The Oleander Sword (The Burning Kingdoms, #2)

by Tasha Suri

Malini should not write it, she knew. But she wanted to. I have looked upon the ocean, she wrote. And it made me recall the tale of a river. And of a fish, searching for a new world on its bank. And I remember a tale of garlands. And ill stars. And two people who found their way to one another. Tell me, do you remember it too?

Obsessed with them 😭

She opened the letter. Pressed it flat. That writing—it had to be Malini’s. It was too graceful to be anyone else’s. She wrote of garlands. Of Mani Ara, and her river. And other tales of yaksa and mortals. “I didn’t tell her these,” Priya whispered. Which meant that at some point, Malini had read the Birch Bark Mantras. Had she learned the tales for Priya’s sake? Priya couldn’t write back. She knew it. Whatever subtle means Malini had used to deliver this to her—and spirits, she hoped they had been subtle, for Malini’s sake—there was no way Priya should write to her in return. But somehow she found herself sitting at Bhumika’s desk. Grasping a clean sheet of paper. Writing down words. I miss you, she began.

OBSESSED

It was deep, dark night when an Aloran messenger arrived with a message from Ahiranya. It was worn from travel, dust-stained, and had clearly passed through many hands. It did not have Malini’s name on it, but she knew at once that it held Priya’s words. Priya’s voice. I miss you, the letter said. Artless words. She could feel Priya in them, and it made her heart bloom with helpless fondness. Such grand stories you know now! Where did you discover them? Did you seek them out? I don’t know if I will ever have your answer. Maybe it’s enough to wonder. Maybe that’s what you want, for me to think of you. There is so much I wish I could tell you. But I have no head for poetry, though I’ve met it from time to time. I will say only this. I made you a promise once. Say my name, and though it makes me a fool—and I know it does—I’ll find my way. I’ll come.

A flower of fire. Proof of the rightness of his rule.

😒😒😒😒😒

Priya, Of course I sought out grand tales. I do not like my own ignorance. And those tales were the ones that made you. Surely, you learned them as a child. Surely they were as much the milk that shaped you, as tales of the mothers were for me. Don’t you realize I want to know everything about you? That even now, when I should have forgotten you, all I desire is to know your heart better than my own?

SHUT UP WHY ARE THEY SO CUTE I CANT DEAL

And surely there were worse indulgences than wanting to love someone. To be known.

😭😭😭😭😭

I have so many debts, Priya. Debts to my men. Debts to you. I never forget my debt to you.

When Malini woke in the morning, she found herself laughing, at odd moments, at the memory of Lata passionately reciting a full range of rude verses about mothers-in-law from across the empire.

😭 my girl deserves to laugh among women again

I miss you, she wrote to Priya, and to herself. But not as you miss me, I think. I miss you because I let myself care for you. For a brief time, I let you into my heart. And I find now that I am empress, now that the world lies at my feet, my heart is a closed door. I am meant to be someone beyond mortal feeling—someone shaped by fire and prophecy into more than flesh and bone and want. What I was with you, I can never be again.

“Never try to become a poet, Pri,” Sima said. She’d spent the day tending to the running of the mahal and was about as tired as Priya, but mellowed by liquor. She smiled a little. “I was a poet to her,” Priya said quietly, letting the confession slip free. “I… I wrote to her, you know.”

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

I am always thinking of you. I think of you in battle. I think of you in the dark of night. When my mind is silent or full, you wait there for me. It galls me that I want you as much as this. That my heart so thoroughly belongs to you. The power you have over me, Priya. Why does it refuse to fade? I think of the way the earth would yield to your hands, flowering for you. I think of what you could do for me, if I put you to use. And I should put you to use. Somewhere, you must wonder why I haven’t. I think of how you could have made a weapon of anything. Do you think of me, in the quiet? I wonder—

A hand tugged at her sari. “Up,” Padma demanded. “You’re a terror,” Bhumika said, with utter fondness, and swept her daughter up into her arms. She kissed Padma’s face and over and over again until Padma shrieked and kicked her little legs furiously. “My lady,” Khalida said impatiently. “Hand her to me and go.” Bhumika did, with one further kiss. It felt good to briefly relish this: the smell of her daughter’s hair, the soft riot of her curls; the sheer, joyous fury with which she greeted the world.

I'm obsessed with this 😭

Some believed they could ready a child for the cruelties of the world with punishment and unkindness, callousing the heart before the world could set its knives upon it. But Bhumika was raised a temple child—taught to excise her softness and weakness, and to face the world with her teeth bared. And still, every loss she had experienced had hurt her. Still, she carried the scars of her own choices, and the choices made by others. She wanted a different path for her daughter. Perhaps all lives became brimful of pain, eventually. Well, then. Let her daughter’s start painlessly, in joy. Let her have at least that.

