Malini’s face, cold and resolute, was the last thing she saw.
MALINI
The first time Malini learned how to hold a knife was also the day she learned how to weep.
She and Narina were playing in her mother’s flower garden, profuse with both lilies and water lotuses in small ponds, zinnia and hibiscus. They were being Dwarali merchants, crossing the borders of Parijatdvipa into the dangerous wildernesses of nomadic Babure and Jagatay territory. For that, they’d needed thick cloaks—for some reason, Narina was insistent that merchants always wore thick cloaks—but they also needed weaponry.
“To protect our wares,” Narina explained.
“I would expect we’d have guards to protect our wares,” Malini had said.
“Not everyone has guards, Malini,” Narina huffed.
“I see,” said Malini. “We’re not very good merchants, then. Or we’d be able to afford guards, wouldn’t we?”
Alori gave a small sigh.
“Don’t argue, please,” she said. “Anyway, I know where we can get weapons.”
Alori was the only daughter of the king of Alor, who had enough sons to constitute his own small army. Alori was quiet and small and had a gift for vanishing from view, fading into insignificance. But her quiet wasn’t timidity, and she guided Narina and Malini confidently to the room where the youngest of her nameless brothers slept. On the way through the corridors, they could hear the sound of thudding wood and the clang of chains below. The sound was assurance enough that the imperial princes—Malini’s brothers—and their attendant lords were busy sparring in the practice yard.
The girls went into the room and rooted through the trunk at the foot of Alori’s brother’s bed. He didn’t keep his mace or his saber or any of his more impressive weapons in the room. But there were twin katara, sheathed in leather at the bottom of his trunk, and two daggers with carvings of beady-eyed fish at the hilts. It was only as they were leaving the room that Malini had the sudden thought to look beneath the mattress. That was where she stored her own treasures, and her instinct rewarded her when she grasped a simple knife. It wasn’t a fine enough thing to be a dagger. There was no sinuous curve to the blade or decoration on the hilt. It was plain and brutal and sharp. Malini pocketed it.
They raced back to the garden, where they collapsed into fits of laughter.
It was Alori who offered to show Malini how to use the knife.
“My brothers taught me,” she said. “Here, this is how to hold it.”
There was a trick to holding a proper blade. Confidence, a shape to the grip. Malini extended the knife in front of her and felt a strange, blazing feeling unfold in her chest. She smiled.
“Let’s protect our wares,” she said.
She was pretending to be a Babure bandit, standing on the edge of a high rockery, waving the knife in front of her, when Narina and Alori—standing below her, yelling up at her valiantly—fell suddenly silent.
Malini was a sensible child. She lowered the knife to her side and straightened. Turned. Behind her, she saw a man’s figure rising, limned to shadow by sunlight. But she knew the shape of those shoulders; that turban, with pearls around the edge and a single peacock feather stitched to the crown. The slippers of gold and richly dyed vermilion on his feet.
Chandra stood before her. He was young, only a few years older than her. But he already had a hardness around the eyes, a stony quality of someone furious with his lot in life. He looked down at her with disdain, and Malini was suddenly conscious of her uncovered hair, her bare and dirty feet. Her weapon.
“Malini,” he said. “Where did you get the knife?”
Malini said nothing. Her palms were hot.
“I heard you in the corridor,” he said, approaching her. “Oh, you thought you’d gone unseen, I know. But I wasn’t in the practice yard with the others. I was praying at the family altar. Speaking with the high priest.”
“About what?” Malini asked.
Perhaps if she pretended that nothing was amiss—that she couldn’t see the curl of his lip, the narrowness of his eyes—his anger would melt away. Such wild hopes, she had.
Somehow his mouth thinned further.
“Give it to me,” he said.
Alori had told her, with a laugh, how a jab beneath the hollow of the ribs could kill a man. How she could cut a tendon. How she could slice a throat.
She’d said it all mildly, easily. Those were all things Alori’s brothers had revealed to her, as if a girl had equal right to weapons and knowledge, as if they expected her to spill blood by her own hands.