The Lotus Empire (The Burning Kingdoms #3)

Chapter 80 Malini

MALINI

The fire was growing closer. A gust of burning wind brushed her hand as she reached out to the water and grasped—nothing.

She kneeled on the edge of the water. Shivering. The absolute blistering heat followed by the shock of cold water up to her knees had left her shaking. Her arms felt too light, too empty.

There was gleaming—blue, bright. When she’d lowered Priya into the water she’d seen the shape of Priya vanishing. Blistered skin, closed eyes. The shadow of her hair fanning out around her face. The shadow of her body.

Now there was nothing. Priya had sunk deep, deep.

Had Malini condemned them all? Would Priya rise from the water with a stranger behind her eyes? Malini had told herself she had followed Priya here to stop that. What a lie. She was, perhaps, the instrument of the yaksa’s successful rise into the world.

She could not find it in herself to care, not as she should have. Panic and grief were metal between her teeth, on her tongue. She could smell fire, and the scorching smell of fat and skin and hair burning.

If Priya rose out of the water, light pearling her skin, her face wood-whorled and strange—if she smiled a stranger’s smile, and looked at Malini all cold and unfeeling, too inhuman to love in the ugly and desperate way Priya and Malini had loved each other—

I will burn myself, and burn her with me , Malini told herself.

Another outcome occurred to Malini, worse than all the rest: that Priya would not return at all.

She blinked, her own breathing overly harsh in her ears. Blinked again, and realized why her vision was fading.

The light in the water was dimming. Growing dark.

The light of the water went out.

The darkness was absolute.

She couldn’t laugh, or cry. Only close her eyes. Only feel something—the green in her blood, in her ribs, her heart—waver as if it were a candle flame, and die.

Her own voice, a bitter voice, coiled in her skull:

Burn, so at least you may have some bitter remains of glory.

Burn, so all of this at least has some meager worth to the world.

A drumbeat behind her eyes, in her ears.

She was not meant to burn. She had told herself so, so many times. She’d wrestled a future and a crown for herself and yet…

She’d brought herself here to this place and this darkness, and lowered Priya into water that could kill her or make a god of her. And the only fire left that could kill a god—that could destroy it here in darkness, in a carapace, far from the fragile human lives that lived beyond the Hirana—lay in Malini.

There were dreams, or nightmares that lived in her skull. Not visions from the nameless, but paths she’d charted in the dark night on the road to war.

A dream of an old, embittered queen. Alone on her throne. Famed and powerful and utterly empty. A hollow monster, no different from the emperors who came before her.

Another of a golden statue, her own face carved and still, a means to an end. An infant crowned in her place.

A world of nothing but rot and green, where what it meant to be human was forgotten.

A world burned and scarred, where Ahiranya would be nothing. History’s dust and ash.

She wanted none of those paths. None of the tales that had been written for her. Both the great empress and the dead mother of flame were not her .

What she wanted, more than anything, was to be the woman who lay beneath all the masks. And that woman did not believe in the mothers, or empire, or the nameless god.

That woman had placed her faith—her fractured, ruinous faith—in a person who’d given Malini her heart, then stolen it back, and then returned it to her once more. A woman who was gone.

“I believe in you, Priya.” Her voice was a rasp. Thin in the dark, the absolute quiet. With her eyes closed, she could pretend that Priya could hear her. “I have faith in your humanity. In all of you that is broken and hurtful. I have faith in all of you that is mortal. You have many faces, Priya. The mortal one, the flawed one, and the one with power, this immortal one—they’re all mine. If you will allow it. They’re all mine.”

She opened her eyes. Gold light, the very edge of fire, gleamed like a river in the veins of her wrists. Her arms. There were flowers growing beneath her knees.

Around her, shadows flared. In the flicker and hugeness of the flames she saw figures form. She knew them even without the color and texture of flesh or cloth.

Alori. Narina.

Aditya.

She realized her face was wet with tears.

Sacrifice was terrible. Monstrous, when it was bred into you, inflicted. But it could be an act of love too. It could destroy one part of you and set the rest free. For a priest, a priestess, a worshipper kneeling lonely on soil by deep waters—

It did not have to be death, even when it was.

“Priya,” she whispered. “Find your way back to me.”

Then she stood and stepped into the water. The fire was at her back. It glowed on the walls of the cavern.

The waters were poison. She remembered that. The waters were a trial, and not one meant for her. To enter them would be a willing death.

But there was green in her too, and Priya’s soft dreams—and Malini could not let her go. Could not, without reaching out, one last time.

What was a little more poison, willingly imbibed? Malini slipped into the water without fear. The fire followed her path as the water swallowed and clasped her life in its palm. The gold in her skin was a fire from another world, and water could not blot it out.