Fantasy fiction: Empress Malini and priestess Priya will stop at nothing to save their kingdoms

This was her last hope.

The monsoon rain was pouring. The woman rode through it on horseback, without the cover of a parasol, letting the water soak her through. The trees of the forest loomed around her, black in the fading light.

She missed, with a sudden and knife-sharp grief, the flower gardens of home. White jasmine and needle-flower, and her pink roses. There were no trees to loom over her there, and no parched battlefields underfoot, seeded with nothing but dead flesh to draw scavenging birds.

The only flowers she had seen in months had been on the skin of her enemies. The yaksa who had killed her father had been flower-haired – a glowing, smiling girl-like thing with pits for teeth and arms sharpened to fine points. She had skewered him through, and laughed as she did it.

The woman shuddered at the memory, and shuddered again from the cold. She should have traveled in a chariot instead, but she loathed to be contained.

The monastery loomed out of the darkness ahead of her. Its gray stone shone silver in the shafts of dull light that broke through the trees.

Her army halted as the priest emerged, and bowed, and offered to lead her to the...

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