And you did not think on how we would survive then, she thought with a savageness she did not allow to touch her face, her voice. You merely played at rebellion. You liked the sweetness of the idea, and never considered the bitterness that reality would bring.

“It would be good to have a friend with me,” Priya said instead. “If… if you want to come. It might be an adventure.” “An adventure,” Sima said flatly. “It’s war, Pri. It’s going to be a nightmare.” “You’re probably right.” “Going with you would be… Pri, you shouldn’t have asked me.” “But I have,” Priya said. “And I mean it. If you want to come—there’s a place for you. I just can’t promise it’s a safe one.” For a moment, Sima was silent. Then she sighed and bowed her head. Priya could see the new looseness in her shoulders, and the smile growing on her mouth. Then Sima straightened up and abruptly began to walk away. “You can finish your own packing,” she said. “I’ve got my own to sort out now. Spirits, Pri, you could have given me some notice.” “I’m sorry!” Priya called at her back. “No you’re not!” Priya grinned. No. She wasn’t.

I LOVE THEIR FRIENDSHIP

But she’d discovered a curious pleasure in enjoying something that had once been a cause of pain for her.

The fragile thing in Priya’s chest splintered, just a little. Malini’s words were a reminder that there was so much more at stake than her soft feelings for Malini, or Malini’s for her. Politics and war and history all stood like a chasm between them. “You summoned me,” Priya pointed out. “Yes,” Malini said. “I did. Because I am on precarious ground. Because I need someone I can trust. And because…” She stopped, and then said, carefully, “Because you are you. To me.”

I WILL NEVER BE OVER THEM

Are you rightly mine? Can I keep you too? “Do you ask all the kings who serve you to obey you?” Priya asked. “Not so directly,” said Malini. “With them I play the necessary games and niceties. I write pacts and bargains. I flatter and dole out power as required. But you—you are not them. And I am asking you.” “Will you believe me if I say yes?” Priya asked. “You’ve placed your life in my hands before,” Malini said softly. “The deals we have struck between us have always held true. I’ll trust you again, as I always have, and always shall.” “Don’t say such things,” Priya said, voice smaller than she wished it to be.

Let them stare. She was a temple elder. She had more power in her bones than any of them had in their titles.

Priya walked forward. Awaiting her, beneath a canopy of gold, on a dais that clearly served as a throne, sat Malini. Empress Malini, in all her glory, legs crossed and hands upon her knees. The softness in her was all gone. What remained was hard and beautiful, as bitterly sharp as a blade. I wanted you to see.

They sat. Priya kept her face slightly turned away, hands clasped in her lap. It should have looked respectful. It made Malini want to take Priya’s face in her hands. Turn her head. Look at me.

“Is that a joke?” Priya sounded delighted. “Is the Empress of Parijatdvipa joking with me?” “I would like to think I’m flirting with you,” Malini said, feeling her own heart lighten in response. “Or daring you, perhaps. But you may call it a joke if you like.”

The smile faded from Priya’s lips. But the light was still in her eyes, fierce enough that it made Malini’s breath catch. “I don’t really think you want a brief kiss from me,” Priya said lowly. “And that’s not what I want from you either.” “Perhaps we should both stare at opposite walls,” Malini muttered, and Priya laughed again. “Perhaps,” she agreed. And tilted her head against the palanquin wall, even as her gaze stayed on Malini—steady, and so very soft. I would kiss you, Malini thought. Throat aching. I would kiss you and kiss you. But that isn’t why I need you here. That isn’t the yielding I require from you. Not today.

They are idiots your honor and I love them

Hopefully the words were pretty and politic enough to hide the instinctual nature of her action—her desire to say I will not shame you, not you, not like this.

By the mothers, Malini would not give a woman to these men and have her caned before them. Her mouth was full of a bitterness that was like poison. She would not give Priya to these men. She would sacrifice a great deal, do a great deal, but not this.

Priya looked into her eyes and smiled. The ash had streaked across her face like misapplied kajal. Her hair was wild darkness all around her shoulders, unspooled. You are like ink, Malini thought helplessly. Ink, and all I want is to make poetry of you. “Your women feel the same of you, Empress,” she said.

Malini turned her head and peered sidelong at Priya. She could not help herself. She could not offer Priya the position of a general of her army. She did not offer, and Priya did not ask. Their eyes met. The noise of the highborn arguing faded like mist. Priya raised a hand to her chest; a fist, curled against her heart. If Malini touched her own fingertips to the needle-flower on a chain at her throat—if she looked at Priya and felt helplessly thankful, grateful that she was here—then that was no one’s business but her own.

