“I have never done anything—anything,” said Priya. “I’ve been… nothing but a maidservant. Parts of me are broken and I stand in the middle of all those pieces and don’t go anywhere. I’m stuck, Bhumika. In all this time, I’ve just been quiet. I’ve just survived.”
“A biding quiet, I think. And now you’re exactly where you were intended to be all along: on the Hirana, with the deathless waters almost in reach.” Bhumika’s voice was knowing. “I can tell that you’re growing stronger.”
“I never planned this.”
“Did you not?” A pause. “I won’t try to control you anymore, Pri. But I do ask you to think: Are any of the people you’ve trusted truly worthy of it?”
“I trust you,” Priya managed to say.
Bhumika shook her head, slow and sure. “No,” she said. “I don’t think you really do. Go back, Priya. And please, keep the princess imprisoned and safe just a little longer. For my sake.”
“What will you do?” Priya asked, not for the first time.
Bhumika was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I don’t know, yet. But I’ll begin by speaking with Vikram. I’ll counsel him to carve a path through war that sees us all survive. And if he will not listen…” A shadow passed through her voice, black-winged. “Well. You and Ashok are not the only temple children.”
“I wish you luck,” said Priya. “For all our sakes, I suppose.”
“Yes,” said Bhumika. “For all our sakes.”
She returned to her skin. Glanced at Malini’s sleeping form, then slipped from the room to walk the triveni. It had been raining again. The ground was slick, almost a pool, a great mirror.
If Bhumika was right… If she had chosen not to speak. If she had chosen to forget…
She tilted her head back. Rain was falling again. One last shower for a fading monsoon. She rose to the plinth of the triveni, the stone cool and damp beneath her bare feet, her face raised to the sky. Soil. Sky.
Just show me the way.
“Why,” she whispered. “Why did I have to show you the way, Ashok? What did I know that you didn’t?”
The answer lay inside her. It always had. But she had folded herself small. She’d held that night of fire and death in a closed fist. She’d been too frightened that it would be stolen from her to let it go, to do anything but conceal it. Through grief and hunger and loss, through her arrival in the mahal, to drinking and laughing with Sima under the cover of trees—she’d carried it with her. She’d held it so it couldn’t be touched or altered.
It was time to unfurl her fingers. It was time to see what she held.
For the first time in a decade, Priya thought of the night the temple children burned.
PRIYA
Priya tugged at the heavy bucket of water, swearing as it tilted precariously, a wave spilling out over the hem of her ghagra choli. “Nandi! Help me!”
“I can’t help,” Nandi said, sounding affronted. He was sitting in the center of the room with his hands clapped pointedly over his eyes. He had been sitting that way, wailing, for a good ten minutes. He’d had a run-in earlier with the handiwork of some of the elder temple children, who’d been growing deep bursts of spores on the walls. Nandi had touched where he shouldn’t have, and a burst of yellow pollen had hit him square in the face.
Usually, Priya would have dragged him directly to one of the elders for a scolding and to have his eyes washed clean and a tincture applied to stop infection, but the elders had expressly forbidden Priya’s group of children—the youngest and smallest—from leaving their rooms this evening. One of the twice-born had lost control of a seething knot of vines, which had cracked stone and burrowed their way under the surface of the temple, causing a fair amount of destruction. They’d already shattered the steps up the Hirana, stopping any pilgrims from making the journey.
The Hirana was always dangerous and changeable. Sometimes the path the pilgrims took vanished overnight. Sometimes strange wildflowers grew even upon the triveni, in violet and black and vibrant pink, and had to be plucked away with murmured prayers and reverence by the elders. But the Hirana was not vicious in its shifting moods, in the way mortals could be. Or so Elder Bojal said. Elder Bojal complained vociferously, to any other elder who would listen, that the “cursed” children had ruined the Hirana, totally and utterly. He’d only shut up when Elder Sendhil had cornered him and asked, in a low voice, if he wanted to confront the children directly himself.
Elder Bojal hadn’t been able to answer that.
Elder Chandni hadn’t commented on the changes to the Hirana. Not even the new cracks that opened to darkness, which had caught some of the general’s own men in their maws. No one had died—the elders had intervened—but one man had broken his leg at an awful angle, and that had made thrice-born Sanjana and Riti—who were elders now, although none of the other elders called them such—laugh and laugh, as if blood and bones were a terribly funny business. But when Priya had asked Elder Chandni about it, she’d only shaken her head and told Priya to be careful.
“You’re not quite like they are,” she said. “Be glad of that.”
Priya had thought that was an odd statement. Priya was exactly like the rest of them, even if she was only once-born. She had passed through the deathless waters during the festival of the dark of the moon, along with all the others: the youngest children trying to become once-born; the once-born ready to be twice-born; the twice-born seeking to rise to elderhood. She’d risen from the waters, gasping, when three of her age-mates had not. She’d sat in the sickroom, waiting to see if the waters would take her belatedly, with fever and wasting, as they sometimes did.
And like all the children who’d survivedthatjourney, that unnatural and ill-starred journey, she’d grown… strange. The twice-born had suddenly been able to coax small blooms, burst pollen through buds. The thrice-born had sheared stone with leaf and thorn alone. And Priya and Nandi had stumbled through dreams of waters meeting, walking the sangam of ancient tales.
No elder has walked there in centuries, Elder Kana had whispered. And of the rest, as the keeper of old lore she’d said:No elder has had such power since the Age of Flowers.
Mythically gifted they might be, but Priya and Nandi were still children, and Nandi was still a crybaby. Priya thumped the water down, struggling not to snap at him again.
