“You won’t defeat me,” said Bhumika. “You have your vial-poisoned followers, the taint of the water in your veins. But I am not the only twice-born in opposition to you today.”
Priya placed her own hand over Malini’s. She felt Malini flinch like a hound used to the lash. Malini’s hand was trembling now, where it gripped the knife, hot from the sacred wood and damp with sweat.
“Let me go,” Priya whispered.
“I can’t allow him to take you,” Malini said roughly.
She could have broken Malini’s grip. She could have broken Malini’s fingers. She could have bound her with vine and thorn and stepped easily to freedom.
“Let me go,” she repeated.
She had never needed strength to break away. Only this. The gentlest shadow of a touch, the barest press of her fingertips, on Malini’s arm. Only her own voice. She leaned back into Malini, letting Malini take a little of her weight.
“Please, Malini,” she said. “Trust me.”
Malini released a shuddering breath. Released her.
Bhumika’s hand moved in an arc. And Priya moved a hand too—moved it as if through water, and drew on the power that lived inside her, just as Bhumika did the same.
The air was a shower of glittering, deadly thorn shards.
She had never seen anything like it before. She had neverdoneanything like it before. She felt the roots beneath the soil—every deep root and every shallow curl of green—and drew them out. The ground crumbled unevenly, sinking and lashing tight around the feet of the rebels, throwing them to the ground and swallowing their weapons whole.
Priya grappled clumsily with her new strength, pouring it into the task. She wouldn’t have been able to do any of it without Bhumika. It was Bhumika’s skill that broke those thorn shards into razor-edged fragments; Bhumika who coiled the earth around limbs.
Priya understood for the first time the sheer power Bhumika had concealed all these long years. She saw the rebels try to draw on their cursed abilities and falter, under the strength of the thing she and Bhumika wielded. Their gifts seemed to feed on one another, a rush of water all the stronger for its weight, all the stronger for their shared power.
Ashok stumbled back. He reached for his own gifts, but it was like moving against the tide. She felt him in the sangam. The flicker of him.
“We are stronger than you, brother,” Bhumika said, and her sweet voice was a vicious kiss.
The ground roiled beneath him, knocking his feet from under him. He fell to the ground.
Imagine what the thrice-born could have done, Priya thought wildly,if they’d known what their powers could do together. It’s like a song, a howling song—
Ashok drew his mask down over his face to protect himself. The other rebels did the same. She saw his shoulders rise and fall. His chest heave.
He slammed his hands down, the grass rippling under him in a wave. Where Priya had used the momentum of her fall to fling herself back to her feet, he used it to launch forward, all brute strength. When Bhumika flung a heavy vine at him—thicker than his torso—he caught it, winding it around his arm. Drawing it like a lash, he whipped it back at Bhumika.
Bhumika broke it into halves in the air. The two pieces crashed to the ground.
Slowly, Bhumika walked between the cleaved halves toward him.
“Will you hurt me, then?” Bhumika asked, voice mild. “Your own temple sister?”
Priya saw his hand curl into a fist. Saw him raise it. Priya moved forward, her own hands upraised.
He doubled over, clutching his chest.
His mouth parted, and a rush of blood and water poured from it. Two of his rebels who had fought free from the earth’s prison ran to him, gripping him by the shoulders as he forced his head up, touching his fist to his mouth.
“Perhaps not,” he said, voice thick.
Bhumika took advantage of his lapse in control. Her eyes narrowed, and she broke the earth beneath him again. He fell forward, and the two rebels grabbed him.
“Retreat!” one yelled, and as the soil churned up around them, the trees collapsing, they stumbled back and began to run, Ashok held unsteadily between them.
“Let them go,” said Bhumika, and the people behind her, who had begun striding forward, came to an abrupt stop. She touched her own knuckles to her mouth as Ashok had done, a calculating and almost sorrowful look in her eyes.
