“I may be no priest of the nameless, but I am a sage,” she said finally. “I understand the value your people place on names. And I know Rao isn’t your true name. I know you keep to the oldest ways and pay the price those ways demand. I don’t need to call you by a pet name. I honor the name that was whispered at your birth.”
“Do you know what it is?”
She shook her head. “How would I?”
“My sister knew it,” he said. “She told me her own, before she died. And I… I told her mine.”
“I had no opportunity to speak with the princess before her immolation,” Lata said quietly. “And she would not have told me anyway. I understand the telling is… significant. Special.”
Rao nodded. “When your name is a prophecy, it is wise to keep it secret. Or so I was always taught. We only speak of it when the time is right. When the prophecy nears its fulfillment. When our voice has a purpose.”
He knew the tale of his own naming. How his mother and father had carried him to the temple garden of Alor, a gentle, swelling valley full of trees that dripped with jewels upon threads. How the priest, in his pale blue, had taken Rao into the monastery and sought out his name from the fathomless dark of god. Rao had returned to the garden, at age five, and been given the gift of his name. He’d carried it ever since—the weight of its sharp consonants and its soft vowels. The weight of its promise.
“Alori…” He swallowed. “My sister. Her true name was—old Aloran is hard to translate but—but she was named She Who Will Burn upon the Pyre. And so she did.”
“A death name is a terrible burden,” Lata said, with such learned compassion that he did not dare look at her.
“She was strong. She managed it—well.” Better than Rao would have. “My name doesn’t prophesize my death. My name…”
“You can tell me if you wish,” Lata said gently. “Or not.”
He looked up at nothing. He thought of his sister, with her silences and her cleverness, and the way she’d touched her forehead to his arm and told him, Don’t weep, please don’t weep. I’m okay. I’ve known all my life that one day I’d burn.
“No,” he said. “It isn’t the right time. I know that.”
He stood, wincing a little as the wound in his side pulled.
“But it is the right time for me to begin my journey to Srugna. I’ve done all I can here. Princess Malini’s fate is out of my hands.”
PRIYA
She climbed the Hirana with her eyes closed, the wind biting her cheeks, her hair catching in the breeze. At one point she stopped, pressed her head to stone, hooked a foot into a crook of broken rock and moss, and used her free hands to loosely plait her hair.
There. Much better.
What would Bhumika say if she saw me now? Priya thought, with no small sense of amusement. Balanced on a deathtrap with nothing but my thick head? Perhaps Bhumika would enjoy the excuse to yell at her.
When she entered the Hirana—slipping through quiet halls, under the shadows thrown by the guttering lanterns—she checked on Malini.
She was asleep. There was color in her cheeks; something easier about her form. And the minuscule dose of needle-flower Priya had left for her had been taken.
Perhaps she’d survive after all.
Priya lowered her head to the weave of the charpoy at Malini’s side. Listened to her breathing—the steady, comforting rhythm of it.
And entered the sangam.
She’d avoided this for longer than she should have. The thought of seeing Ashok again had made her chest burn with an echo of pain, the memory of betrayal. But what scared her most was the falsely kind way he’d looked at her and spoken to her, in the moments before she’d flung herself beneath cosmic waters and returned to her flesh.
He’d hurt her for love. That was the way of strength, in their family.
She opened her mouth. Called for Bhumika in the fathomless winding of waters. She had howled for Ashok; this was something quieter. A beckoning.
And Bhumika came. She rose, a shadow spooling out of the water.
“Tell me,” Bhumika said simply.
She told Bhumika everything as succinctly as she could. She spoke of her pact with Malini; of her meeting with one of Malini’s allies, and of Malini’s efforts to see Emperor Chandra replaced on the throne by his brother, Aditya.
“So war comes for us no matter what,” Bhumika said. “Parijatdvipa turns upon itself. We’re in an even greater mess than I thought.” She sounded tired.