Excerpt: THE LOTUS EMPIRE by Tasha Suri
This sweeping epic fantasy brings the acclaimed Burning Kingdoms trilogy to a heart–stopping close, as an ancient magic returns to Ahiranya and threatens its very foundations, Empress Malini and priestess Priya will stop at nothing to save their kingdoms—even if it means they must destroy each other.
Read the first four chapters of The Lotus Empire, on sale November 12, below!
PROLOGUE
This was her last hope.
The monsoon rain was pouring. The woman rode through it on horseback, without the cover of a parasol, letting the water soak her through. The trees of the forest loomed around her, black in the fading light.
She missed, with a sudden and knife-sharp grief, the flower gardens of home. White jasmine and needle-flower, and her pink roses. There were no trees to loom over her there, and no parched battlefields underfoot, seeded with nothing but dead flesh to draw scavenging birds.
The only flowers she had seen in months had been on the skin of her enemies. The yaksa who had killed her father had been flower-haired—a glowing, smiling girl-like thing with pits for teeth and arms sharpened to fine points. She had skewered him through, and laughed as she did it.
The woman shuddered at the memory, and shuddered again from the cold. She should have traveled in a chariot instead, but she loathed to be contained.
The monastery loomed out of the darkness ahead of her. Its gray stone shone silver in the shafts of dull light that broke through the trees.
Her army halted as the priest emerged, and bowed, and offered to lead her to the lake. She dismounted and followed him, boots heavy on the wet soil.
She thought of her sons. Her eldest three boys, at war. Her youngest, still in the care of a wet nurse. She wondered if she would see them again. Sikander, her oldest, had promised to meet her on the road from Alor with news from home. She had carried sweets for him just in case. Dried mango. It was the fresh he loved the most, but that she couldn’t easily provide. They’d burned all the orchards in Harsinghar to keep the yaksa at bay.
The lake was black. Although the rain fell fiercely, the lake was untouched, a disc of glossy stillness.
She kneeled by its side. Her salwar kameez grew wetter at the knees.
“Look,” the priest said. “Gaze into the water. Pray for the nameless to speak.”
She looked. The darkness showed her nothing. Nothing for a long time, as she shivered and the night drew in.
She had been foolish to come here. What could she see that a priest of the nameless could not? There were no answers to this war. They would fight the yaksa until their last breaths, and they would be defeated. There was no hope anymore.
Something flickered in the darkness. She leaned closer.
It grew. First, an ember. Then a lamp. Then a blazing fire, swallowing up the water, swirling in screaming light.
Let me in, the fire said. And the woman said, without hesitation, Yes.
The fire was gone. The lake was black again.
“My lady,” the priest said hesitantly. “Have you returned to yourself?”
He had seen nothing. She pressed her tongue to her teeth. Searched for her voice.
“Yes.”
“Did the nameless speak?” the priest asked, eager and terrified.
She raised her head. Her vision swam, golden as fire. Despite the rain she felt suddenly warm—lit like a lantern from within.
Not the nameless, she thought. But it did not matter. They were saved.
“I know how to kill the yaksa,” Divyanshi said.
1
PRIYA
On the first day, they made her kneel.
There, at the base of the Hirana, on soil laden with flowers, she lowered herself down. Her clothes were already filthy from her long journey. It didn’t matter that the ground made her filthier. The yaksa with her brother’s face had told her to kneel, so she had.
He bowed over her. Leaves surrounded her. It was like being beneath the boughs of a great tree.
“Priya,” he said. “Wait here. Will you wait?”
What else could she do? She had come here, hadn’t she? If a yaksa wanted her to kneel, she would. If they wanted her to walk again—walk and walk until her feet bled and she reached the edge of the world, and beyond—then she would. What else could she do but obey?
She was so impossibly tired.
“Yes,” she said thinly. “I will.”
The shadows of his leaves, points of cool darkness on her skin, rustled. They drifted away, leaving her in bare sunlight.
She was alone now, in silence, but the green was a cry in her ears: the susurration of growing things. The sharp, sap-bright crack of things rising from the soil, gasping for sunlight. All of Ahiranya, under her knees, inside her, around her.
Someone was approaching.
She raised her head again. But this figure did not tower over her. This ghost was small, slight—no more than a boy. Silvery, flat eyes. Soft petals flowering from his shoulders.
“Nandi?” Her mouth shaped his name without her say-so. Her little temple brother. A memory struck her like a clear bell: Nandi laughing, cheeks dimpled.
Nandi, lying dead on the ground in a burning room.
This Nandi smiled. Too many sharp teeth.
She touched the ground beneath him. Green things were growing beneath his bare feet. The world at this angle was all vibrant soil and falling leaves the color of moonlight. He curled his toes, and she heard the click of wood.
“You’re not Nandi,” she said. “I am sorry.” She bowed, or tried to bow, in the way she’d always done before the effigies of the yaksa, with her forehead pressed to the ground and her hands beneath her. But her body had other ideas, and took that moment to collapse. Mouth full of dirt.
Hands on her upper arms. Lifting her back to her knees. The yaksa wearing Ashok’s face was holding her up.
“You’re tired,” Nandi said. “Come with us.”
“Where is Bhumika?”
“Come with us,” he said again, and it was not a gentle urging any longer. It was an order. And because it was an order, her body obeyed. She rose, until she was standing. Walking.
