One of Ashok’s own boys took him by the arm. Acting as a crutch, the boy led Ashok out of the hut, the two of them lumbering into the light.
“Don’t worry,” he heard Kritika say. “We’re not actually here for your weapons, after all…”
Two more of his people waited outside the doors. They ushered him away, into the shadow beneath the trees, away from the suspicious eyes of the rot-riven men.
Without guidance from him, his followers fell into line, guarding him in a loose circle, their scythes ready and their feet grimly planted.
“What happened?” asked one.
“I need silence,” he said. “Please.”
They nodded in acknowledgment. The barrier closed in tighter.
Priya. She’d found the way.
His equilibrium steadied, his pulse settling into a less frenetic rhythm. He needed to be calm. He breathed and breathed. He needed to enter the sangam.
He entered like a creature stumbling, ungainly. Fell to his knees in the water.
“Priya!”
He had trained her. He had made her. He’d kept her safe, when everyone else had died and they’d had nothing but each other.
“Priya!”
He’d begged coin and food from strangers. Or threatened them for it. When he’d begun to grow sick—blood in his cough, his lungs bands of agony—he’d knifed a man for the parcel of food tucked under his arm. He’d watched her eat it and been glad he had strength enough to kill for her, terrified that he would soon not even have that.
He’d given her up. Abandoned her to Bhumika, their sister who had looked like a stranger, with her finely woven saris and her cold eyes, her husband whose hands were stained in their siblings’ blood. He’d cut out his heart. When he’d been a dying boy and nothing but that, Priya had been his heart.
He yelled for her in the sangam and she did not come.
The water moved around him. He felt Bhumika, the alarm of her, across the water. But she knew as well as he did what had happened; felt it through whatever bonded them, temple-raised and gifted, together.
He realized then that Priya was not coming.
The girl he’d saved. The girl he’d abandoned.
Fine. So be it.
She had the deathless waters. She’d opened the way. And the way was all he needed.
He returned to his flesh. His family of followers had surrounded him in a circle, all thirty of them looking down at him.
Some held metal weapons. Others, stakes and staves carved from sacred wood, burning with heat and the promise of violence.
Kritika crossed through them. She was wiping her scythe clean of blood.
“We’ve dealt with those men,” said Kritika. “And we have what we need.”
They were always underestimated, until they drew on their masks.
They still had safe houses untouched and unknown by the regent. But they needed food and weapons and sources of coin. The nobility who had funded them were more wary, after the attack on Lord Iskar, unsure of what would happen under Lord Santosh’s regency. And his regency was coming, sure as the sunrise.
But these rot-riven outcasts had also possessed something Ashok needed far more than food.
“You have it?”
Kritika nodded and held it forward.
