“You’re not here,” said Malini. “So shut up.”
“Still rude, I see,” Alori said, with an exasperated sigh.
“She can’t help herself,” said Narina.
“Even in my mind you’re awful to me,” said Malini. Her eyes ached. “If I tell you I miss you… well. You both would have known that, when you lived. And now, it matters to no one but me. So I won’t.”
“Malini.” Priya’s fingers threaded with her own. “Please. Focus on me. The needle-flower. Will you take it?”
Priya. Priya leaning over her. Priya squeezing her hand, trying to draw her back into the steady world.
Priya’s hair was so very straight, so dark where it draped over the curve of her ear. Strange. She was not lovely, no, but parts of her were lovely. Parts of her.
“There are so many ways I could have convinced you to set me free.” Dark thoughts, light thoughts, like a flicker of shadow on skin. “I wish I had the strength to use you as I need to, in order to escape here,” Malini said. “And yet I’m rather glad I can’t.”
Priya just looked back at her, unflinching.
“Please,” she said. “Drink.”
And finally, Malini took the barest sip. Choked it down, acrid and sweet. And fell back into a dark slumber, her fingers still intertwined with Priya’s own.
PRIYA
The first night, she didn’t leave Malini’s side. She measured out a careful dosage of needle-flower tincture and prayed that she hadn’t made an error, that Gautam hadn’t misled her, and that Malini would survive. Ever since her last dose, when she’d pinned Priya and raged, Malini had been utterly silent, eyes closed. If Priya hadn’t held a hand to her mouth to feel the cadence of her breath, or touched the pulse in her wrist—and Priya had, over and over again—then she would perhaps have thought Malini was gone.
She sat beside Malini on the woven charpoy and urged Malini to drink the needle-flower, coaxing the other woman’s mouth open. She propped Malini up in her lap and fed it to her, without even the medium of wine to make it easier.
“You’re going to be okay,” she told her, when Malini coughed and pressed her head against Priya’s arm, eyes still squeezed tight shut. She ran a hand through Malini’s hair, as if Malini were a child, easily comforted by kind touch. “It’s going to be okay.”
She hoped it wasn’t a lie.
Priya slipped in and out of a doze, out of exhausted dreams. When she blinked her eyes open, shifting between sleep and wakefulness, the carvings seemed to dance on the walls before her eyes, surrounding her in an unblinking circle. The Hirana thrummed beneath her feet. And Malini slept on, breathing warm and steady against Priya’s side.
The next day, Malini was still alive, but she continued to sleep, consuming no food, taking water and needle-flower only when she was coaxed. On the night that followed, Priya held her again, watching the rise and fall of her chest.
Let her live, Priya thought. Don’t let me wake and find her cold. Let her live.
It was only human, only natural, to want Malini to live. No more than that.
She took Malini’s hand in her own and held it firmly.
“You’ll never get your revenge if you don’t survive, Malini,” Priya said to her. “If you can hear me, don’t forget that.”
It was the next day, in the middle of a rainstorm, when Malini finally woke. Drank a little water. She held out her hand—laced her fingers with Priya’s once more.
“Tell Rao,” she whispered, when Priya asked her how she felt; when Priya tried to convince her to eat, to rest more, to take her next careful dose. “Tell him to go.”
Then she fell back asleep. Her fingers on Priya’s were cool.
Priya drugged Pramila once more. Paced the triveni, waiting, anxious, then climbed down the Hirana in the dark of night.
The regent’s men were patrolling in significant, intimidating numbers. But the night bazaars were alive with people regardless, all of them winding between the food stalls with stubborn cheer, their voices loud, their smiles defiant. Colored banners had been hung between the houses. There were lanterns set out on every veranda, not yet lit.
It took Priya, confused by the bustle of the crowd, a moment to remember that the following night would be the festival of the dark of the moon, when households donated lavish gifts to the poor, ate golden jalebis and milk sweets, and placed dozens of lanterns on their verandas to light up the dark. It took her significantly longer to gather—from the gossip of people around her—that the regent had given explicit permission for the festival to go ahead as normal. No one seemed to know exactly why he’d chosen to do so, but there were discontented murmurs here and there as she walked about things that had been done in the city by Parijatdvipan soldiers. And sure enough, she saw a handful of buildings with their wooden frames clearly hacked apart, the damage still unmended.