She followed the two yaksa to the Hirana. There, in front of her, were familiar carvings. Familiar stone, weathered and ancient. She felt an ache: a pang like homesickness or homecoming.
Nandi touched a hand to the stone and it shifted, parting to open a way for them. The tunnel ahead was dark, but it called to her. She heard a song inside it.
My sapling.
Into the darkness she went. She walked, and walked, and the darkness opened—softened by blue light. And there before her were the deathless waters, and before it three more figures. Against the light behind them they were faceless, fleshless. No more than shadow.
A sudden fear gripped her heart like a fist. A yaksa would step forward wearing Bhumika’s face. Bhumika, hollowed out, with flowering eyes and wooden smile, Bhumika gone—
Then one stepped forward, and it was Sanjana.
It was better. Terrible, but better, and when Sanjana told her to kneel again Priya did so without complaint, with something almost like thankfulness.
Elder Chandni and Elder Sendhil followed, and for a brief moment Priya wondered, wildly, whether she had died. How could she be meeting the dead if she were still alive?
“Priya,” Sanjana said softly. She stepped behind Priya and took hold of her hair, her touch nearly tender. She gathered it up in her hands. “You’re home.”
She felt Sanjana’s fingertips move up to her scalp—ten points of sharp touch, ten seeds ready to take root.
“Why am I here?” Priya asked. “Yaksa, ancient ones—why here, by the deathless waters? I’d do better resting in a bed.”
There was something like laughter—rustling, rippling.
“Your soul needs rest,” the yaksa who was not Sendhil said. “More than your body.”
The one wearing Ashok’s face kneeled before her.
“You carry something precious within you,” he told her, his voice hushed. He grasped her hands, turning them over. The bluish light of the deathless waters reflected on her skin, turning the brown of her palms soft gray. “We want to protect you.”
She felt the sangam pour over her—cosmic and rippling, mingling with the light of the deathless waters before her. She breathed out, only half knowing her lungs, and felt Sanjana’s nails press deeper against her scalp, points of grounding, points of pain.
Is this healing? Priya thought. Is this rest? It certainly didn’t feel like it. But she had stabbed Malini and watched the terror and betrayal fill her eyes. She had left Sima behind. And Bhumika—wherever Bhumika was—could not help her.
“Rest,” Nandi urged again. And Priya…
Priya closed her eyes.
* * *
On the second day, she dreamt.
She was in the sangam. Wholly, deeply, immersed in rivers of green and gold and blood red. And they were around her, the yaksa. All five of them, all utterly inhuman. Fish-scaled, flowereyed, lichen-fleshed—river water oozing from their skin, and pearly sap adorning their finger bones. She loved them, a little, or perhaps entirely. She’d worshipped them all her life, after all. But she feared them too, and that was bitter, a sharp thorn under her tongue.
Are you hollow? the yaksa asked. Are you ours, wholly and utterly?
Are you hers?
Yes, she told them. Yes and yes. She had cut out her heart, after all. If they could see her soul, then surely they could see that. Her ribs of wood, and no human heart within them.
They picked at her. Picked her apart. They asked her again, and again.
Can you be trusted?
Will you stay? Will you serve?
Yes.
She isn’t enough. She isn’t ready. She isn’t strong enough.
Words not meant for her that darted through her anyway; silvery arrows, piercing her.
Will you be what you need to be? Will you reach for her? Can you find her? Can you break your bones, your heart, your mind in her service? Can you yield?
Yield to it, Priya. Beloved. Yield.
Yes, and yes, and yes, and yes—
On the third day, she stopped counting.
Someone pressed water to her mouth. She drank.
She slept. She dreamt of the war: the churn of chariot wheels, and the Saketan warriors around her racing forward on their horses, and Sima holding up a shield to protect her.
More water. Pangs of hunger through her belly.
She was walking into the imperial court. She was sliding a knife between Malini’s ribs. She was kissing Malini—kissing her even though she hadn’t kissed Malini when she’d stabbed her. Kisses that tasted of blood, salt. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Hate me, you can hate me.
Hate me and live.
She woke. Back in her own body, breathing and aching, sprawled in the dirt. There were flowers growing from her wrists, burrowing their heads into the soil. The yaksa were still there. She could feel them, even before she caught sight of them; kneeling as she had kneeled, as if they were tending to her, worshipping her.
She was dizzy with hunger. Her body hurt.
“Where is Bhumika?” Her voice cracked. “Where is my sister?”
Silence.
“Padma, then,” Priya said, when no answer came. “Where is she?” She rose up on her elbows, dislodging growing things—feeling the soil under her thrum at her presence. “I came back for my family,” Priya went on. “For my people. If you won’t tell me about Bhumika, then at least tell me her child is safe.”
“You think we would hurt a child?” Ashok—not Ashok—asked. But there was something assessing in the fathomless liquid of his eyes, in the leaf-rustle rasp of his voice.
“I think I know what nature does,” Priya replied slowly. And what were the yaksa, if not nature? “And I know how I was raised. And I know… what was asked of me.”
“Do you think,” Sanjana asked, “that you have the right to ask?”
“I am an elder,” Priya said. “I am thrice-born. Who else can ask, if not me?”
They said nothing, but the silence was weighty. There was a question inside it. It reminded her of her childhood—of her elders teaching her. They were waiting for her to fill the silence herself; to give a proper answer.
