The Lotus Empire (The Burning Kingdoms #3)

Chapter 26 Rao

RAO

He had a headache for the entire first week of travel toward Dwarali, a pounding, burning ache that settled in his temples and behind his eyes and refused to fade.

The simple light of the day often felt painful, and when he closed his eyes there was more light: gleaming embers behind his eyes, and Aditya’s wavering ghost, haloed in fire and smoke, and distant mountains, white, bleeding bright blood. Every conversation grated at his already strained nerves. Even the pounding of hooves disturbed him. He’d tried to prepare for his journey, filling his skull with Dwarali’s particular tangle of politics: the aged sultan, and his lack of heirs, and the relative power of the Lal Qila, a gold-rich fort guarding the edge of the empire; the innumerable, interwoven Jagatay and Babure tribes and clans that hounded the fort, scrabbling over the scarce resources of the mountains beyond the Lal Qila, warring with one another in complex patterns that only Lata had been able to sensibly explain to him. But all of it spilled from his memory like water. He could hold none of it.

Perhaps the nameless still held some love for him, even if he held no love to hand in return, because he was left largely alone by his traveling companions. His men were obedient but not talkative, and the Dwarali riders seemed simply happy to be able to ride freely on their horses under an open sky. Life in the imperial capital Harsinghar clearly had not suited them.

Lady Raziya was polite and kind, her eyes on him thoughtful—but she too respected his clear desire for solitude.

Only Sima seemed interested in breaking his self-imposed isolation, and that surprised him. She had no reason to like him, after all. Hadn’t he left her alone—simply abandoned her—to her imprisonment?

She turned up one evening at his tent, startling him. She slid inside, entering calmly as if she had every right to be there.

“Did my guards not see you?” Rao asked.

“I told them you asked for me,” she said with a shrug. He paused, then decided not to think about what assumptions those men had made about his prisoner coming alone to his tent in the night darkness. Better not to contemplate it.

She moved toward him and sat cross-legged across from him. For a moment she seemed content to simply watch him pour his wine into a small glass.

“You drink too much.”

“Thank you,” he said slowly, “for pointing that out. I’ll stop, then.”

She huffed a laugh. As she watched him drink, her eyes grew grave.

“Does it help? Does it dull—all of it?”

“It does,” he said. “And doesn’t.”

“Let me drink with you, then, Prince Rao.”

He hesitated.

“You should go,” he said finally. “There will be talk.”

“And what does that matter to me? I’m not trying to find a good marriage to a nice Parijatdvipan man.” She wrinkled her nose. “Or a nice Ahiranyi one. Besides, I’m a prisoner. My reputation is already dirt.”

“A prisoner for now,” Rao corrected.

A flick of her eyes to him, then away. She took the wine, grabbed a spare glass, poured and drank. So did he, not stopping her.

“So how should it be done?” she asked. “My potential escape, I mean.”

Her look was guarded, behind the rim of her raised cup. She was testing him. Not quite ready to trust him on this. He could see that.

“Shall I slip away when you’re not paying attention? Or will you arrange it for me? Should we have some kind of signal?”

“I don’t know,” he said. She frowned at him. He tried again. “If you choose to slip away, I can’t stop you. But…” He gestured vaguely around them, not to encompass the tent but to suggest the sheer size and business of the camp—and the impossibility of escaping it unseen. She nodded, understanding.

“Teach me how to play catur,” she said. “Or something else. Anything you like. It’s boring to drink in silence. So teach me.”

He hesitated again. But ah—what could it hurt?

“Let me get the board,” he said.

After that, they played regularly. Some of the wariness left her eyes and the lines of her shoulders. Something uneasily like friendship began to sprout between them.

It did not stop his gnawing grief, or the need for drink to ease the hard edges of the grief-knife digging into him; but it helped lighten his burden, and there were nights that he slept more easily in a tent than he ever had on a soft bed in the imperial mahal.

He accompanied Raziya to the sultan’s court.

The sultan was ancient, wrinkled and wizened, eyes pearly black beads in his face. But he accepted Lady Raziya gracefully, as a daughter. He was no fool. He knew the way the winds were blowing.

There was a feast of welcome, where Rao sat with the company of a handful of Dwarali lords and administrators, who treated him with courtesy and gentleness. Clearly tales of why he was traveling to Dwarali—to take him, broken as he was, comfortably away from the empress’s war and the political heart of the empire—had spread.

For one night, he rejected liquor and let himself feel everything: grief, and fire behind his eyes, but also the smell of incense rising from the edges of the room, where cones of powder burned; the music of a flute in a young musician’s hands, where he sat alongside a tabla player beneath an arch of white jasmine flowers, in subtle honor to the empress and empire. He let the gossip of the nobles flow over him too, and heard them talk of attacks by the tribes that lived beyond the Lal Qila’s borders, and obliquely of the sultan’s growing frailty. He stored all that information away. It could perhaps be useful.

He stayed as long as he could, among Dwarali’s lords and ladies, then gave his apologies and rose and tried to make a discreet exit.

He thought he’d managed it. He was at the entrance to his chambers when he heard a voice call his name. He turned. Walking toward him, one guardswoman trailing her, was Lady Raziya.

“You’re leaving us, Prince Rao?”

“Leaving the feast, Lady Raziya—yes.” A smile, a bow of his head. “But I will go to the Lal Qila, with your permission, in the morning. If there is anything you wish for me to take…?”

“No.” A smile of her own; a tilt of her head. “And what does our empress seek for you to do in the Lal Qila, Prince Rao?”

