19 January, 1968
The morning came wrong.
Nitara noticed it the way animals noticed weather before it broke, not with her mind, which was occupied with the important business of deciding whether the blue ribbon or the green ribbon better suited an academy admission, but with something older than her mind. Some part of her that had not yet been smoothed into a princess. The air in the capital was strange.
She stood at the window of her dressing room in the Kalabhra Palace, the territorial seat, the family's true home, nested in the heart of Srivanti, the city that had been the blood-centre of Lemuria since before the Federation had given it a modern name, and she looked out at the streets below, and the streets were quieter than they should have been for a morning in January.
Not empty. But quieter.
As though the city had taken a breath and was holding it.
"Blue," she announced, having resolved nothing.
Her attendant tied the ribbon. Nitara's mother appeared in the doorway wearing her travelling shawl, the dark green one with the silver thread that Nitara associated with important occasions, and smiled with the particular warmth her mother reserved for mornings she was proud of.
"Are you ready?"
"I have been ready for three years," Nitara said, with the certainty of a six-year-old who had been told about the Academy for approximately her entire sentient life.
Her mother laughed.
Her father was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, already dressed, speaking quietly with the head of the household guard. He looked up when Nitara descended and his face did the thing it always did, that softening, that private pride that he never managed to fully contain, and he held out his hand, and she took it.
They went out into the morning.
Outside the territory's gate, Srivanti breathed its held breath and did not release it.
She felt it more clearly now, in the streets. The Vadik quarter through which their route to the Academy passed, the old lanes of cedar-fronted houses and courtyard temples, the neighbourhood her family had protected and governed and called home for twelve generations, was subdued in a way she could not name. Shopfronts that should have been open were shuttered. The vegetable sellers who called to each other across the lane every morning were absent. An old woman sitting at her window caught Nitara's eye and looked away quickly, which was not what old women in this quarter did. Old women in this quarter said things about how tall she was getting and offered her sweets.
"Papa," Nitara said.
"I see it," her father said quietly. He had not released her hand.
His guard-captain said something in a low voice. Her father answered in a lower one. Her mother's hand found Nitara's shoulder.
They were in the lane between the temple of the river goddess and the old spice merchant's house, which Nitara knew because she had walked it a hundred times, when the sound began.
Not the sound of the capital. A different sound. Coming from three lanes over, then two, then —
Her father turned.
There were men at both ends of the lane.
She would spend years, the better part of twenty years, trying to remember the next four minutes with more clarity than they retained. Memory, she would learn, was not a recording. It was a survival mechanism. It saved what it could carry and left the rest at the side of the road.
What it carried:
The blue ribbon. She was aware of the blue ribbon the entire time, in the way you became aware of small ordinary things when the world stopped being ordinary.
Her father's voice, very calm, speaking to his guard-captain in a tone she had never heard from him, a tone that was the sound of a man making calculations he did not want to make.
Her mother's hand on her shoulder becoming a grip.
The men at the end of the lane. The Kharijites. That was what the Vadik people called them, the ones who came from across the partition line, from the young nation of Varakha that had been carved from Lemuria's western body in 1947 and had been bleeding the Federation through its wound ever since. Not an army. Something looser and more terrible than an army. The Liberation Front's young men who had been handed guns and ideology and pointed at Srivanti's old quarter and told that what they were doing was sacred.
She did not learn any of that until later.
In the lane, there were only the men and the sound and her father stepping in front of her mother in a way that Nitara understood, even at six, was the last gesture of a man who knows he is not going to be able to do enough but will do what he can.
Two shots.
The blue ribbon.
Her mother fell first. Her father turned, she would never understand why he turned, why the body's instinct was toward the person you loved rather than the threat, it was not logical, it was not strategic, it was human in a way that broke her every time she thought of it, her father turned and then he fell too, and the sound his body made on the old stones of the lane was the sound the world made when it divided into before and after.
Something hit her in the stomach.
Hot. She thought, stupidly: hot.
Then the guards were around her, and the lane was chaos, and someone was carrying her.
The blue ribbon came loose.
She did not remember losing consciousness. She remembered the blue ribbon on the stones of the lane, growing smaller as she was carried away from it, and her parents on the ground beside it, and the sound the city was beginning to make, not in that lane, in many places at once, a sound like the city was tearing, and she thought:
I was going to the Academy today.
Then the darkness came and was merciful.
She woke in the palace.
The wound in her stomach had been tended by the court physician, who told her she was very lucky in the way that adults said things when they meant something they didn't want to say to a child. Her brothers were there, Aryan sitting at the edge of her bed with his jaw set in a way she had never seen, Ryan standing at the window watching something she couldn't see from her position.
Priya was asleep in the chair beside her, small and curled and somehow still innocent, the way only Priya could be.
"Where are—" Nitara began.
"Rest," Aryan said.
"Where are—"
"Rest," he said again, and his voice broke on the word in a way that answered the question without answering it.
Outside the walls of the Kalabhra territorial palace, the nineteenth of January did its work.
The capital quarter that had been Vadik for twelve generations, the cedar houses, the courtyard temples, the lanes where old women offered children sweets, burned and did not stop burning.
