Ashok beckoned over one of his men. “Wake her,” he said. “Interrogate her. Find out if she knows anything useful about my sister.”
His man nodded and removed his scythe from his sash.
Ashok left him and returned to the triveni.
You are mine, he thought, speaking to the Hirana in the quiet of his own skull. He placed his hand upon the plinth.And I am yours. I did not die in you for a reason. So show me the way.
Beneath his hand, the stone was cold and unresponsive. He couldn’t feel the warmth of it, as he had as a boy. It was still and cold, a corpse of stone. He’d hoped, perhaps, that he could find the way without Priya. Now that the regent’s power had been broken—now that Hiranaprastha burned, and the Hirana was as good as his—he had hoped the temple would yield to him. It had been a small hope, against all reason.
No matter.
One of his women entered the room, wiping her hands clean of blood. Behind her were three more rebels, watching him, waiting for orders.
“We keep searching,” he said. They did so. He walked the length of the Hirana—entering each cloister room, every space where his siblings had once run and fought and played and prayed. He entered the sangam, hoping the Hirana would feel it and yield to him. But the entrance to the deathless waters did not appear. He could not find it.
Perhaps if he meditated—if he spent days upon days here, as she had—he would find the way.
But there was no time. The deathless waters swam in the blood of his followers, quickly turning to poison. Leaching away their strength. Their lives. He needed to act before they ran out of time.
Damn you, Priya.
“We’re leaving,” he told his followers eventually, defeated by a pile of stone. “We’re going to seek out my sister once more.”
“I’m sorry,” another of his men said. Through the mask, Ashok couldn’t see his expression, but he sounded ashamed. “I shouldn’t have let her escape.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “We still have our new strength. We’ll find the way.”
PRIYA
The first step, after entering the deathless waters, was to emerge at all. If you could fall beneath that cosmic blue and come back out again, your body still in working order—well. You’d already managed a minor miracle.
The next step was surviving the hours that followed. Priya had not forgotten the sickroom: not forgotten the twice- and once-born who’d died there, lost and feverish in their beds. But she had not thought it would come for her now, when the Hirana had called her to the waters, when she’d felt nothing but a kind of bliss as she’d lowered herself into them and the sangam had unfurled for her.
But here she was. Burning. Spitting bile into the bushes.
It was her own fool fault for thinking she was somehow special. She wasn’t. And now she was dying.
Weeds withered and resurrected in a frenzied cycle beneath her hands as she dry heaved. She swore, dizzy on her hands and knees.
“Can you get up?” Malini asked. Her voice was near. She was kneeling by Priya, her own eyes fixed on the path behind them. Looking, perhaps, for other people running for refuge, or soldiers.
“I can. Just give me a moment.”
With great effort, Priya stumbled to her feet.
Fell.
“Well,” said Malini. “Apparently not.”
“I’m going to have to,” Priya gritted out. “We can’t stay here. Not with the city in the state it is.”
Malini was silent for a moment. Then she said, “You understand that my strength is—limited.”
“Of course I do.”
“Then you’ll forgive me if this ends badly. Come. Put your arms around me.”
Priya did. Somehow, Malini managed to leverage them both to their feet, with Priya’s face against the crook of her shoulder and Priya’s hands clutched tight against the cloth of Malini’s blouse.
