properly established, things will change.”
Prakash laughed.
“Instead of wedding our women for alliances, we will be sending our sisters and daughters to court as emissaries to win the empress’s favor,” he said, as if it were a great joke. Shook his head. “It will be a strange business, having a woman on the throne.”
“Prince Rao.” A clear, light voice. Rao turned and met the eyes of the priest Mitul. “Will you come with me?”
“Me?”
Mitul inclined his head.
He glanced back at the others. Everyone looked as confused as he felt. But there was nothing to be done save nod in agreement.
He climbed the sandstone steps of the temple. Followed Mitul through the archway into a column-lined corridor, and from there, through narrower and narrower corridors that seemed to lead nowhere.
“You are not taking me to the empress, I think,” Rao said cautiously.
“No, Prince Rao.”
“I’m not familiar with the temples of the mothers, or all the traditions of your faith,” said Rao, emphasizing his Aloran accent—as if he had not been reared at the heart of the faith of the mothers of flame, alongside the imperial princes of Parijatdvipa.
“What need do you have of me, a worshipper of the nameless?”
Mitul said nothing for a long moment. He guided Rao across a path next to a central garden courtyard, ushering him into a quiet room, walls carved from a pale, lustrous stone.
“I have not always been a priest of the mothers,” Mitul said. “Nor has the priest the empress has come to meet. I, too, am Aloran.”
Rao felt a brief sense of surprise. He had never met an Aloran priest of the mothers before. His people worshipped the nameless. But Aditya had become a priest of the nameless, leaving the mothers of flame behind; he supposed it wasn’t so impossible for the reverse to happen.
Rao was not sure what reaction the priest wanted, so he simply nodded, keeping his voice attentive, curious.
“How did an Aloran come to be a priest of the mothers?” he asked.
“The nameless guides our fates,” said Mitul. “And the nameless guided me to the service of the mothers. Here, I found others who shared my vision.” Cryptically put, but Mitul was looking at Rao with his pale eyes. “You believe in the nameless god. And you believe in the mothers of flame.”
“Of course.”
“And the yaksa?”
“It is not a matter of belief,” Rao replied. “The yaksa, the mothers of flame, the nameless god—all of them exist, do they not? I don’t disagree with your—path. But I venerate the mothers of flame, and I worship the nameless god. That was how I was raised.”
“And the yaksa?”
“I am simply glad they’re gone,” said Rao.
“Ah, Prince Rao,” Mitul said with a faint smile. “They are not gone.”
For a moment, Rao was not sure he had heard correctly.
“They are not gone,” Mitul said again. His pale eyes seemed to cut through Rao before he turned, guiding Rao deeper into the room. “Let me show you the worth of this temple, and why priests of the mothers tend to it so lovingly.”
Tension knotted its way through Rao’s body. It was a feeling somewhere between fear and anticipation. It carried him across the room. Held him silent.
The nameless. Somehow, he was sure, the nameless god had called him here.
“The fire of the mothers burned the yaksa grievously,” Mitul said, with that priestly, storytelling cadence to his voice.
“But there were yaksa who, dying, laid their bodies in Ahiranya’s soil.
Trees grew from their corpses, or so the Ahiranyi believe.
There are many who dismiss the Ahiranyi because they worshipped monsters.
But their truth is no less than ours—only darker. Only crueler.
“We kept one such yaksa here,” Mitul went on.
“One dying yaksa, carried into this temple. One yaksa, laid in our temple’s soil to perish.
Its body has not survived the centuries unchanged or intact.
It is no more than wood—strange, and rich with heat, but nonetheless, no more than wood.
” He touched his fingertips to a long box that lay on a high table.
“Then, a decade ago, it began to change.”
He lifted the lid. Inside it, Rao could see soil—rich, soft earth. And upon it…
An arm.
At first Rao had thought it was human. Nameless help him, in the course of war he had seen many a severed limb.
He knew the shape of one—the absolute horror of a limb flung on a battlefield, still human and freshly alive, fingers curling, knuckles scarred, garbed in some poor soldier’s broken armor.
The thing within the box resembled an arm: It had five fingers, curling toward a palm.
A wrist with jutting bones, the shadow of veins beneath thin skin, leading to the jut of an elbow, an upper arm cut ragged.
But the veins, even in the dim light, were the green of sap.
The skin was not skin, but wood. If a hand had carved it—and Rao was certain no hand had—then it would have been called beautiful workmanship, eerily lifelike.
Roots, white and green, emerged from the stump, sinking into the soil.
It was alive.
“The priest of the mothers reared in Parijat do not know the meaning of what lies before them,” said the priest. “They see this arm and do not understand. But we who serve the mothers but also came from other branches and other faiths—we see with clearer eyes. We understand.” Mitul looked at him steadily. “This,” he said, “is yours, now.”