Homes were invaded in the night. Men were taken from the rooms where they had been sleeping, from the streets where they had been walking, from the doorways where they had been watching the frightened air and hoping the frightened air was wrong. Killed where they were found. Boys too. The age did not appear to matter to the Liberation Front, whose pamphlets, which Nitara would read years later with a cold and thorough hatred, described the Vadik men of Srivanti's old quarter as occupiers of sacred land, which required a particular creativity of historical revision to sustain, given that the Vadik people had been in this quarter for four hundred years, but the Liberation Front had never allowed history to complicate its arithmetic.
The temples were entered. She would not describe what was done there because some things deserved better than description.
The women who could leave left.
They left overnight, the way people leave when leaving is the only remaining act of agency, quickly, with almost nothing, carrying children and small bundles and whatever they had grabbed in the dark that turned out to be not what they thought it was. They went to the palace territory, to the gates, to the households of relatives in safer districts. They went by the back routes because the front routes were no longer safe. They went and did not look back because looking back was not something you could afford at the moment of exodus.
Some could not leave in time.
For them, for the women and daughters who remained in the settlements beyond the reach of rescue in those two months, Nitara would not find the right words for years. She would eventually decide there were no right words. There was only the fact of it, which she would carry in a specific chamber of herself for the rest of her life, and which she would not speak about often because the speaking did not help the carrying.
There was a boy.
A boy. Perhaps nine or ten years old. Walking up the road to the palace territory in the dark, holding his little brother's hand, the brother no more than four, struggling to keep pace. The boy had wrapped his brother in his own coat despite the January cold. He had found the road to the gate through the burning quarter, how the guard did not know and did not ask, and he had stood at the gate in the dark with his small brother and knocked.
The gates were closed.
Not from cruelty. From the calculus of defence, the gate-captain had sealed the territory at nightfall against the threat, against infiltration, against the chaos in the streets that kept changing its shape. Sealed gates were the rule, and rules were the rope you held when everything else stopped making sense.
But the boy was on the other side.
He knocked again. He said something, the guard wasn't close enough to hear exactly, but the shape of it was a child asking for sanctuary in the only place he believed was safe.
The gate-captain looked through the slat.
He opened the gate.
Later, he would be reprimanded for this by someone in the administration who would cite protocol. He would stand and receive this reprimand without expression. He would not apologise.
The boy came through with his brother. He sat down just inside the gate in the torchlight, his brother in his lap, and he did not cry and he did not speak. He simply sat. His brother fell asleep.
Outside the gate, the fires continued.
It lasted two months.
The Lemuria Federation's army, which had spent twenty years carefully not looking too hard at the border provocations of the newly established Republic of Varakha, not looking because the Federation government's policy was economic growth, stability, the careful management of a large and complicated nation, and looking too hard at Varakha meant looking at things that were expensive to look at, the army finally moved.
They cleared the quarter. They killed the men who could be caught. They repaired what could be repaired.
The leaders of the Varakhan Liberation Front had already left.
They had given their orders and distributed their pamphlets and handed their guns to the young men who believed what the pamphlets said, and then they had crossed back over the partition line to the houses and the safe addresses and the plausible deniability that had been arranged for them, and when the Federation protested to the Republic of Varakha, the Republic of Varakha expressed condolences and denied involvement and requested evidence, which it knew could not be produced in the form that international conventions required.
The centuries-old trust that had held the quarter's communities together, Vadik and Varkhani and the dozen other peoples who had lived within the sound of each other's temple bells and market calls for four hundred years, was ash.
You could not unburn it.
It had been tended for decades, that fire, fed from across the partition line with pamphlets and money and ideology and the particular, patient work of people who needed it to burn. It had been tended by the Governance's regional networks and by the Liberation Front's leadership and by forces that operated in that comfortable shadow between a nation's official policy and what its money actually did.
It had been tended since 1947. Perhaps before.
Nitara healed.
She healed physically, which took six weeks and left a scar on her left side that she would carry the rest of her life, and she healed in the other ways, which did not happen in six weeks and did not leave a scar visible from the outside.
Her brothers ran the dynasty's affairs in the absence of their parents, Aryan with the controlled ferocity of a twenty-year-old who had been shaped for leadership and now discovered that leadership in catastrophe felt nothing like leadership in calm, Vikram quieter and harder than she had ever known him, moving through the palace with the particular efficiency of someone who did not trust himself to stop.
Priya stopped collecting animals. Nitara noticed this without saying anything. It was the kind of grief that expressed itself in absences.
The boy who had come through the gate was named something, she asked later and was given the name and filed it away. He and his brother were housed in the palace territory's residential quarters with the dozens of other families who had come through the gates or been brought in during the weeks of the clearance. The boy did not speak much. He helped wherever there was something to carry.
She watched him from a distance sometimes, in the way you watched people who had walked through the same fire from a different angle and understood something you understood from opposite directions.
She was six years old.
She did not know, had no means of knowing, that she would spend the next decades of her life tracing the hands that had made the fire. That the boy at the gate would become important to her. That the wound in her stomach was the first wound, and that the world had more of them planned, and that the only answer she would eventually find to any of it was not grief and not rage, though she would pass through both, but something colder and more architectural.
Who needed them to fall?
She had read that question in a library. A smaller version of herself, sticky with candy, had read it and filed it in the part of herself that was already becoming something more than a child.