“That’s what an elder should be,” she went on, her throat sore. “The one who can ask. Not just—a worshipper. If I am wrong, yaksa, then I am—sorry.”
Elder Chandni—or the yaksa who mimicked her—leaned forward. Her dark hair was shining with water.
“Your sister ran,” Elder Chandni said. “From her duties. From her purpose, in cowardice.”
Lie. Bhumika would never have run. But as ground down as Priya was, she knew better than to say it.
“Did you kill her for it?” Priya asked. Her voice trembled. She couldn’t help it.
“No,” the yaksa wearing Ashok’s face said. His eyes were fixed on the distance—on nothing, and everything. “We did not.”
Was that a lie, too? She had not seen Bhumika in the sangam in so long.
She bowed to the earth again. Flowers against her face, the smell of petrichor seeping against her lips.
“Yaksa,” she said. “I’m only mortal. Let me go. You’ve seen enough of my soul. My body needs to rest, too. To eat and to rest.” And I need to find my sister.
“How long,” the yaksa asked, “do you think you have been here?”
She turned her head, looking at him, then through him, at the rivulets of shining blue water, working their way down the stone wall. How long had the water run, bleeding like light in that same pattern, for the stone to scar as it had?
“I don’t know,” she said dully.
“If you were simply human,” Sendhil murmured, “you would be dead.”
She traced her lips with her tongue. It almost felt unnatural: tasting the salt of her skin, feeling the parched dryness of her mouth. Simply human. What was she meant to do with those words? She knew she wasn’t simply human.
But she was human enough to be thirsty. Her knees hurt. And for all they’d been picking her apart from the soul upward, every shadowy root-and-spirit thread of her, she was more than her soul in the sangam. More than the sap under her skin. There was blood and flesh in her yet.
“You have my heart,” said Priya. “Mani Ara has my heart. And you’ve seen everything of me that matters. Let me leave here. Let me serve you properly.”
“And what service must you provide to us?” Elder Chandni prompted.
A flash of memory. Malini’s betrayed eyes. A thorn blade. The feel of blood and flesh. She knew what Malini would do.
“There’s going to be a war,” Priya said. “The Parijatdvipans—they’ll come. And you will need me. I’ll serve. Just as the elders served in the Age of Flowers.”
She raised her head, and saw as Chandni’s mouth shaped a slow smile.
“Let me out, yaksa,” Priya said. “So I can do the work you need from me.”
She almost asked again. But she bit down on her tongue instead. Begging wouldn’t get her anywhere. The yaksa would not respond to pleading. She’d learned a little more about them, in the time they had spent rummaging through her skin. She waited. Waited.
“Resting has fashioned something useful out of you,” Chandni said indulgently. “Go, then, Elder Priya. Tend to your flesh. And then we will prepare for our war.”
2
MALINI
Every night she returned to the court of the imperial mahal. She could not help it. Her dreams carried her there.
Every night was the same. Blue stone beneath her, the light of an unseen moon veiling the white marble, the pale sandstone, in waterdeep shades. The gold of a fire ahead of her, blooming into flowers. Marigolds and ashoka and roses of bloody red, tumbling from the flames to her feet. And there, waiting for her, always: Priya.
Priya with leaves falling softly from her tangled hair. Priya, weeping—tracks of fire glittering on her cheeks.
Priya sliding a knife through Malini’s ribs.
Malini woke, as she always did, with a sharp pain burrowing its way through her chest. She kept her eyes closed for a long moment, then rose to her feet. Removed her blouse with careful fingers. Pressed her fingertips to her own skin.
Smooth flesh first, and then the scars: the roughness of them, ugly beneath her fingers, a rope of hurt flesh knotted anew.
Touching the scars reminded her the knife was gone. Priya was gone. There was no reason at all for the pain.
She lay back down. Chest throbbing. A door open in her skull, a fire and a knife at the end of it.
The sun rose on the day of Aditya’s funeral. She’d half expected that it would not.
The sky was still rose-pale when maids dragged buckets of fireheated water into the marble bathing room, pouring them into the bath. Malini followed after them, slow-footed, heavy-hearted.
She lowered herself into the deep well of the bath, the water scalding around her, so hot it made her skin sting and ache. She closed her eyes, breathing the steam in as one maid poured oil into the water and another gathered up her hair, working through the tangles with an ivory comb and jasmine oil.
The maids moved silently. The smell of flower attar, even diluted, was nearly overpowering. But even so, when Malini rose out of the pool, she dipped her hand into the jug still held in a maid’s waiting hands and pressed the fragrant oil behind her ear.
She knew how strong a pyre smelled. Better to smell flowers than fire, if she had the choice.
A drying cloth was wrapped around her body, her hair carefully daubed dry and then bound into a braid. No flowers in her hair today. No jewels at her wrists or her nose, her ears or throat. The sari that the maids wound around her body was pure mourning white.
Her chest ached as she moved at her maids’ gentle urging. Pulled and tugged, the tight, scarred skin resisted her movements. The pain was all the greater because she refused to distract herself from it. Instead, she focused resolutely on her own body: the sweat already threatening to rise to her skin, the fading heat of the water, the scent of jasmine, and the ever-present ache within her ribs.
Funerals were meant to be performed as soon after a death as possible: the body burned, prayers made, mourning begun. But Aditya’s funeral was no normal funeral. He had sacrificed himself for the empire. In the heart of a fort in Saketa, he had chosen to die.
