Malini exhaled.
“Good,” she said. “That’s good.” And then she turned her head, meeting Priya’s mouth with her own, brushing their lips together once again before she drew back. Drew back and turned away.
“You should go now, if you want to leave before it’s light. Go now, Priya.”
Priya looked at Malini. At her back, a forbidding line.
“I promise you I’ll come,” Priya said to her. “I know you don’t think much of prophecies. Or portents, or fate, or anything of that sort. But one day I am going to come and find you. By then, I expect you will have long forgotten me. Maybe I’ll only be able to walk the edges of whatever mahal you live in, but as… as long as you want me to, I’ll come. If you want me to find you, I’ll come.”
There were so many things Priya didn’t know how to say.
The moment I saw you, I felt a tug. You are the feeling of falling, the tidal waters, the way a living thing will always turn, seeking light. It isn’t that I think you are good or kind, or even that I love you. It is only that, the moment I saw you, I knew I would seek you out. Just as I sought the deathless waters. Just as I sought my brother. Just as I seek all things—without thought, with nothing but want.
Priya said again, “If you want.”
“You’ll always be welcome,” Malini said abruptly, as if the words had been wrenched out of her. “When you come and find me—you’ll be welcome. Now, Priya. Please.”
Priya swallowed. “Good-bye, Malini,” she said.
MALINI
Malini waited until she was sure that Priya would be long gone. She waited hours, in the strange light of the seeker’s path, sat at the writing table, no pen in hand. Then she rose to her feet and left the tent to ask for the whereabouts of Commander Jeevan.
As she’d expected, she was soon informed that Commander Jeevan and his men had returned to Bhumika’s retinue some time ago. When one of Rao’s party had gone to seek them out, approaching cautiously with a lantern held above his head to mark his presence, he’d found no signs of the camp.
“The Ahiranyi vanished,” said Rao. “Left, as far as anyone can tell, of their own accord.”
Rao had brought her food. Clean, simple fare, carried from the monastery: pickled vegetables; fermented beans; roti, cooked to char over the shared fire. She ate it without really tasting it. She’d thought—hoped—Aditya would come question her. But his reluctance to engage with his fate apparently extended even to this. It was Rao instead who stood in her tent, his hands clasped behind him, watching her with careful eyes.
“I told them to go,” Malini said.
Not true. It didn’t matter, of course. Truth and lies were both tools, to be used when most necessary. And she had made a vow to Priya that she intended to keep.
“They could have been useful,” Rao observed.
“Most were not,” said Malini, bluntly.
Rao’s eyes narrowed, a little. Canny. “The one who saved you…”
Malini shook her head. “I am in their debt,” she said. “They saved me from prison, and saved my life. If they’ve chosen to return to defend their nation—I cannot begrudge them. I can only be thankful.”
“Aditya told me you made them a promise.”
“I did,” said Malini. “And I’ll see it fulfilled.”
Rao looked at her for a long moment. “Malini,” he said. Hesitated.
“Yes?”
He lowered his gaze. “Nothing. The camp is packing up. Shall the men arrange you a palanquin?”
She shook her head.
“No need,” she said. “I’ll walk.”
As they neared the end of the seeker’s path, sunlight bled through the trees, untainted by the strange rain-like wash of night.
“No candles,” one of the men was barking at the others. “No pipe smoking, men. Don’t forget that.”
At first glance, the lacquer gardens of Srugna were a grand valley monastery, an ideal worship ground for the nameless. The valley walls were covered in a delicate, rich profusion of leaves of deep green and burnished yellow. The ground was rolling grass and meadow flowers: purple, pink, blue, as small as beads. Between them were trees, delicate and long-limbed, heavy with the weight of fruit and young leaves, berry dark.
But none of it was real. The weather in Srugna was not suitable for the meadow flowers of Dwarali, the sweet grasses found in parts of Alor.
Malini looked at the high tree-ringed slopes that surrounded the gardens, encircled by a vast reservoir of water; the narrow entry across a bridge of woven root and vine. The monastery was both well protected from invasion and terribly vulnerable.