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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tasha Suri
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February 25 - March 2, 2024
I don’t think she knew if she wanted to save you or consume you whole.
“I know exactly what I’m seeing,” said Malini. “But I don’t understand why. Oh, when you thought I was something gentle and wounded—that I could understand. But now, now you know I’ve lied to you and used you, now you know I am a traitor, impure, that I have a hard heart, that I am the empire and the empire is me—” “I don’t know,” Priya said. Her voice was a lash. “I don’t know why I care, is that enough? Perhaps I’m simply not monstrous enough to enjoy watching another human suffer, no matter
But the Hirana was not vicious in its shifting moods, in the way mortals could be.
Cruelty was part of their training, callousing the heart the way a knife calloused the hands. Weakness had to be burned away. Sanjana had always tried to make Priya
When he’d been a dying boy and nothing but that, Priya had been his heart.
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. And yet she felt then, with an aching resentment, how Vikram would use their child to reduce and erase her. She hated him for that, for stealing the quiet and strange intimacy of her and her own flesh and blood and making it a weapon.
But suddenly it no longer mattered. Suddenly her spine was iron. Her tongue tasted of blood, as if Priya’s hurt lay inside her. She did not need flowers or court or the graces due a princess, to be what she was.
Malini asked, feeling a strange hunger at the base of her skull as she watched Priya turn the knife over in her grip. Tell me what you are, the hunger was saying. Tell me what you are, every layer of you, tell me how I can use you—
Malini look at Priya’s face. Thought, I do not know this woman at all. And yet that did not frighten her as it should have.
The face Priya wore now was a familiar one. She’d worn it when she killed the rebel maidservant on the triveni; when Malini had first looked at her and thought, I could use this one. It was the face of a temple daughter, formidable and strange. Priya was not just a maid or a weapon. She was something more, and Malini had no words for her.
She didn’t want to be convinced into foolishness again, to let herself like Malini too much. She didn’t want to trust her, or want to be friends. She didn’t want to want her. And it would have been so easy, after all they’d been through together—after she’d seen Malini nearly die and watched the way Malini’s eyes had gone wide and cold with fury when Pramila had held the knife to Priya’s throat. She was teetering on the edge. She did not want to fall.
“You don’t have to believe that I care for you, Priya. You only have to believe that I need you. And I do need you.”
“The hollowing,” Chandni told her. “It is called the hollowing.” She looked away from Priya then, making her laborious, slow way around the building’s perimeter. “We believed we understood it. Hollowing, to scrape you clean of weakness. Hollowing, to make you a vessel for truth and knowledge. Hollowing for purity.” A pause. “Then your siblings entered the deathless waters and returned with strangers living behind their eyes. And we understood that we were wrong. Whatever returned wore their skins. But it was not them. And then the rot began. Whatever lies in you—whatever returned within
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She thought of Sanjana’s smile, Nandi’s gentle eyes, and was crushed with the weight of how hollow they hadn’t been—how hollow the world was without them.
“There’s no ‘perhaps,’” Priya said thickly. “Was it worth it, then, murdering my brothers and sisters? For a belief?”
“I know the will of the mothers. I feel it.”
interesting
“What is the point of knowledge that isn’t used?”
You can have a child, and hold that child against your own skin, and raise it. You can betray yourself and your values for that child. You can let the child escape, even though you know it should die—know, no matter how strong and firm its hand is in yours, that it is a blight and must be hollowed from the world to give the world chance enough to survive. And that child can look at you, with fury and contempt, and leave you to die.
“Whether my flesh made her—whether she was left a foundling at the base of the Hirana, with birth blood still on her—what difference does it make? I thought of her as my own. That was my error.”
“Because I think you are. Or I’m afraid you are. Oh, you’re so lovely to me, you’re very good at being lovely, but you’re also the woman who organized a coup against the emperor. You’re deep waters, Malini. You’re so much more than you’re willing to show me, and that scares me. I think I’m always waiting for you to turn on me.”
But more than anything, Priya—more than that—I’m monstrous because I have desires. Desires I have known all my life that I should not. I’ve always wanted things that would place me in danger.”
Why would you want me? Why would you follow me into the water, and hold my heart and speak to me in a voice like that, like you’re yearning for me?
“You know this doesn’t make you a monster,” Priya murmured. She lay facing Malini, sun on her deep brown skin, her hair a loose sheet of darkness around her. “Wanting me. You know that, don’t you?”
Malini wanted to explain that being monstrous wasn’t inherent, as Priya seemed to believe it to be. It was something placed upon you: a chain or a poison, bled into you by unkind hands.