Aditya had burned as the mothers burned. Aditya had smiled, or so people said—smiled and made the warriors around him vow to serve her, before the flames had consumed him whole.
Empress Malini, one of those warriors had said, head bowed. In death, he gave you an everlasting crown.
She let out a shuddering breath, tears threatening at her eyes. One of her maids made a high-pitched sound, resonant sympathy, her hands fluttering. She settled on adjusting Malini’s pallu.
Strange to cry, when her heart felt so leaden inside her. Sometimes grief was pain, and sometimes it was simply absence—the wound in the shape of things that could not be felt or touched or comprehended.
A figure entered. Malini turned and saw Lata standing in the doorway, white-garbed and solemn.
“It’s time,” Lata said.
In the first hall stood Deepa and Raziya, and a whole throng of highborn dressed in uniform white. Some were already weeping. But Raziya was dry-eyed. She met Malini’s eyes for a moment, then bowed—one sweeping movement mimicked in a ripple by the women around her.
Malini waited until they rose from their bows. The leaden feeling had spread from her heart to the rest of her body. She was not sure she could move her legs. But she had to. There was no alternative.
One step, then another. Another. And her court of women followed her, skirts whispering, a rustle like birds seeking flight.
She walked from her chambers, out, out.
And there, waiting for her, was a sea of highborn men. Her lords and kings. The rulers of her empire.
They bowed, too.
Through the throng of them, the High Priest emerged. Hemanth was the head of the priesthood that served the mothers of flame, and by extension served her. He was meant to be her spiritual advisor, by stature and standing.
But he was also the man who made Chandra into what Chandra had been. He was also the man who had burned women. The man who had almost burned her.
“Empress,” Hemanth said. She could not read his expression. But she counted the new lines of grief and tension around his mouth. Noted the redness of his eyes. He was suffering, at least, and that pleased her. “Prince Aditya’s soul awaits our prayers.”
Distantly, through the high windows and from remote corridors, she could hear weeping and song. Prayer and music, and the beating of mourning drums. Would the mourning have been so ostentatious if the rot was not flowering across the empire, if rumors of the yaksa rising and walking once more had not begun to spread? People needed something to have faith in.
“High Priest,” she said, loud enough for the waiting men to hear her. Her voice was clear as a bell. “Show us how to revere him.”
Chandra’s funeral had not been like this. It had been swift, and small. Ignoble. No one had been willing to burn his corpse during her sickness, and by the time she had recovered from her wound his body had rotted. Even the flowers and perfumes laid on his pyre, and the attar of roses dashed from small silver filigree jugs by the priests onto his remains, had not been enough to cover the smell. So there had been no public display of mourning for the people of Harsinghar to wail or cheer over. Instead, there had only been members of her council and the priests, and Malini herself. And the corpse, of course, swathed in white cloth to conceal its decay.
But for Aditya’s funeral there was weeping and wailing. The people of Harsinghar had left sheaves of flowers outside the mahal’s walls. And Aditya’s funeral pyre—with no corpse to burn—was heaped with garlands. Pink, red; the rich, profuse gold of marigolds; the delicate white, too, of needle-flower.
She kneeled, prostrating herself before the bodiless pyre. All the people around her followed suit, and their prayers were a roar like waves, a billowing storm in her ears. Their grief was so ostentatious it was more akin to a celebration: of death, of sacrifice, of the faith of the mothers.
Of Aditya. Not as she had known him—not her brother, with all his infuriating flaws, his gentle eyes, his unbending morality—but as the immortal thing he’d become. Not a mother of flame, but a son of one—dying for Malini’s empire, Malini’s throne, Malini’s fate.
She could not complain, could she? By the time she’d clawed her way from her sickbed, his tale had fused with her own, nourished her power even when sickness should have leached authority away from her. So empress she continued to be, crowned anew in the flames of his death.
She closed her eyes as Hemanth spoke his name.
Prince Aditya.
She couldn’t remember the last thing she had said to him. She’d searched her memory, racked it. But the more she thought about it, the less she could recall: the more the memory writhed and twisted, evading her. Her mind, punishing her, or showing her compassion.
Malini opened her eyes, blinked as Aditya’s face wavered before her swimming gaze.
Hemanth had fallen silent. He stepped forward and, with reverence, lit the pyre.
As the flames caught and rose, the sound of prayers rose with them.
The jasmine oil was a mistake. She realized that now. She could smell nothing but flowers: rotting flowers, burning flowers, flowers turning to smoke and flowers on her own skin, and the absence of burning flesh was almost more awful than the presence of it. Her stomach roiled. She almost wavered where she sat; almost slipped like all her bones had melted and she was nothing but wilting flesh. She felt the possibility of it like nausea, vertigo, and held it—somehow—at bay.
Maybe she was slipping. Losing her grasp on herself, on authority; maybe she was unraveling.
She hunched forward. A tear slipped free. That was fine. A little grief. A respectable amount of grief. A grief like worship. That could be allowed. That could—perhaps—be a necessity.
After the prayers ended she felt Lata’s hand on one arm and Raziya’s on the other. They raised her up. She found her feet and moved, the crowd moving with her.
She walked from the court to a veranda overlooking the city. The sky was painfully blue above her, and her skirt began to billow, caught in a sweet breeze.
She looked out at the city. At its people, so many of them that she could not discern individual faces, only the movement and sway of bodies, all palely dressed, exultant and mourning and joyous in their grieving under the rise of the beating sun.
