Chandra had taught her how fear felt. And shame. The way they could settle in your stomach, heavy as a stone. How they could alter your nature to something bidden and chained.
Malini thought of all the ways a knife could be used to kill or maim, her palm itching with bloodlust. Then she offered it blade first to her brother. Chandra took it.
“What did I tell you,” he said, “the last time you behaved improperly?”
“I’m sorry,” Malini said.
“Bow your head,” he replied, as if he hadn’t heard her.
He gripped her by her hair.
And then he began to cut.
“I told you,” he said, sawing through her braid, his other hand roughly gripping her roots, “that women are a reflection of the mothers of flame. You were born to be holy, Malini. I told you if you refuse to behave properly, you’ll have to learn.”
Malini could see Narina right near them, her face red, her hands in fists. Alori had moved beneath the cover of the trees and was utterly still. Watching.
She’d never forget the look on her friends’ faces.
She tried to shove him away—shoved hard, with both hands. He’d merely wrenched her head back and cut harder. She’d felt a piercing pain. He’d cut her flesh. There was a sting, and the heat of blood trailing down her skin.
She’d felt it then, as she’d feel it many times over, in the years that followed: the dizzying sense that when he hacked at her hair he wanted to hack her neck clean too. That hurting her made him love her more intensely and want to hurt her all the more intensely too; as if destroying her was the only way to keep her pure.
She began to weep, then. She wept because fighting had not helped, and she couldn’t bring herself to beg. And his cutting gentled; as if her tears were a submission, a sign of defeat, and so he could afford to be kind to her. As if this was what he’d wanted all along.
She learned. Tears were a weapon of a kind, even if they made her fury smolder and rot and writhe inside her.
“Chandra,” said a voice. And her brother’s blade paused.
Malini’s eldest brother, Aditya, stood on the veranda to the garden. He was still dressed for the practice yard, bare-chested in nothing but a dhoti, no turban to hide his sweat-slicked hair. He crossed the garden, his tread quick. Behind him, in the shadows, stood their mother. Her pallu was drawn over her face, her head lowered.
When Malini saw him she cried all the more furiously, great heaving sobs even as her heart stayed spiteful and furious inside her.
“Leave her,” said Aditya. He sounded tired.
“She had a weapon. A woman should know better.”
“She is a child. Let Mother deal with her discipline.”
“Mother would ruin her if she could,” Chandra muttered. “The priests say—”
“I don’t care what the priests say,” Aditya said. “Come with me, Malini.”
She didn’t have to be told twice. She ran to his side.
Aditya guided her to the veranda. After a moment, Narina and Alori followed.
“No one else thinks like he does, little dove,” Aditya said gently. He lightly brushed the shorn ends of her hair. “This is a more enlightened time. But you’ve no need for a knife. You have guards enough to protect you, and two brothers who love you.”
“And who will protect me from my brothers?” Malini asked.
“Chandra didn’t really want to hurt you.”
Malini knew Aditya was wrong. Chandra had wanted to. And he’d managed to.
But Aditya wouldn’t understand, if she tried to explain it, so she didn’t.
That night, when she and Narina and Alori had curled up like pups under one blanket, Alori tucked a sheathed blade between them. Another one of her brother’s knives.
“He wants us to have it,” Alori said. And: “He’s sorry, Malini.”
But no prince of Alor was responsible for Malini’s pain.
She learned that day to turn to a carapace of meekness rather than showing the true mettle of her fury. She learned, when Chandra hacked her hair, that there was a way she was expected to be, and if she failed to be it, there would be a price to pay.
Only her mother knew what she was about. Once her mother sat beside her on the bench swing in the same garden where Malini had learned her lesson.
“I am going to tutor you and your girls,” her mother said, after a long silence. “It’s high time you learned. The philosophy of military strategy and leadership, the teachings of the first mothers—these are things a princess should know of.”