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Perhaps all lives became brimful of pain, eventually. Well, then. Let her daughter’s start painlessly, in joy. Let her have at least that.
“But choices so large must be made and remade over and over again. That’s how paths are carved, Lady Deepa. That is how you decide your future.”
You are like ink, Malini thought helplessly. Ink, and all I want is to make poetry of you.
“But when you’re in war, sometimes knowing you have some power, even if it’s fragile, even if it’s nothing against what’s coming… It helps.”
Does a sacrifice have the same power if you don’t know what you are sacrificing? If you cut out your heart so flowers could grow, so magic could wind its roots in your yielding lungs, without understanding that you would end up here, kneeling before a thorn-mouthed god, being told you must kill what you love? Surely not. Surely the way of things couldn’t be this cruel.
“The Parijatdvipans think they know what it means to sacrifice,” she went on. “Grand gestures of self-destruction, they think. They glorify it. But it’s not so. The slow way, fighting even when you know it may have no worth… that is sacrifice.” She