Empress Malini. Mother Malini. Empress, Empress, Empress.
She felt the tale settle around her, written in smoke and in death.
And her ribs still burned, and burned, and burned.
3
RAO
“There will be war, of course.”
The snap of a flask. Liquor being poured. The scent of it was sharp—iron-rich, so close to blood that Rao could only turn his face from it and stare at one of the lamps along the wall. The flame inside it flickered orange and yellow.
A flame could burn blue, if it burned hot enough. Rao knew that now.
He kept silent as another voice muttered, and then another. War, yes. There would be war. The Ahiranyi had sent an assassin, after all, to murder Parijatdvipa’s holy empress. There would have to be vengeance. No—justice. The Ahiranyi would learn Parijatdvipa’s strength once more.
An assassin. The word rattled strangely in Rao’s head.
Priya had saved them all at the Veri river. She’d fought for them, nearly died for them. He’d dragged her flower-riven body from the riverbed himself. Without her the empress would have no throne at all.
But there was no denying that she had stabbed Malini, in the end.
“…impassable borders,” another man was murmuring. Rao turned his head, following the voice. One of the Srugani. Rao did not recognize him, and had no interest in recognizing him, but he noted the sweat on the man’s forehead and the tension in his jaw with a disinterested eye, just for the sake of something to do apart from thinking of flame, and flame, and flame. “We sent warriors to Ahiranya, but the trees consumed them. Like teeth in the maw of a beast. You will not believe me, my brothers, but if I were asked to choose between the jaws of a tiger or Ahiranya’s forest…” He shook his head. “I would choose the tiger,” he said heavily.
I believe it, Rao thought. He’d seen what Ahiranya’s forest was like firsthand. He’d seen what the rot could do to a body.
He said nothing. The highborn around him shifted uneasily on their bolster pillows. There was a clink, as more liquor was opened and shared.
Mourning meant no liquor, no gambling, no sex until the ritual of grieving was done. The empress and her court of loyal women prayed still by the smoking ashes of flowers. He hadn’t gone to the funeral—he would rather have cut out his own eyes than watch an empty pyre burn in Aditya’s name—but he’d heard florid descriptions of Malini’s noble misery as she kneeled by the flowers, and her gray face, and her white grief clothes, bleached like sun-touched bones. A perfect mourner. She had to be cajoled to even eat.
And yet here were her men in a dark room with the shutters closed and the curtains drawn and candles burning, drinking their way through the finest liquors in Parijat and eating their fill as they pondered the doom ahead of them.
“The priests claim the yaksa will return,” a young Parijati noble said. His voice trembled a little.
A murmur of unease. One man laughed.
“Impossible,” he said.
“If the priests say it, then it must be so,” another man said. There was a ripple of disagreement.
The yaksa are returning, Rao thought. He’d seen a yaksa’s severed arm, a relic of the Age of Flowers, blooming with new life. He’d seen a vision from the nameless god in a pool of water. A coming. An inevitable coming.
He’d seen Aditya’s eyes when Rao had shown him the severed arm. He’d seen the moment when Aditya had made his choice: when Aditya had decided the nameless had a purpose for him, that it was time to burn—
Rao stood abruptly, knocking over a cup of wine in the process. The man next to him swore as it pooled messily on his lap.
“Apologies,” Rao said shortly. The man opened his mouth to say something—but when he met Rao’s eyes, it abruptly snapped shut.
Rao turned and left the room. No one made any effort to stop him.
For days, Rao had been possessed by a vague but urgent desire to vanish into the anonymity of a pleasure house and drown himself in a vat of cheap wine surrounded by strangers, but the time he’d spent in the presence of his fellow highborn had made clear to him that he wasn’t fit for company.
That was fine. He’d be alone instead. He bribed one of the guards for drink and kept on walking.
There were a few low-roofed chambers overlooking a garden of lotus ponds. He climbed up to the lowest of them, swinging up one-armed, his other arm cradling three flasks of arrack—his least favorite liquor. As soon as his legs were on firm roof-stone, he pried open a flask and set the rim to his lips. Bitter, fiery liquor burned against the roof of his mouth. He swallowed fast, letting the fire run right through him.
He wanted to drink until he couldn’t feel his own skin; until he was a blank, buzzing, nauseated void of a man, all the grief scooped out of him.
Another swig. And two, and three. He leaned back on his elbows and stared out at Harsinghar.
From here, the city was a night sky laid out on the earth, dark and formless and flecked here and there with light. It looked almost peaceful. From here, he couldn’t see the mourners still crying and praying outside the walls of the mahal. He couldn’t hear them, either. It was a relief to hear nothing but the wind—to feel nothing but liquor and the sharp bite of the night’s breeze against his face, turned up at the sky.
But, ah. If he could still feel his face, well—then he had more drinking to do.
So he drank more, until even the darkness had softened. When he heard a clatter—and felt a stone bash sharply against his leg—he swore with surprise, and the flask slipped from his drink-dulled grip. It rolled, spilling all the arrack left in it, which wasn’t much.
“Rao?” a voice called. “It’s me.”
“Lata?” He sat up. “Why did you throw that? Come up.”
“I can’t climb to you,” she replied, voice small in the dark—small and far away. “I’ve already tried. Didn’t you hear me?”
“No,” he said. Slurred, more like. “But I’ve had a great deal to drink. I’d climb down to you, but I’d probably break my neck.”
