This time it was not an accidental flinch that brought blood to Priya’s skin. It was a deliberate movement of Pramila’s hand. Priya’s mouth parted, just slightly.
And Malini felt something inside her tighten.
Being locked here had made Malini a shadow of herself. She’d been haunted by her own past—by a flower-wreathed princess of Parijat with a shrewd smile and a voice full of secrets, who had the hunger and the wherewithal to tear Chandra from his throne—and by how beyond her grasp even the possibility of being that woman lay.
But suddenly it no longer mattered. Suddenly her spine was iron. Her tongue tasted of blood, as if Priya’s hurt lay inside her. She did not need flowers or court or the graces due a princess, to be what she was.
“Pramila,” she said. Her old voice came out of her—water-deep. “Lower the knife. You’ve never killed before. Will you start with this one?”
Pramila went quite still. After Malini’s trembling, her sudden strength was a weapon all its own.
“I can do what is needful,” Pramila gritted out.
“Is killing a mere maid needful?” Malini asked, letting her voice spool from her lips like a silk noose. “Come now, Pramila. You’ve never been cruel.” A lie. But it was a lie Pramila believed, and it would strike her like truth. “The only needful murder you must commit is mine. And you balk even at that, don’t you? You feed me needle-flower, but not enough to kill me quickly. You entreat me to choose the pyre, but you will not light one beneath me yourself.
“In that, you are very like my brother.” Malini let pity seep into her tone. “He cannot stand to have blood on his hands either. He chose to place mine on yours, after all. Tell me, is he displeased I still live? Is my continued survival a failure?”
“I have dreamt so many times of killing you myself,” Pramila spat. “Believe me, I have. I don’t fear blood on my hands. But unlike you, princess, I try to do what is right. I’ve tried so hard to ensure that your death would purify you. But now, now I’ve woken time and again from a sleep riddled with nightmares, now I’ve dreamt drugged dreams where my daughter screams…” Pramila swallowed. She raised the knife an increment further.
A thicker rivulet of blood snaked down Priya’s throat.
“Don’t hurt her,” Malini said, and was horrified to hear her voice falter all of its own accord. By the mothers, it was one thing to tremble when she had chosen to do it. It was quite another to do it now, when an air of command had momentarily held Pramila still, and perhaps could again. “Don’t—Pramila, she is nothing.”
“Nothing,” Pramila repeated. “Nothing and yet—look at you. Are you going to weep? I think you might. If you’re debased enough that you’d cry over a maid, then—good. Good!” Pramila’s laugh was more a sob, a haunting ribbon of grief. “You took everything from me!”
Malini had felt helpless in the past. She did not feel helpless now, although she should have. Her cheek was throbbing. Her head was spinning with stars.
“If you kill her,” she said, in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere far beyond her, from somewhere old and beyond mortal lifetimes, “you do not know what you will make of me. I will see you ruined, Pramila. I will see your living daughters ruined. I will blot all that brings you joy out of this world. I will murder more than your flesh. I will murder your heart and spirit and the very memory of your name and your lineage. I vow it.”
“Will you? Will you truly?” Pramila’s hand was steady now on the blade, holding it so close to Priya’s throat that surely Priya could not breathe around it. “You are not in Parijat anymore, Princess Malini. You have no ready spies, no slavering fool boys following at your heels. You’re a filth-ridden, impure traitor and you will die in a foreign land like the shame you are.”
“I am still what I have always been,” Malini said, although Pramila would not understand. Pramila had never understood even her own child, her clever and prickly Narina, who had died believing in something, who haunted Malini still. “I’ve set many things in motion, Pramila. I can set a few more, before death comes for me.”
Pramila laughed. “Such empty threats, Malini! I never thought I’d see you stomp and shout like a small girl, but here we are. You—”
Pramila stopped abruptly, choking. There was something around her throat: a great, knotted skein of green and earth and root.
Malini had been so focused on the knife against Priya’s neck that she had not seen what was happening on the ground. But she saw now that thin tendrils of thorny vines had crept their way across the floor, winding through the lattice hidden behind its curtain and the crack beneath the heavy door. They’d crept up the side of Priya’s body, up her wrist and her shoulder, up behind her neck until the whole tangle of them had met, squarely around Pramila’s throat.