The Jasmine Throne

Malini is the sister of an emperor, and when she refuses to burn herself alive as proof of his holiness he does not kill her but sends her instead to the Hirana, a crumbling temple above the conquered city of Ahiranya, drugged and guarded and left to rot in plain sight. Priya is one of the maidservants sent up to clean it, and she has been in the Hirana before, as one of the temple children the empire massacred a generation ago, which means she carries an inheritance of magic she has spent her life pretending not to have. Ahiranya beneath them is decaying: a rot spreading through crops and bodies, an occupying regent, and a rebellion in the forest that would very much like Priya back. The two women recognise something in each other and begin to bargain, each intending to use the other, each rather less able to keep to that plan than she expects. Suri builds her Indian-inflected empire with attention to how colonisation actually operates, through collaborators and administrators and destroyed archives, and the novel's romance and its politics are the same thing: two women deciding what they will burn to get free.