Vikram did not bother to fear the Hirana. When the temple elders still lived, it had been the regent’s responsibility to supervise the temple council. Every month, he had been guided up the Hirana by one of their youngest temple children and had eaten with the elders. He hadn’t thought much of them, those relics of a long-gone age—a time when Ahiranya had still been powerful—playing their symbolic role. But still, he had found them quaintly fascinating. They had been friendly to him, even shown him the little tricks of magic they could still perform, shifting the Hirana’s surface subtly to their will.
He was not afraid of the Hirana. But he was afraid of the consequences of this night.
An assassin. A Parijati princess, howling and weeping, insensible with terror. If not for the intervention of one maidservant—a thing of pure chance—the emperor’s sister would be dead, and Vikram’s own death sentence would have been sealed.
He reached the Hirana’s summit, and the guards at the door bowed to him. Their commander opened the gates and led him in.
“She’s here, my lord,” the guard said in a low voice. “Lady Pramila hasn’t left her side.”
They entered a cloister room, an outcropping from the western corridor of the Hirana. Princess Malini, only sister of Emperor Chandra, king of kings, master of the empire of Parijatdvipa, was kneeling on the floor, vomiting into a bucket.
“Take it away,” the princess gasped, shoving the bucket one-handed, even as she gripped its edge precariously for balance. “Please.”
“And have you ruin the floor?” Her jailer’s voice was grim. “No. Keep it close, there’s a girl.”
“General Vikram begs your indulgence, princess,” said the guard, bowing his head once more, drawing back into the hallway. He left Vikram alone with the women.
The princess lifted her head, her face gray, eyes wet.
Before her brother had sent her to be imprisoned, isolated, upon the Hirana—where she may contemplate her decisions and the state of her soul, as I have contemplated it, in a place befitting of her fate, the emperor had written—Vikram had seen the princess once, on a visit to the imperial mahal in Parijat itself. She’d been a genial and pretty thing, wrapped in fine silks. Royal daughters did not wear crowns. Instead they wore imperial symbols: jasmine flowers, yellow and white, twined into a halo; marigolds and roses, gold and carnelian, fresh and still touched with dew, bound to the roots and ends of a heavy braid.
The woman he looked upon now did not resemble the flower-wreathed princess of Parijat. She did not even look very much like the princess who had arrived nearly a month ago at his mahal. That girl had been quiet and dour but healthy enough, tall and shapely with severe dark eyes and a wary turn of the mouth.
This woman was thin and dirty, panting hysterically, skin mottled with tears, eyes sunken and red-rimmed.
Mothers of flame protect him, he should have concerned himself far more closely with her welfare than he had, emperor’s orders be damned.
“Princess,” he said, speaking in Dvipan—the formal language of court, and a royal daughter’s mother tongue. “Were you injured?”
“Merely frightened, my lord,” her jailer said quickly.
Vikram looked at the princess, wavering where she kneeled, her face flushed with suffering.
“She requires a physician,” he said.
“She does not, my lord,” said Pramila. “She has a frail constitution. She merely needs rest. Medicine, and rest.”
Vikram was not convinced. Far from it. How could he be, when the princess continued to tremble, her hair as loose and wild about her as a priest’s, her body all gaunt ugliness?
“Princess Malini,” he said once more. “Tell me how you fare.”
He saw the princess swallow. Saw her raise her chin. “An assassin tried to take my life, General,” the princess croaked out, in a voice that wavered like flame. “My imperial brother and master would never have allowed such a thing in his household.”
Ah.
He was conscious of the eyes upon him. The guards that surrounded him, barring Jeevan, were all Santosh’s men and not his own. And Santosh had plenty of reason to report any and all of Vikram’s failures back to the emperor.
Emperor Chandra clearly did not care, overmuch, for the princess’s well-being. He would not have sent her here if he did. But nonetheless she was royal blood, sequestered in Vikram’s care. If she had died at an assassin’s hands imprisoned in Ahiranya, if Vikram had failed to keep her safe, and allowed imperial blood to be spilled on his lands…