“The empress sends me,” he said, “to recover from my grief.”

“The Lal Qila is not known as a soft place for the sick and stricken.” There was amusement in the curve of her mouth, a thoughtful and probing look in the eyes turned on him. “I think she does trust my family with your care—and cares for you, deeply—but I also have no doubt she has other motives that guide her actions. What awaits you there?”

“Nothing that will bring ill luck to you and yours,” he said, and Raziya laughed.

“You won’t deny it, then? Well, you have always seemed an honest man guided by honest stars.”

She placed a hand lightly against his shoulder.

“My daughter Asma rules in my husband’s stead. She will take good care of you, I promise. Rest easily in her care, and if you need anything from her or my family to aid you, simply ask.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Raziya released him and turned in a swirl of skirts back into the feast, leaving him alone.

There was a noise behind him: a quiet, pointed cough.

He turned and saw Sima watching from the archway of the door. She must have been standing silently out of sight, listening.

“Are you really going to the Lal Qila just to rest?” Sima asked.

“Do you think I am?”

“Lady Raziya certainly doesn’t.”

“Well. I am being sent,” he said, “to chase a tale.” He walked into his room and she followed. He itched for some distraction—he thought of Prem with his pipe, soothing smoke, and wished for the first time not for liquor but the bliss of needle-flower smoke.

Instead, he said, “Let me tell you a story.”

He told Sima what Lata had told him: a tale in one of the languages from beyond the borders of Parijatdvipa. It had been poorly translated, or so Lata had claimed with some displeasure. “But even poor translations from beyond Parijatdvipa are rare as pearls,” she had told him.

“In the snow lies the corpse of a king,” said Rao. “He died for his people, when monsters came and ate their land. And from his chest, after his death, his people cut free his heart. But it wasn’t a heart.”

“What a twist,” Sima said blandly. Rao glared at her.

“I didn’t write the tale!” He threw up his hands. “I won’t tell you about the battle with monsters, then. Just know his heart was a ruby with the power to murder beasts—and that is the falsehood I’ve been sent to chase across the empire.”

“It could be a ruby,” Lata had told him, riffling lightly through the book, her brow furrowed. “Or that could be a translation error. The root word in Jagai—never mind. I can see your attention wandering, Rao. It’s just as likely to be a pomegranate. That’s all.”

That had only confirmed his fear that this was a fool’s errand: a search for a smear of a tale, a scratching that could be no more than a mistranslation.

An excuse to remove him—and his drunkenness and his grief and his visions—from court.

Sima looked thoughtful.

“You trust me enough to tell me this?” Sima asked. “The story of a weapon you could use against—the yaksa?”

“If you wanted to destroy Parijatdvipa, you would have left a long time ago. Besides,” he said with a smile. “A tale like this is a fool’s errand, I told you. I am being sent away to rest. Or because I am not fit to serve the empress as she requires. It doesn’t matter.”

“Well, don’t treat it as a pointless task. Treat it like something that matters. I’ve seen strange things in my life—done strange things. A ruby with magical powers doesn’t sound impossible, and it might be an adventure to look for it. And if not…” She hesitated. “I’ve never been to the Lal Qila. I’d like to.”

He couldn’t hide his surprise. “I thought…”

“Thought what?”

Instead of using his words, he went to one of his travel chests and opened it, removed a pack, and placed it in her hands.

She opened it. Her eyes widened.

“Food was simple to arrange,” he said. “Coin, too. Clothes were harder, but I hope they’ll do.”

She touched the edge of the bag reverently.

“You really want to help me,” she said.

“One good thing,” he said curtly. She raised her head. He swallowed. “I want to do one good thing,” he said. “In a sea of shit.”

She nodded. Closed the bag.

“I’ll go to the Lal Qila with you,” Sima said. “I couldn’t stand being trapped. I don’t feel trapped anymore.”

His heart twisted at that.

“You still are,” he said slowly.

“No. Not exactly.” Her hands were still on the pack. “But I can’t go home. And if I get to choose where I’m going to be, well.” She shrugged. “I think you could use a friend, Prince Rao. And so could I.”

He swallowed, unable to speak.

“Get out the catur board,” she said gently. “Unless you’re tired?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not tired.”

As he arranged the catur board, he thought not of Aditya or Prem or even his sister, but of Lata when she’d said goodbye, when he’d told her he saw no worth in chasing foolish, broken stories of rubies and false hope.

She’d taken his hands in her own. Her hands were far smaller but held his steadily, firmly—and her eyes were just as firm.

“I do not want the empress to burn, Rao,” she’d said to him. “I want her to live. I want an answer—a tool or weapon—that will save her. But I want you to live, too. Go to Dwarali, go far from all this, and learn how to live again. Then come back. Whole, or broken, it doesn’t matter. There is nothing worthless about a broken thing—be it a tale, or a man.”

One of Lady Raziya’s guardswomen sacrificed a shawl and a lined tunic to Sima for the journey ahead. As they drew near the Lal Qila and colder climes, Sima changed her clothing, clearly grateful. She wore her pack at her back, like a charm for luck or safety.

Her eyes rounded with awe as they approached the Lal Qila at dusk; the sun setting made the vast fort look even more bloodied and imposing than it usually did. At its gates, flanked by guards, Lady Asma waited for them. She looked a little more like Lord Khalil than her mother, although she had her mother’s smile—confident in its welcome and its strength.

“Prince Rao,” she said. “Welcome back to the Lal Qila.”