He raised the box and held it forward.
Rao took a reflexive step back.
“This should be shown to the empress.”
“It is yours.”
“It should be hers. She must—she needs to be told of this, immediately.”
“The empress already knows,” said Mitul. “And if she does not, my teacher will tell her. He is wise in such matters.”
“Why give this to me?” Rao demanded. “Why me, of all the men waiting beyond this temple? Why part with it at all?”
“This is no temple to the nameless, but the nameless speaks everywhere,” said Mitul.
“You have named and crowned your empress. You have followed her through months of endless war. And now she finally turns her face to Harsinghar and the throne. It is the nameless god’s voice—and the mothers alongside it—who tell me it must be you.
And you know it too, Prince Rao. You hear it in your heart.
” He held the box forward again once more. “You know what must be done.”
Rao stared at him.
“Does the nameless not speak in your heart?” The priest’s voice was kind. “Does the nameless not show you the way?”
Rao knew what his heart said. But he couldn’t do what it urged him to do.
He had a duty here, on the path that lay before him, in the battle that awaited Malini at Harsinghar. If there was a voice in his heart, always tugging him away, turning his footsteps back, back, back, then he had no right to listen to it. No right to follow it.
But he held out his own hands and took the box of stone, and the yaksa’s severed limb with it. It fit into his waiting hands like it belonged there.
He stepped out into the central gardens of the temple.
They were no monastery gardens of the nameless, no gleaming grasses and fruit-heavy trees, no water-laden plinths for seeking visions.
There were flowers, and only flowers: gently flowering jasmine blossoms, vibrant pink roses, and sunbursts of yellow oleander, lovely and poisonous. And across from him stood Malini.
Malini was standing under the cover of the temple’s columns, in soft shadow.
Whatever the priest had said to her had left no mark—she looked as calm as ever, the wind catching the pale folds of her sari, a few stray flower petals from the shrine caught in her hair.
She was looking down at him, and as she stared and he stared back, a slight frown creased her brow.
He wondered what she could see in his face.
“I did not expect to find you here,” she said. She swept forward, unhurried. The frown had settled, fixing in place. “Did you come in search of me?”
“Malini,” he said. “I. No.”
She said nothing. She looked at him and looked at him, with those dark eyes that were a mirror of Aditya’s and Chandra’s.
“I am going to Aditya,” he said. The words wrenched their way out of him.
“I must…” He tightened his hands against the box.
He could not lie to her. He owed her this: the truth.
The reason for his fractured loyalty. “The priest told me the yaksa are returning. He gave me…” He could not explain, so he simply opened the box, and she peered in. Her face went very still.
“A limb of wood,” she murmured.
“A message,” he said. “Proof that Aditya’s visions are true. And proof to me, that I should follow my instincts. What the nameless has been telling me in my heart.” He let out a shaky breath. “Malini,” he said. “I. I have to go back to Aditya. I have to go back to Saketa.”
“You are my Aloran general,” Malini said. “If you are not here, who will lead your men?”
“My commanders are wise and able,” Rao said. She would not part with his soldiers, then. He was not surprised by that. “I trust them to you. My father would support me in this.”
“Would he,” Malini said noncommittally. She looked at him, measuring him up. There was a new coolness in her tone when she said, “A priest spoke to me of yaksa too. Rao. Tell me truly. You believe danger is coming for us? A danger greater than even Chandra presents?”
“I do,” he said.
“And you think the answer lies with Aditya? Not with me?” A strange urgency to her tone.
“I think there is something Aditya must do,” he said. “I think he has a purpose. And if the crown is your purpose, then his is something else altogether. And I… I must help him find it.”
“Ah, Rao,” she murmured, bitterness and fondness twining together in her voice. “Always the helper.”
“If that is my role in life, it isn’t such a bad one,” he said. “I only ask—Empress—that you give me permission to fulfill it.”
“If I deny you, won’t you simply slip away in the night?” Her mouth curled—not quite a smile. It was too knowing for that.
“I don’t believe I would,” he said, after a brief hesitation. She caught it. Of course she did.
“Then you don’t really know yourself,” she said. “You followed your name across the empire. You sought me out for its sake. And now you’ve been handed a new purpose…? You’ll follow it pitilessly, no matter what demands I place on you. So I shall not place any.”
He could say nothing. It was true—the kind of true that struck him through swift and brutal as an arrow.
“You may only take the bare minimum of men you need to reach Saketa safely,” Malini said, after a moment.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “You must do what you have been guided to by higher forces. And so, apparently, must I.”