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by
Tasha Suri
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December 31, 2024 - February 16, 2025
She poured the thought into every inch of her own limbs: into the tilt of her neck, the firmness of her hand on the ground, the proud jut of her shoulders.
Rao would have chased answers like a predator with the scent of blood in its nose.
The meek, quiet girl, easily given to tears, that Rao had expected her to be—had always known her to be—had fallen away. The princess who sat before him was stern and calm, her gaze pinning him as neatly as a dagger to the throat.
He thinks the tenets of his faith will purify his hands of blood. He thinks his atrocities are blessings.”
“She said, What are you without your crowning glory? But now I wear a crown of fire and I am gristle and dust, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
“None of them have names. Only words for the rest of us to use, to pin them like a cloth beneath a needle. You understand?”
The words came out of her slow and thick like honey.
his head at an awful angle, nothing living in the wrongness of it.
Even through the closed lids of her eyes, she could see and feel the press of the luminous water. The tug of it, more stars than river.
It took two days for the leaves on Priya’s skirt to die.
Love. As if love excused anything. As if the knowledge that he was cruel and vicious and willing to harm her made her heart ache any less.
There was no void in her any longer. Whatever she was—weapon, monster, cursed or gifted—she was whole.
There was an illusion that had fallen over her when she’d wed him. It did not always hold her. But sometimes the veil of it covered her eyes. Sometimes she believed she loved him. Sometimes she was grateful to him,
But now it was not love that tugged the truth to her tongue. It was furious spite that made her want to speak. He thought so little of her. So little.
The belief that all she’d said was a product of her flesh—her pregnancy, her so-called womanly weakness of heart and body—and not evidence of her intelligence, her political acumen, and all that she was.
A child should not be a chain, used to yoke a woman like cattle to a role, a purpose, a life she would not have chosen for herself.
He wanted what she now had. And she knew—with the bone-deep assurance of a woman who’d felt his fist around her heart—that she could not give it to him.
It was amazing, really, how close a tremor of fury sounded to a tremor of fear.
Malini asked, letting her voice spool from her lips like a silk noose.
she said, in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere far beyond her, from somewhere old and beyond mortal lifetimes,
I will murder your heart and spirit and the very memory of your name and your lineage. I vow it.”
“We all learn this way,” said Priya. “By hoping we won’t die, when the odds are thoroughly stacked against us?”
“Yes,”
I want to understand the world I live in, strange though it may be. I need to understand, in order to survive it. I learned young the importance of understanding the nature of those around me, but also the need to understand greater things:
Maybe what it means to be me is to… to be a cure.”
“Bad news, my lady.” “Tell me.” “Your husband lives.”
She could not even imagine her own child yet. When she tried to, she saw—nothing. Only felt the alienness of her own body, the tug and pain that pooled at the base of her spine.
The mouth opened and within it was a flower that unfurled in thorns, virulent blue and black, its heart a cosmos.
Priya realized it was not gentleness as she’d first supposed, but the lulling voice one uses with a feral animal.
You didn’t sleep when a child you’d tried to murder returned to your home full grown.
Ah, spirits, she felt unclean, as if her own mind had stained her skin.
the lessons your enemies can teach you, however unwitting.
her sweet voice was a vicious kiss.
“Yes,” Bhumika said finally. “Symbolism is important. And freedom… You will not understand this, Princess Malini. But there is a subtle pain the conquered feel. Our old language is nearly lost. Our old ways. Even when we try to explain a vision of ourselves to one another—in our poetry, our song, our theater masks—we do so in opposition to you, or by looking to the past. As if we have no future. Parijatdvipa has reshaped us. It is not a conversation, but a rewriting. The pleasure of security and comfort can only ease the pain for so long.” She clasped her hands before herself. “And yet I never
...more
the fall of her hair, black haloed in gold.
“I am going to have to carve out a new face. A face that can pay the price I need to pay. I am going to become monstrous,”
And strength—strength is a knife turned on the parts of yourself that care.”
“Will you hurt me?” Malini demanded. “You should, to save yourself.” Priya shook her head. “No.” “Priya.” “No. I’m sorry, but no. Because I’m strong enough not to need to.”
utter, terrifying softness.
She didn’t flinch. To flinch was to invite the first cut.
He took her hands in his own. Looked at her, as if her face were a blazing light, as if she shone brighter than a statue of a mother.
Not true. It didn’t matter, of course. Truth and lies were both tools, to be used when most necessary.
The reality of Aditya, bound by a vision. Unwilling to rise.
Finally, thought Malini. She understands the bitterness of knowledge.
Maybe freedom will mean being able to protect our children instead of using them,”
“But I suppose you’ve long been friends for a reason. You both have a weakness in you that I don’t understand.”
The pain held fragments of the memory down, like a stitch through cloth.
The nothing was so solid, so complete, that she knew it wasn’t true emptiness or true neutrality. It was a feeling like a fist around a throat.
She wanted Malini. She wanted the woman who had held a knife to her heart. She wanted only things that would destroy her, and what good would that do anyone?
