She should have been weighing up the regent: his weaknesses, his beliefs, the likelihood that these things could be leveraged to turn his loyalties against Chandra. He could not possibly like her brother—no sensible man liked her brother, and General Vikram would not have held the regency for so long if he were lacking in intelligence—but her mind was still a tangle of knotted thoughts, made slow by the weeks of needle-flower.
She could only sit, and stare at her plate, and feel her own mind stumble drunkenly over what must be done. She would need to find a way to win over the maids of the household, now that she had no jewels or coin to bribe them for favors. She would need eyes and ears in the mahal.
“The princess does not yet know,” Santosh said, sounding more gleeful than Malini liked, making her head rise, “where her prison cell is located. Would you like to do the honors, General Vikram?”
The regent’s gaze flickered between them.
“Emperor Chandra has requested that you be housed in the Hirana, princess,” he said.
Malini wished she could be surprised. But she was not. Dread and resignation pooled through her, rolling from her stomach through her limbs, until even her fingers felt numb.
“The Hirana,” she repeated. “The Ahiranyi temple.”
Pramila inhaled audibly. She had not known, then.
“The temple where the priests of Ahiranya set themselves alight on my father’s orders,” Malini said slowly, looking from Pramila’s pinched face to the regent’s unreadable one. “The temple where twenty-five children—”
“Yes,” General Vikram said abruptly. He looked rather gray himself. He had, she remembered, been regent when her father had ordered those deaths.
“There is no other Hirana, princess,” Santosh said with a mild chuckle. Oh, he was thrilled, wasn’t he? “What better place,” Santosh went on, “to contemplate your choices. To think about what awaits you.”
General Vikram was looking away from her, his eyes fixed on the lattice window. As if by not acknowledging what lay before him, he could ignore her fate.
“Whatever my emperor brother wills,” Malini said.
The Hirana was like nothing she had ever seen before.
It was a huge edifice, rising to a zenith where the temple proper sat. But there were no clear stairs up its height—no easy gradient of stones. Instead, it was as if someone had actually taken a pile of bodies—animal, mortal, yaksa—and stacked them upon each other to create a mountain of the dead. From a distance, to Malini’s eyes, it looked grotesque.
It looked no better when she was guided to a rope and bid to climb it.
“You must be careful, princess,” Commander Jeevan, the guide provided by the regent, told her calmly. “The Hirana is extremely dangerous. The surface is damaged in many places, and opens to deep pits. Do not release the rope. Follow my lead only.”
The carvings upon the stone were uneven to walk on and distressingly lifelike. Malini looked at them as she climbed, clutching the rope tightly, Pramila huffing behind her. Snakes coiled, their teeth bared, mouths vast enough to act as a neat trap for an ankle; mortal bodies, etched out of stone, with hands upturned, fingers curled; yaksa, those ancient spirits that were part mortal and part nature, with eyes that oozed greenery, profuse vegetation escaping their mouths, their forms humanlike, but broken at the stomach, the heart, by thick, violent surges of leaves.
No wonder the world had feared Ahiranya once. Malini could imagine how the Hirana had looked in the Age of Flowers, when it had been lacquered in gold and the temple elders still held great power and the yaksa still walked the world. The figures below her, with hair of vines and razor teeth, skin like bark or crumbling soil, filled her with a visceral, instinctual wariness.
The Parijati soldiers that Santosh had brought with him to guard Malini climbed nervously. Santosh no longer looked gleeful. As they drew higher and the rain began to splinter the sky, his voice took on a distinctly whiny cast as he asked how long it would be before they reached the top.
“Not long, my lord,” Commander Jeevan said, still calm. If he thought anything of their cowardice, he was sensible enough not to show it. “Maids have prepared the rooms for the princess in advance. I believe you’ll be pleased.”
Malini’s prison was in the northern end of the Hirana. She was led through echoing, empty corridors—through a strange atrium opened all around to the sky—to a large chamber with a lattice wall hidden behind a faded curtain clearly intended to keep out the chill of the atrium. There was only one door. Another had clearly been sealed off—bricked shut to allow only one entrance and exit into the room. There was a single charpoy of woven bamboo for a bed. A trunk for her meager collection of clothing.