Bhumika lowered her head. “Yaksa,” she said, heart howling. “As you say.” She was bound. This was better than a knife at the throat. They had her—her own gods—by the heart. And it was too late, far too late, for anything to be done to stop it.

I'm so scared 😭😭😭😭

There were two truths inside Malini’s heart. It was the colder one she spoke. But the other was this. Because I need her. Because she saw me once, for everything I was and could be, and wanted me anyway. And she sees me and wants me still, over the chasm that should make enemies of us. And yet it does not. Cannot. It was a truth like a wound, like a fragile heart exposed, and it frightened and awed her in equal measure.

Strange, she thought, how compliments from his lips so often sounded like despair. As if he looked at her every success—every battle won, every highborn enemy circumvented, and felt fear. Sometimes—often—she wanted to pry that fear apart and see its working. She wanted to ask him: You, who named me and gave me the opportunity to seize my crown. What do you fear? Is it me and my choices? Is it what will become of me? Or what will become of men like you?

She wanted her brother as he had never been. A brother who had seen how she had been hurt and had shielded her when she had been unable to shield herself. She wanted a love from him he’d never been able to give and never could, because it was a love she had needed long ago. She did not want him to die. There was no possibility, in death. Only an end.

Priya didn’t hate her then. How foolish, how terrible, that Malini had come to the point where it mattered to her so very much that Priya did not hate her. That on some level, in some way, Priya’s heart was still hers.

“You’re friends with Malini,” he said, voice lowered. Friends. Was there special emphasis on that word? She wasn’t sure, but she nodded. “Of a kind.” He hummed in acknowledgment. “You’re not very like her,” he said. “That’s all. You’re very—forthright.” Oh, I am like her, thought Priya, even as she said nothing, even as she stared at the opposite bank—at the spindles of distant trees, and the lush fronds dipping into the eddying water. I just wear my anger on the outside.

At the maze fort, fate had turned against her. But today it was in her favor, and it was all thanks to Priya’s presence. All Malini needed to do was let the tide carry her. She raised her saber in the air and finally let out the cry bottled inside her—a thin, wild thing, like a bird of prey taking flight above a wounded hare. The sunlight caught the edges of her saber, giving the polished blade a hue like bright fire. “For Parijatdvipa!” she yelled. “For the mothers! For your empress!” She heard the answering cries around her, a noise that swelled and swelled, already triumphant, drowning her enemies in its song.

“Take care, Malini,” he said softly. A caution. She said nothing. The last thing he saw before he closed the tent flap behind him was Malini touching Priya’s cheek—four fingertips, tenderly pressing into the softness of it, her eyes fierce and fathomless.

“I told myself I wasn’t doing it just for you,” she said deliriously, flowers writhing from her fingertips, her scalp. “I told myself I was doing all of this for Ahiranya—my family’s sake, my country’s sake, my sake—but I was lying to myself, lying, lying—”

“Priya.” The name came shakily to Malini’s lips. “It was for you. Maybe all of it or maybe part of it but you, you—I can’t—” A flutter of broken words, little shards of words, blooming as the roses twined from Priya’s skin onto Malini’s steadying hands. “I barely understand it, the way I would willingly kneel for you, anywhere, for anything. The way I would fight for you. The way I want to be at your side. Is that what love is, Malini? Is that how awful love is? Because if it is, then I love you, the way that roots love the deep and leaves love the light. It’s—the way I am. And no matter how much I try to be good, to do right—I’m all flowers in your arms, for your war, for you—” “Priya. Priya.” Malini pressed her face against Priya’s. Felt the changing skin—the rhythm of her breath, the promise that Priya was here and alive. “I should never have asked you to come,” she whispered against Priya’s cheek. “I should never have let you go into battle.” “But you need me. You needed me here.” “I needed you,” Malini agreed. “Need you still. But not just for your gifts. Never just for your gifts. Surely, surely you know.”

“I do, I do.” And their faces were turning, not quite touching, sharing breath. Creeping ferns coiled out from Priya’s hair. She blinked her green-struck eyes. Strangeness, horrific strangeness, and yet somehow Malini could not bring herself to let go of her. Priya’s mouth parted. Words, again. Words, always cleaving distance between them. “I think there must be a scale somewhere in your head, where you weigh out how much my gifts matter to you and how much the rest of me matters, and I think—the scale is tipped, isn’t it? Listing to one side. You don’t have to nod or agree or—I already know, Malini. I already know.” Malini wanted to say—Your gifts are you and you are your gifts, I don’t love you in pieces, I don’t ...

