She blinked at him, surprised.
“I—I’m just a maidservant,” she said. “I’m sorry, little brother, but—”
“You must work in a nice house, if you can help strays like us,” he said quickly. “A big house with money to spare. Maybe your masters need a boy who works hard and doesn’t make much trouble? That could be me.”
“Most households won’t take a boy who has the rot, no matter how hardworking he is,” she pointed out gently, trying to lessen the blow of her words.
“I know,” he said. His jaw was set, stubborn. “But I’m still asking.”
Smart boy. She couldn’t blame him for taking the chance. She was clearly soft enough to spend her own coin on sacred wood to help the rot-riven. Why wouldn’t he push her for more?
“I’ll do anything anyone needs me to do,” he insisted. “Ma’am, I can clean latrines. I can cut wood. I can work land. My family is—they were—farmers. I’m not afraid of hard work.”
“You haven’t got anyone?” she asked. “None of the others look out for you?” She gestured in the vague direction the other children had vanished.
“I’m alone,” he said simply. Then: “Please.”
A few people drifted past them, carefully skirting the boy. His wrapped hands, the shawl over his head—both revealed his rot-riven status just as well as anything they hid would have.
“Call me Priya,” she said. “Not ma’am.”
“Priya,” he repeated obediently.
“You say you can work,” she said. She looked at his hands. “How bad are they?”
“Not that bad.”
“Show me,” she said. “Give me your wrist.”
“You don’t mind touching me?” he asked. There was a slight waver of hesitation in his voice.
“Rot can’t pass between people,” she said. “Unless I pluck one of those leaves from your hair and eat it, I think I’ll be fine.”
That brought a smile to his face. There for a blink, like a flash of sun through parting clouds, then gone. He deftly unwrapped one of his hands. She took hold of his wrist and raised it up to the light.
There was a little bud, growing up under the skin.
It was pressing against the flesh of his fingertip, his finger a too-small shell for the thing trying to unfurl. She looked at the tracery of green visible through the thin skin at the back of his hand, the fine lace of it. The bud had deep roots.
She swallowed. Ah. Deep roots, deep rot. If he already had leaves in his hair, green spidering through his blood, she couldn’t imagine that he had long left.
“Come with me,” she said, and tugged him by the wrist, making him follow her. She walked along the road, eventually joining the flow of the crowd leaving the market behind.
“Where are we going?” he asked. He didn’t try to pull away from her.
“I’m going to get you some sacred wood,” she said determinedly, putting all thoughts of murders and soldiers and the work she needed to do out of her mind. She released him and strode ahead. He ran to keep up with her, dragging his dirty shawl tight around his thin frame. “And after that, we’ll see what to do with you.”
The grandest of the city’s pleasure houses lined the edges of the river. It was early enough in the day that they were utterly quiet, their pink lanterns unlit. But they would be busy later. The brothels were always left well alone by the regent’s men. Even in the height of the last boiling summer, before the monsoon had cracked the heat in two, when the rebel sympathizers had been singing anti-imperialist songs and a noble lord’s chariot had been cornered and burned on the street directly outside his own haveli—the brothels had kept their lamps lit.
Too many of the pleasure houses belonged to highborn nobles for the regent to close them. Too many were patronized by visiting merchants and nobility from Parijatdvipa’s other city-states—a source of income no one seemed to want to do without.
To the rest of Parijatdvipa, Ahiranya was a den of vice, good for pleasure and little else. It carried its bitter history, its status as the losing side of an ancient war, like a yoke. They called it a backward place, rife with political violence, and, in more recent years, with the rot: the strange disease that twisted plants and crops and infected the men and women who worked the fields and forests with flowers that sprouted through the skin and leaves that pushed through their eyes. As the rot grew, other sources of income in Ahiranya had dwindled. And unrest had surged and swelled until Priya feared it too would crack, with all the fury of a storm.
As Priya and the boy walked on, the pleasure houses grew less grand. Soon, there were no pleasure houses at all. Around her were cramped homes, small shops. Ahead of her lay the edge of the forest. Even in the morning light, it was shadowed, the trees a silent barrier of green.
Priya had never met anyone born and raised outside Ahiranya who was not disturbed by the quiet of the forest. She’d known maids raised in Alor or even neighboring Srugna who avoided the place entirely. “There should be noise,” they’d mutter. “Birdsong. Or insects. It isn’t natural.”
But the heavy quiet was comforting to Priya. She was Ahiranyi to the bone. She liked the silence of it, broken only by the scuff of her own feet against the ground.