He didn’t have to hear her to know she was sighing and shaking her head, that her forehead had creased a little, the way it did when she was lost in thought or thoroughly vexed.
“I didn’t see you at the funeral,” she said.
A punch of grief through his chest. The funeral. The funeral.
“Did Malini notice?” Rao asked.
“No. The empress was… distracted.”
He could hear the thread of worry in Lata’s voice. Malini did not miss things. But Aditya’s death, and the actions of Elder Priya, had changed her. She’s wounded, Lata had said to him once. Not just in the flesh. Somewhere deep within her, where no physician can heal her.
Rao had understood. He knew how that felt.
“Good,” he said. He thought about opening the next flask, but something like panic bubbled through him. His hands were shaking. “I should have come,” he said. “But I… Lata. I didn’t need to see Aditya burn. I already—”
“Rao,” she said. Her voice was thick. “I know.”
Suddenly he was tired of not seeing her face, of being alone on that roof with a vile drink he didn’t even like. He slid to the edge and jumped down. He tumbled, his elbows catching the stone, face pressed to the ground. He watched Lata hurry toward him, her sari skirt a blue shadow against the grass. She grasped him by the shoulder.
“Get up,” she said. “What did you drink?”
“Arrack,” he said.
Another sigh. “Can you get up on your own, or do I need to find guards to help me?”
He insisted he could get up, and between them they managed to haul him to his feet. He leaned a little of his weight on her shoulder, and the two of them stumbled through the lotus garden into the corridors of the mahal.
“You’re too heavy for this,” she said after a few minutes. “Use the wall for support instead.”
“Should have thrown me into the pond,” he muttered, as he let her go and grasped a lantern sconce. “That would have woken me up.”
“Or drowned you.”
That wouldn’t have been so bad, he thought. But thank the nameless, he had the sense not to say it.
Usually there were curtains covering the doors that led off the corridors of the mahal—expansive silk things in peacock green and lustrous blue, shot through with gemstones and silver thread. It took his dazed eyes a moment to register that all the curtains had been replaced with plain white cloth that hung heavy, too thick to billow with the soft night winds. He grasped one curtain in his hands. Felt its weight.
“Do you think,” he heard himself say, as if from a distance, “that anyone really mourns him?”
“Of course they do,” Lata said from somewhere behind him. “The empress does.”
He swallowed, his throat unaccountably aching. Grasped the cloth tighter.
“Yes,” he said. “She does.”
He felt her hand on his upper arm. A light touch. Then a man’s voice, from the gloom ahead of them.
“Prince Rao,” the voice said. Heavy footsteps followed it. “I…”
The voice trailed off as the man emerged into the lamplight. Romesh was one of Low Prince Ashutosh’s men—his high-collared, long-sleeved tunic, marked with Ashutosh’s liegemarks, hid the leaves of rot at his arms and his throat. His eyes darted from Lata to Rao—from the empress’s advisor to one of her generals—and then he bowed and said, “I’ll take my leave.”
“No,” Lata said. “Please, take him. I’m afraid he’s had too much to drink.” She stepped away from Rao, walking swiftly toward Romesh—and then beyond him. “Take him to his chambers,” she urged. “Prince Rao must rest. The empress will have need of him soon. There is much work to do.”
Work. War, he supposed, was indeed work.
Romesh nodded his head in acknowledgment, then deferentially took Rao by the arm. They walked together in silence for a long moment.
Rao’s head was not exactly beginning to clear, but the worst of his dizziness had shifted.
“You were looking for me,” he said eventually.
“Perhaps when you’re less in your cups, my lord,” Romesh said gruffly.
“You want to speak to me? You’ll find no better time. We’re alone, after all.” Silence—just their footsteps, the crackle and spit of the lanterns. “You’re nervous,” Rao said. “You sought me out. So speak. Tell me what you want.”
He turned his head, lights blurring around him. Romesh’s jaw was set, his expression conflicted. Then he said, “The Ahiranyi woman. The—good one. She’s your prisoner?”
It took a long moment for Rao to understand what he meant. The good one. “Sima?”
Romesh nodded curtly.
“Me and the other men—we want to know how she is.”
“She’s caused no trouble.” She really hadn’t. All through the war, she’d been firm and determined. She’d waded into deep, corpse-infested water to save Priya. But ever since—ever since everything—she’d been gray and silent. When he’d arranged her safe chambers and promised her safety, she’d only nodded and murmured her thanks, and turned her face to the wall.
And Rao had… simply let her.
“She’s proved herself trustworthy,” Romesh muttered. “She was good in the war. She fought hard. My lord, if you’ll let me speak plain—she’s not responsible for the actions of the other one.” A pause, and then he said, almost reluctantly, “I liked them both. But the other one… she made her choices.”
Everyone knew what Priya had done. A thorn knife. A dead priest. Stone cracked through with flowers, and Malini clutching her own bloodied chest, weeping as the blood spilled through her own fingers.
“Sima is safe,” Rao said. “Safe and well treated. I’ve vowed to protect her. That won’t change. You can tell your men I’ve made a promise I won’t break.”
In his own chambers, he forced himself to drink some water. He could only take a few mouthfuls.
His tongue was dry and his mouth tasted foul. His eyes had started to burn. He rubbed them, the prickling heat only growing stronger.