“I’ve never wanted justice. Maybe I should have, but the thing I truly wanted was myself back. And now I just want to know—to prove—that the temple elders were wrong. Parijatdvipa was wrong. My brothers and sisters and I, we were never monsters. We didn’t deserve what was done to us. I want to believe that. I want to know that. I want that to be true, and if it isn’t, I want to make it true. But you, Malini,” she said. “You want to remake the world.”
There are other versions of you that I don’t know. But this one…” Her fingers were against Malini’s lips. “This one is mine.”
Priya knew more of Malini than she thought she did. And Malini was struck, absurdly, by how much she liked the woman Priya had made her be, however fleetingly. I know you.
“You shouldn’t be so rude to women holding knives,”
“Let me go,” she repeated. She had never needed strength to break away. Only this. The gentlest shadow of a touch, the barest press of her fingertips, on Malini’s arm. Only her own voice. She leaned back into Malini, letting Malini take a little of her weight.
even one or two of you can find the deathless waters—if you can survive the process—your strength would be enough. It would be enough.”
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.”
This was what she had needed. Not forgiveness, not a balm for this strange writhing fury inside her, but the promise of someone to care for—to love—that she could not harm. Even if she had to. Even if she tried.
Priya huffed out a breath. “Jeevan, why are you holding her hand?”
Priya pushed her sudden yearning to know this Malini—as she’d known the one who had kissed her beneath a waterfall—away.
To be nothing but a part of Malini’s history, and for her to be part of Priya’s in turn… no. That felt wrong, viscerally wrong. It couldn’t be that easy to erase what they felt for each other—the wonder and hope of it.
“You’ll see me again. I know it. No matter where you go or what you do, I’ll find you eventually, because you’re taking a piece of my heart with you. You carved it out, after all.”
“I promise you I’ll come,” Priya said to her. “I know you don’t think much of prophecies. Or portents, or fate, or anything of that sort. But one day I am going to come and find you. By then, I expect you will have long forgotten me. Maybe I’ll only be able to walk the edges of whatever mahal you live in, but as… as long as you want me to, I’ll come. If you want me to find you, I’ll come.”
There were so many things Priya didn’t know how to say. The moment I saw you, I felt a tug. You are the feeling of falling, the tidal waters, the way a living thing will always turn, seeking light. It isn’t that I think you are good or kind, or even that I love you. It is only that, the moment I saw you, I knew I would seek you out. Just as I sought the deathless waters. Just as I sought my brother. Just as I seek all things—without thought, with nothing but want.
“I am not asking for anything unreasonable,” Malini retorted. “I never have. But if you will not explain yourself, let me explain something to you: You and Chandra both believe the right to rule is something that must be given to you, by the mothers of flame, by blood, by the nameless. I’m no such fool. I know there is no higher power that sanctions a king or emperor. There is only the moment when power is placed in your hands, and there is one truth: Either you take the power and wield it, or someone else will. And perhaps they will not be as kind to you and yours.” She leaned forward. “You
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He had never understood. Her hurts and her terrors, which had consumed her all her life, had always been small to him. He had either never truly seen them or simply, easily forgotten them.
“Look at the world, not at the water,” said Malini. “Look at your sister. You know this is what must be done.”
“Then he sought to burn me. And I finally heard the mothers. And I remembered one fact we have all forgotten, my lords.” She had them. Held them bound with her words, winding and winding. “The first of the mothers, who founded our line and the empire, was a devotee of the nameless god, as the Alorans and Srugani are. In his faith and his nature, Aditya is closer to her than any scion of her line has ever been. He does not forget that Parijatdvipa is bound together for a reason. The mothers chose to ascend in fire to gain the power to protect their people. Our people, for we are one empire.”
Need to take note of this moment bc this is when I fell in love with her character. The way she spins the truth and created this nrrative.. Her big brain
“See,” Priya said, with a smile. “I am clever. Shows you.” “I’ve never said that you’re not clever.” “You call me a fool all the time.”
You both have a weakness in you that I don’t understand.” “Morality isn’t weakness.” “It is if it will see us all dead.
“I don’t know what you see when you look at me. But if you think it is too cold for me, or too cruel…” She shrugged. “I have never lied to you, Rao. If you don’t know me, if you fail to understand what I want to achieve, you alone are responsible for that.”
They knew this day would come to pass. Is that not so, Prince Rao? Do your priests know the path of fate?” “They do,” he heard himself say, and knew he had condemned them.
Nothing of particular interest i just think this line goes really hard
I know the judgment of fire, and the price it demands. And here, in this dark, I hear the mothers. And I know it is my duty to ensure that fate is done.”
She thought instead of the fact that she and Ashok and Bhumika were the last survivors of their family, a family not of blood but of history and suffering, love and the kind of hurt that only love can breed.
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.
“Remember that we love you still, no matter what you become.”
