Priya raised her gaze when she lowered Malini’s left foot to the ground. She could not tell if Malini had been crying, not through those already red eyes, the water on her face. But Malini’s jaw was trembling faintly, her hands curled upon her lap into fists.
“Whenever you want to bathe in cold water, you just need to ask,” said Priya. “I’ll arrange it.”
The trembling eased, a little. Malini’s smile was weak but pointed—a lash of white teeth against the gray of her face.
“Thank you,” said Malini. “That is—kind of you, Priya.”
Priya swallowed. Lowered her head. She ground her own teeth together, forcing herself not to ask the razor-winged question racing about her skull.
What do you want from me?
And even more dangerous.
What do I want from you?
BHUMIKA
Even Bhumika’s most loyal guards protested when she called for a palanquin to be arranged.
“Your health, my lady,” they said. “The child…”
“Is inside me,” Bhumika said, “and has no plans to go anywhere yet.”
One said tentatively, “If General Vikram hears of this…”
“He won’t be pleased,” Bhumika admitted, huffing as she donned her strongest, lined boots, with some difficulty. The girth of her belly was ever interfering with her daily business. “But why would he hear of this? Fetch my shawl, please.”
One of her girls brought over the shawl and arranged it neatly around Bhumika’s shoulders.
“We,” one hesitating guard said, “would hate to see more conflict between you and the master.”
“Perhaps I should take a war chariot instead of a palanquin,” mused Bhumika. She smiled, to show she was joking. Mildly, she added, “We’re going now.”
Only a handful of Lord Santosh’s men had remained in the household to act as spies, and she avoided their notice simply by ensuring that her departure did not cross over with any of their guard shifts in the vicinity of the stables or the mahal gates. With the assistance of her own men and women, she had learned to track their patterns—the watches they took, the duties they demanded be assigned to them, the questions they asked.
She had met Santosh only once, when he’d first arrived at the mahal. It hadn’t taken her long to understand what he was: a pompous man, petty and small-minded, and hungry for power. She hadn’t thought much of him.
Santosh liked to think he was keeping a close eye on her husband. He had not yet realized that his spies were being watched in return, and he likely wouldn’t. He lacked the sense to be wary of maidservants. Like many of his ilk, he looked right through them.
Bhumika’s husband had allowed the markets to reopen after the raid on the brothel, albeit reluctantly, out of necessity. People needed to buy food, after all. The streets of Hiranaprastha were still relatively quiet, but people could not put aside all their daily cares because of rebel activity or the general’s soldiers patrolling, even if they wanted to.
Through the net of the palanquin’s sliding doors, Bhumika watched the bustling food stalls pass, tables laden with pans of hot oil for frying freshwater fish, pakoras and samosas, even Srugani-style rice dumplings with carefully pleated edges.
As a girl, Bhumika had loved the bustle of Hiranaprastha, the constant motion and energy of the city. She had never been able to enjoy it directly—as a noble daughter, she had been sheltered, only able to watch the city through a palanquin screen as she did now—but she had preserved the image of it in her mind like a miniature portrait. Noise. Life. Her own quiet body, hidden and protected, watching it all.
The world beyond the palanquin screen had changed since her girlhood. Although the sound and motion remained, the edges of the portrait had frayed. There were more beggars now. The buildings were poorer, drabber. Color had leached out of Hiranaprastha. And Bhumika was no longer just a quiet body, consuming the city with her eyes alone.
She was carried from the bustling center, out beyond the quieter markets, the pottery district where she had once bought exquisite blue vessels for her rose cuttings, over a stretch of overgrown fields and barren hills dotted with houses, toward the burnt, flattened field where imperial traitors were put to death. Here, there were only a few homes—a scattering of dwellings for the men and women who guarded the jail and then cleared away the dead. Behind those houses loomed the high walls that encircled the field. Forbidding walls of wood and stone, rimmed with jagged points of glass. In the morning sun, they shimmered like the dome of a crown.