Lalita
Lalita stood in the dark of a hallway in her home. She could smell the incense of the approaching storm, mingled with the jasmine scent of her own hair, recently washed and oiled, now bound at the nape of her neck in a hasty knot. Her neck was damp with sweat. She breathed in and out in a steady, slow rhythm even as her hands trembled at her sides.
Below her, echoing up from the central courtyard of her home, came the sound of a woman weeping.
“Tell us where your mistress is.” The man’s voice echoed up from below, mingling with the sound of tears. “Or I swear, I will make sure your whole family is hounded out of the city for protecting Amrithi scum. Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” howled a voice. “I don’t know where she is!”
Farida, fool girl, could have told them that Lalita was likely to be on the roof, watching the storm approach, or in her study as she had been that morning, writing a message to Mehr. Instead the maidservant wept and claimed to know nothing, all the while begging for mercy. Lalita would have liked to believe Farida was showing her an astonishing level of loyalty, but it seemed far more likely that fear had entirely obliterated the girl’s mind.
Lalita closed her eyes. Controlled her breathing. There was a rhythm to maintaining a semblance of calm in the face of danger. It was something akin to a rite.
When Lalita left Irinah, for the first time, she was just fifteen. Her grandmother had given Lalita the last of her coin and taken Lalita’s face between her hands. Lalita remembered, still, her dark eyes and the uncomfortable curl of her lip, scarred from a decade-old encounter with a lowly Ambhan official who’d taken it in his head to make an example of an Amrithi woman who dared to attempt trade with a village under his purview.
Hala, she’d said. Little one. You’re the cleverest one of my blood, but your mind will only take you so far. No matter what you do, they will discover you one day. Don’t argue, child. Listen to me. When you make a mistake—when they find you—don’t try to save your money or your possessions. Don’t try to be clever. Save your skin first, Hala. Run.
Lalita was not Hala anymore. She had not been Hala in a long time. But she recalled her grandmother’s words, as she stood still in the hall of her haveli, dressed in her Chand garb and her Chand name, and thought of all the mistakes that had led her here, into a dark corridor, with nowhere to run to.
Lalita’s first mistake, of course, had been returning to Irinah. But homesickness was a curious thing. For a small handful of years, she’d basked in the comforts of Ambha, its distant white-peaked mountains, its lush lakes and sweet air. Its wealthy men. Then she’d begun to yearn, despite herself, for Irinah: for its dreamfire, its daiva, for the scents and sights of home.
Irinah was not a safe place for someone like her. She’d known that. There was too high a chance of her being recognized as an Amrithi, too high a chance of a daiva seeking her out for her ancestry, for her blood. And yet Lalita had come home.
She’d always prided herself on being a practical woman, but it was homesickness that had brought her back. Homesickness, and the feeling that she was losing herself, day by day: that somehow her hidden self was slipping, ever so steadily, from her grasp.
“Don’t you know who we are, girl?” said another voice. Male, again.
“No, my lord,” Farida whimpered.
Her second mistake had been ignoring Usha’s warning.
One of your kitchen boys was questioned by a nobleman, Usha had said. Somebody knows, or thinks they know the truth about you. You should run now, while you still can.
But Lalita had not held her grandmother’s advice as close as she should have. She had wanted to say farewell to Mehr. She’d needed time to arrange the transport of her possessions. Excuse after excuse had kept her feet firmly on the city’s ground, when in truth she’d simply wanted to cling to the life she’d worked so hard to build. Ah, she was a fool.
“We’re no petty lords. We have a higher purpose than most of the nobility,” he boasted. “We’re devotees of the Saltborn. Do you know what that means?”
Farida whimpered out a no.
“We serve the Emperor’s will. You know who the Emperor is at least, don’t you?”
There was a chorus of ugly laughter.
She was not sure how many men stood below her. She didn’t dare look through the lattice window facing the courtyard, for fear they would see her. She wondered if these boastful lords—these squabbling Ambhan children, who had no higher purpose in life than wreaking destruction on their Emperor’s behalf—would have thought to set guards on all the exits from the household. She considered whether men who had never worked for their survival would think to look in the servants’ corridor she now stood in, a narrow passage lit by one latticed window and guttering candles set into alcoves along the wall. She hoped not.
Her third mistake had been carelessness. She’d grown soft after living all these years in Jah Irinah. She’d made no secret of her visits to the Governor’s half-Amrithi daughter. She had danced her rites in her room alone at sunrise, and kept her Amrithi dagger close. Taking on a Chand name had only provided her a thin veneer of security. She should have given up her rites. She should have discarded her dagger. She should have left Mehr well alone.
But Mehr’s mother had been her friend, once—her only friend, in fact, when she had returned to Jah Irinah as a young courtesan heartsick and hungry for home. Ruhi had asked her to care for Mehr—begged her—and Lalita had loved both mother and daughter too well to refuse. She’d never found the will in her heart since to untangle Mehr from her life.
There was more shouting—and more sobbing—from below her. Through it, Lalita heard another noise. To her right, the candle flickered. She heard the scuff of a footstep. Lalita turned sharply, her hand reaching instinctively for the dagger in her sash.
The flash of a familiar face in candelight. Usha.
Ah, Gods.
“I killed a man at the exit from the kitchen,” Usha said, her voice very soft. “Go there now.”
“Come with me,” Lalita whispered.
Usha shook her head.
“They need a distraction,” murmured Usha. “And I need to make sure they let Farida go.”
In the flickering light Usha’s face was resolute, her jaw firm. There was a spatter of blood on her cheek.
There are too many men, Lalita thought. And only one of you.
Lalita thought absurdly of the way her grandmother had taken her face in her hands, a lifetime ago. She wanted to place her hand on Usha’s jaw and give a shape to a farewell that already felt wrenchingly, terribly final. She wanted to tell Usha to save her skin first, to leave Lalita to the fate she’d built for herself, and run. Her hands were trembling. She didn’t reach out.
“I can’t leave you here,” she said instead.
Usha smiled wanly.
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
There was a commotion below them; a scream, and then silence.
If the noblemen found Lalita, she would be the one screaming. She knew very well what Ambhan noblemen thought of the worth of Amrithi. She knew the cruelty they could inflict, before they forced her from the city and the life she had so carefully, laboriously constructed for herself. She thought of her grandmother’s scarred lip, her warning, and shivered.