He couldn’t rest tonight. Not after Aditya’s funeral. Not after an empty pyre had burned. Not when all he could remember was Aditya looking at him, tears bright and shining in his eyes.
What is a star?
Aditya, fire climbing over his skin. Aditya, in Rao’s hands and then not.
Distant fire—
He was walking before he consciously chose to do so. He was steadier now. Steady enough, at least, to walk in a moderately straight line. Corridors, and flickering lights, and the faces of bowing maids—and then—
“Let me in,” he said, and the soldiers protecting Sima’s chambers stepped aside and opened the doors, and let him pass.
Sima jumped to her feet when he entered. She’d been sitting on the floor cushions, but she straightened swiftly, brandishing something in her hands. There was a mirror behind her, great and silver, and in it he could see his own reflection—a wavering, insubstantial figure—and the tense lines of her back, ready for violence.
She met his eyes. Dropped whatever she’d been holding.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I came here so—late. I should have known—not. Not to do so. Was that a knife?”
She wasn’t supposed to have weapons. Even after Lata had asked him to look after her, he’d had to negotiate with Malini’s other advisors for custody of her. The Ahiranyi prisoner cannot have weapons. The Ahiranyi prisoner cannot leave her chambers. If the Ahiranyi prisoner seeks to break the rules of her imprisonment, then the price must be death.
“No,” she said, after a beat. Her voice was rough. “Just a clay bowl.”
Rao looked down. The clay was a shard. Jagged enough to cut.
“Just a bowl,” he agreed slowly.
Sima kept looking at him. She didn’t ask him why he was here, but he could read the question in her face.
“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly, “that I haven’t made your imprisonment more bearable. And I am sorry…” He trailed off, unable to find words.
“It’s not your fault,” she said thinly. “Priya made her decision. And I made mine.”
He still couldn’t quite believe she’d chosen this: to part from Priya. To ally herself with Parijatdvipa, even if it meant imprisonment and suspicion. If it hadn’t been for Lata, it could have meant Sima’s death. And he’d seen Sima and Priya together. They’d fought for each other. Nearly died for each other. How could they have wrenched apart so swiftly, so completely?
He rubbed his aching, stinging eyes. “I’ll do better,” he promised. “There are people here in Harsinghar who care about you, Sima. You’re not surrounded by enemies. Or—not only enemies. And if… if you want the company of friends… Or if…”
He was swaying. When had that begun?
“Rao!” Sima was shouting. He watched her mouth move, distantly aware, as his knees buckled.
He heard the doors bang open as the dark swallowed him.
A dream.
No. Not a dream. He knew this. He’d seen this before, in dark water. In Aditya’s eyes.
A vision.
The void surrounded him. Dark, vast and liquid. And then it bloomed.
Mountains. White snow. A slash in the stone, a wound, bloodletting. Blood the color of deep waters.
A coming. An inevitable coming.
A man holding out his palm. Aditya, smiling even as he wept.
Rao. Rao—
He opened his eyes.
His vision swam for a moment, then steadied. The two soldiers were holding Sima tight by the arms.
“Let her go,” he forced out. His words were rough and slurred, but the soldiers understood and set her free. He forced himself up onto his palms, his knees. His whole body was shaking, godstruck. “Didn’t you think—a physician—might be more useful to me? Than…?” He gestured vaguely at Sima, who was rubbing her arms, her expression tight.
“Sorry, my lord,” one soldier muttered, looking suitably ashamed. The other was already ducking out of the room—likely finally in search of some real help. Rao almost called out to summon him back. A vision was not an illness. No medicine could cure it.
But when he managed to get up to his knees, he heard Sima whisper his name.
He looked at Sima’s gray face, her horrified eyes. And then he looked beyond her, unable to meet that gaze.
He met his own in the mirror.
His eyes, in the silvery glass, were a smear of fiery gold.
4
BHUMIKA
She felt as if she were being carried along by water. Her body swayed out of her control. She could not find her breath easily and when she did, she cried out, begging for something or someone she’d lost. The ache of grief yawned open in her like a chasm, and the voice that shushed her, growing steadily more frantic, was not the one she sought.
Her head ached, a storm in the cup of her skull.
“Breathe,” the voice said. A man’s voice. The man begged her, “Tell me what hurts.”
I named her for a flower. I named her. I left her. I left her. I left her—
“Fever,” the man’s voice said. And then he made a noise that had no words but might have been a choked sob. “Shit,” he said. Then he cursed again. The world tipped as he did so, and she felt breath on her hair. The water in her ears sounded suddenly like a heartbeat.
She wasn’t being carried by water, she realized. It was flesh that guided her. Arms were cradling her. The wind roared, biting at her face. It hurt.
“Hold on,” he said. “Hold on, my lady.”
She held on. Even as the waters rose, as a storm tried to swallow her, she held on. Time passed and then she was still again, the whine of insects in her ears.
“Please.” She heard the man’s voice, ragged with exhaustion. “Auntie, I need help. My wife is sick.”
With great effort, she managed to peel open her eyes. Her vision was a half-moon, a soft blur of dusk-gray sky fading into black earth. A stooped figure stood ahead of them, framed by a door. Silver hair, a sari.
“You’re Ahiranyi,” the figure said warily.
The man shifted her in his arms.
“By birth,” he said. He sounded apologetic. Desperate. “But we moved to Srugna years ago, long before we wed. We were driven out from our village. Please, aunt. Don’t drive us away too.”
