“The thorns kept the worst out,” the maidservant Gauri said gruffly. She walked with obvious pain, but there was a steel to her that told Bhumika she’d held her own well since Bhumika’s departure. “Those are vicious, my lady. We were glad of them.”
A handful of exhausted Parijati and Ahiranyi soldiers, the armed maids, the orphans—these were the people who had held the mahal since Bhumika’s departure.
The servants looked uneasily at the rebels but said nothing. It was a relief, at least, that the rebels possessed the good sense not to wear their masks. But Bhumika had no desire to test her servants-turned-soldiers, or the fragile, uneasy truce that had grown between her retinue and Ashok’s. It would not take much, she knew, to destroy it.
“Take her,” she said, turning to Jeevan and handing him her sleeping daughter. “If I don’t return, she’ll need a wet nurse. Speak to the maids. They’ll arrange it.”
He stared at her, stricken.
“I must go to the Hirana,” she said. “I must gain the strength we need to keep this country safe.”
He looked as if he were struggling for words.
“Speak up,” she said to him.
“She will have no one,” he said finally. “My lady.”
“If I die, then she’s no one’s child,” Bhumika said. “And that would be fitting, I suppose. It was my fate once, and I refused it.” But she touched her own face to Padma’s regardless, and breathed her in, and kissed her forehead before straightening up.
Jeevan bowed his head to her. Said nothing more, as she left, his hands gently clasped around the small bundle.
Together, they began the walk to the Hirana. The rebels. Her siblings. Priya, expression determined. Ashok, half-conscious, blood trickling from his nose.
“Lean on me,” said Priya.
Ashok shook his head, exhausted.
“I can carry you,” said Priya, taking his arm.
RAO
If the rain came, the plan would fail.
As it was, the waters in the tunnel beneath the lacquer gardens were swollen, a reservoir that rose to the chests of the men who lowered themselves down first into the dark. For all that Malini was a tall woman, Rao feared she would not be able to stand in it.
But she lowered herself down anyway. It touched her chin.
The warriors who led the way held their wrapped weapons above them, covered in sacking to protect them from water damage. The water was fetid and stank, and Rao had to resist the urge to gag.
Be thankful, he told himself, that it has not recently rained. Be thankful we’re not drowning here.
Be thankful there’s a way out at all.
He steeled himself, moving forward in the dark.
They had left men and women in the lacquer gardens. They’d had to. “If there are soldiers coming here, they’ll see clear as day if the place is empty,” the Dwarali lord had said. “So I’ll leave a boy or two, and I’ll ask the rest of you fine men to do the same.”
The other princes and lords had agreed, and done so. And Rao had not looked at Malini. He hadn’t needed to. He knew how carefully she spun her webs. Her silence, when the men spoke, meant nothing at all.
The priests of the nameless had elected to remain. “This is our place, and the site of our service and duty,” one man had said, tranquil as he kneeled in a copse of lacquer trees, beneath the pearly sheen of their leaves and the slick, shimmering oil of their bark. “The nameless will decide what becomes of us.”
“Likely nothing will come of this,” Mahesh, a Parijati lord who’d been thoroughly loyal to Aditya from the start, had responded gruffly. “But we thank you for your bravery.”
“It isn’t bravery,” Aditya had murmured to Rao later, as the men packed their gear and their weapons—as Malini watched from beneath the shade of the monastery’s veranda, her pallu drawn over her face. “It’s merely our calling. Acceptance of the winds of fate.”
“I think acceptance of your fate can be brave,” Rao had said in response, thinking of Alori. “To face your death calmly… it can be brave.”
Aditya must have thought of her then, too. He looked suddenly stricken.
“Rao, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s nothing,” Rao had cut in. And it was nothing. It had to be nothing. But he could not have borne Aditya’s apologies. “We’d best prepare to go.”
Now they moved farther and farther through the tunnels of water, great stone-lined hollows, with the darkness growing steadily thicker, closing in upon them. No lanterns. No fire. There could not be fire here. Not yet, and hopefully not ever. He looked back once more at Malini. She was almost invisible, but he could see her eyes, the whites of them a gleam against water.