“Do you hate me for it?” Malini asked, framing Priya’s face with her hands. “Are you angry that I don’t love as you do?” Priya laughed. A breathless sound, oddly sweet. “Were you afraid I’d die?” Priya asked. She took hold of Priya’s hair. Heavy, dark hair, slippery as silk, riven with things flowering. Malini moved her fingers through it. She pressed her lips against Priya’s neck, feeling the heat of her skin, the warmth of it. She smelled of—sweat, salt, and rain-washed soil. It should have been unpleasant, too human and too strange all at once. But Malini could do nothing but press her teeth to the tendo...

She did not want to love Priya the way Priya loved her—that devotion, that terrifying gravity that took a person to their knees. But some things were not in her control. “If I truly feared that battle could kill you, I would never have held back my army until you drowned Chandra’s at their flank,” she said. “If I truly feared that you could die, I wouldn’t have trusted you to rise from the water and destroy them. But I trusted you. I would trust you again. As I trust you now, to find your way back to your human skin. “You may think you break yourself on loving me,” Malini whispered. “That it makes you bow and makes you—you serve.” A hitch, a stumble. She pressed on, still curved, her head against Priya’s throat. “But you cannot be broken by my demands. You cannot even be broken by your own. I could try and break you a thousand times, with all my weapons, with knowledge of your every weakness, and still I—” A hand tightened on Malini’s jaw.

This yearning, this want, was a force like a rising tide. It couldn’t be stopped. And Malini did not want to. “Later,” Malini said, a tentative hope unfurling in her chest. “We can try again.” “Later,” Priya echoed. “Yes.”

“If I stay, it won’t be for allies,” Priya admitted, her voice all rough from crying, from the raw feeling inside her. “That’s… that’s not why I’d stay.” It would be for Malini. For this selfish, desperate thing Priya felt that she’d confessed in all its awfulness and ugliness to Malini, lying in her arms with flowers growing through her skin. “You can stay for more than one thing, Pri,” Sima said. “It doesn’t make you a bad person if that’s true. Besides, I’m not staying just for allies, or an army.” “No?” “No.” Sima rubbed the back of her own hand over Priya’s tear-stained cheek. Her expression was as tender. “I’m also staying for you. Now, let’s see if we can sneak as easily back into the tent as you got out.”

Get you a friend like Sima

“I’ve learned my lesson,” Malini said, low. “I know how to break you now. Let me show you.

She trailed off. Malini’s fingertips were light against her mouth. Silencing her. “I don’t want to talk about battle anymore,” said Malini. “Don’t you?” A smile. “Aren’t you always thinking about how you’ll win?” “Priya,” Malini said. Laughter in her voice. “You’re here, aren’t you? I’ve already won.”

“I will remember what we are,” she said. “I will keep the thought alight in my heart, like a candle. And when our lives darken, I will use it to guide me through. I will remember that we are not what is done to us. We are, and always have been, more than that.” Her voice softened as they stared back at her—grief and rage and something like hope in their faces. “That is what I will do.

She was still so terribly likely to lose. She would have to trust this man. This priest, who spoke to her as if he knew her. Called her good. Dutiful. Pure. She would, if all else failed, have to place her life in his hands. Her skin crawled, even as she held the certainty inside herself, cold and sure.

She felt a terrible realization slide its way between her ribs. She could not tell Priya the truth. She would ask Priya to fight for her, maybe die for her, on the basis of lies. To enter battle for the sake not just of the bonds between their nations but for love. For the trust she’d placed in Malini long ago, when she’d allowed Malini to hold a knife to her heart. When she’d kissed Malini in a forest and told Malini she did not have the power to hurt her. But I do, Malini thought. Her heart hurt. She wanted to be sick.

Malini had always known in her soul what her mission would make of her. She touched her fingertips to the flower beneath her blouse—a helpless gesture. She loved Priya. The feeling was dark and deep within her, with its own steady undercurrent, always reaching for her, always dragging her under. But she needed to win this war. Needed it more than tenderness or love, needed it with a fire that burned and burned and screamed in her heart sisters’ names. She needed it because her brother’s blade had found her and cut the goodness from her long before she’d ever learned the shape of a gentle, encompassing love. If she had to risk Priya for her vengeance—if she had to place her in danger in order to win, and see her brother dead? So be it.

NOOOOO MALINI

“Thank you,” he said. “Don’t thank me,” she said. “You must do what you have been guided to by higher forces. And so, apparently, must I.”

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

“So they’ll give you their support,” Priya said. “All those priests of the mothers. Just like that?” “Yes.” “For nothing in return?” Priya pressed. She knew there was something else here that Malini hadn’t spoken of yet. Raziya had rightly sensed it. They all had. “Oh, they want something,” Malini said. She went abruptly silent.