“What makes you think you’ll be welcome here?”
“Hope,” he said. “We’ve got no rot on us. I promise. Please.”
The woman told him, eventually, that they could sleep behind the house. The man thanked her.
She felt a shawl being drawn over her. Water at her lips. Hard ground at her back; something soft tucked beneath her head by warm hands. Then nothing, for a long time.
She drifted in and out of consciousness. Every time she rose out of the waters of sleep, she caught snatches of conversation, strange in her ears, tangles of nonsense.
“It’s a poor business.” The old woman’s anger was gone. Her voice held only pity. “Families split in two, parents separated from their children and their elderly by whatever evil has changed Ahiranya’s borders. Did you lose anyone?”
“Her brother and sister.” The familiar man’s voice. “I had no other family.”
A sigh. “Ahiranya is cursed. I am sorry for my caution, with you and your poor wife, but you understand—”
“I’m grateful.” A hand on her forehead. A thumb brushing back her sweat-damp hair. “Thank you.”
Sleep.
This time when she woke, the waters of her mind and her heart had settled around her. She’d been drowning, and now she was not. She could breathe. She wasn’t burning. She opened her eyes, which were gritty with sleep and sickness. It was night.
The man was sitting against the wall of the house, upright, legs crossed. He was asleep, a sword across his knees. She could hear his quiet breath. Inside the house a lamp was burning. In the grass and trees around them, she could hear a noise—a steady rhythmic dripping of water. She turned her head slowly.
There were people watching her. Water-drenched cloth was draped across their faces, tumbling in folds to the floor before them at their feet. They held bowls in their hands—bowls that streamed strange river water to the soil. Green water, gold, and red.
Their numbers shifted as she watched them—a dozen, then ten, then a blur of faces too vast for her to swiftly count. But she saw adults. Children.
“Who are you?” she whispered. Her voice came out a croak. She was thirsty, depleted.
Silence. Then, with a rustling sigh, one water-veiled girl stepped forward and kneeled. She held out her green bowl.
“Will you drink?”
She looked at that water. A strange sense came over her—a knowing. A part of her lay in the water swirling in that bowl: knowledge that her skull, already aching, storm-full, could not carry without help. If she drank, she would know something huge and terrible.
She reached out a hand—and the man stirred behind her. The figures were gone.
“How do you feel?” he asked. “Do you need water? Food?”
She stared up at him. Dark hair, a sharp jaw beneath the shadow of stubble. He looked tired.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I am Jeevan,” he said, voice low.
That wasn’t the name he had offered their helper.
“You are not my husband,” she said, lowering her voice to match his. She did not want to be overheard.
“No, my lady,” he said.
My lady. It jarred through her like a knock to the bone, so strange it barely resembled pain.
“If you have told these people you’re my husband, you must not call me that again,” she said. “What is my name?”
“Bhumika,” he said.
Bhumika. The name felt like nothing. It did not slot neatly into her heart. She did not know who Bhumika was.
“Call me that, then,” she said.
In the morning, the man swept their helper’s steps and washed them clean. He brought the older woman firewood and uttered a terse but heartfelt thanks. The woman had clearly softened to him.
“You have a good husband, my dear,” she said. “I hope you find a safe home together.”
“As do I,” said Bhumika.
Their helper clasped her hands. “I am sorry about your brother and sister,” she said sympathetically. “I’ll pray to the mothers that our empress will set them free from Ahiranya one day.”
Her head was pounding. She thought of the watchers in their veils.
“Thank you,” she replied. “I would not have survived without you.”
The man named Jeevan walked with her away from the forest, through undergrowth under the palely rising sun. He turned to her.
“Where will you go?”
She had someone to find.
She was a vessel for knowledge. She needed someone else to carry it. Someone who could see far; someone with the power to be heard.
In the swirl of knowledge inside her lay an image: a lake. A holy place that trained its people to listen to the voices beyond the mortal world. That was where a seeker had learned how to end the Age of Flowers and kill the yaksa long ago. A seeker would return there again.
She turned to the watchers who stood in the distance. The dirt road to them was shining like a river: a twining, beckoning thing. She pointed a hand toward them. Her mouth tasted of silt, of water-smooth stone. The taste of stolen knowledge.
“To Alor,” she said.
Malini has claimed her rightful throne as the empress of Parijatdvipa, just as the nameless gods prophesied. Now, in order to gain the support of the priesthood who remain loyal to the fallen emperor, she must consider a terrible bargain: Claim her throne and burn in order to seal her legacy—or find another willing to take her place on the pyre.
Priya has survived the deathless waters and now their magic runs in her veins. But a mysterious yaksa with flowering eyes and a mouth of thorns lies beneath the waters. The yaksa promises protection for Ahiranya. But in exchange, she needs a sacrifice. And she’s chosen Priya as the one to offer it.
Two women once entwined by fate now stand against each other. But when an ancient enemy rises to threaten their world, Priya and Malini will find themselves fighting together once more – to prevent their kingdoms, and their futures, from burning to ash.
★ “Suri brings her Burning Kingdoms trilogy to a breathtaking crescendo in this epic grand finale. This sends the series out on a high note.” –Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
★ “[The] delectable conclusion to a landmark epic-fantasy series that touches on faith, leadership, politics, friendship and found family, grief and recovery, sacrifice, the roles of women, colonialism, and love.” –Booklist (Starred Review)
