“I’m hungry,” Priya said. “And tired, and I’ve been told reliably that I smell awful. I just want to sleep, Rukh. I don’t have any desire to play these games.”
“If you don’t come,” he whispered, “I don’t know what they’ll do to me.”
“Who?”
“You know.”
“I’d like you to tell me,” she said.
He held her wrist, still. His fingers were light enough on her that she could have broken free with no trouble at all. She didn’t.
“The rebels,” he sniffed, his head hanging before he looked up at her. “The rebels in the forest.”
She looked into his eyes for a long moment.
She’d thought she knew exactly what he was. She’d thought he was a little like she’d once been—starving, hurt, alone. She’d pitied him.
The pity hadn’t changed. But as she looked at him, she let her assumptions about him fall away. He was more than alittlelike the child she’d once been. He had his own secrets. His own obligations. She knew exactly how that felt.
It worried her. Worry for him.
He’s in danger, she thought.He still needs me.
“Steal me something from the kitchens,” said Priya finally. “And then I’ll come with you.”
PRIYA
The Parijati placed many names for Ahiranya’s great forest upon their maps. They segmented it, delineating it with fine lines, affixing labels on all the parts where humans were able to survive, where time did not move strangely and the rot hadn’t infiltrated: the burnt fields of the east; the thick tranches of ancient mangrove, where marsh villages on their water-stilts flourished, to the west. Name after name, each painstakingly transliterated between Parijati and all the disparate scripts and tongues of Parijatdvipa. Only the Ahiranyi language was not included.
The Ahiranyi tongue had been erased, of course—reduced to a scattering of phrases and words that the people of Ahiranya sprinkled through common-tongue Zaban. But Priya, who’d once been taught traditional Ahiranyi as a temple daughter, knew that the Ahiranyi had never had names for the forest. Ahiranyawasthe forest. The woodland was as unnamable as each breath of air, as indivisible as water. It was the cities and villages they named, the mountains they charted. The woods, they left alone.
But that did not mean Priya did not recognize the place Rukh had led her to. They had snuck from the mahal out into the surrounding city of Hiranaprastha. They had made their way through a city shuttered and gutter-lanterned, to the place where the trees melded with the houses, and small alcove temples to the yaksa hung above them in branches, affixed high among the leaves by flat boards hammered between the trunks. They had walked along narrow paths delineated by ribbon and flag, carefully carved though the forest by travelers between Hiranaprastha and smaller villages.
But soon they veered away from the ribbon markers, nothing to guide them but their shared lantern and minute etchings on the bark, the symbol language used by hunters and woodcutters. And then Priya looked up, and realized they were in the bower of bones.
The bower of bones was an ancient place—both a grave and an entrance to an old, old trail carved by yaksa hands. There were places in Ahiranya where time moved differently; this path was the strongest of them and the most well-marked. The seeker’s path, some called it, because it led to the neighboring nation of Srugna, and Srugna’s great monasteries to the nameless god, where priests meditated on the secrets of the cosmos and worshipped their god above all other immortal beings.
But it was a cursed place too. Local villagers and woodcutters in search of sacred wood to harvest claimed to have heard whispers among the graves. They found footsteps in the dew-wet soil, at sunrise, and the bodies of rot-riven animals on the ground. It was as if the creatures had come to the bower to die. Or been left there, some said, by ghostly hands.
When the flesh rotted away, those ghosts returned to finish their work. Above Priya and Rukh hung the bones of the animal dead, strung up on ribbons of red and yellow. They gleamed yellow-white in the light of the lantern. As the wind rustled the leaves, trapped rainwater fell in a cold shimmer, and the bones chimed against one another with the click of chattering teeth.
“Well,” Priya said mildly. “What a pleasant spot for a meeting.”
“I don’t usually meet them here. But…” He shrugged, his expression guarded. “I was told to, this time.”
Meena had worn a crown mask. She’d drunk deathless water broken from the source, and fought viciously, so Priya already knew these rebels were the hardest kind—the ones who used murder as their method of resistance.
She’d heard the gossip and stories of the rebels who wore masks. When the merchant had been killed, people had spoken of seeing a masked figure leaving his haveli. She thought of that now—of rebels who struck fast and vicious—as she glanced down at Rukh.
He looked miserable; his arms were wrapped tightly around himself. She felt anger curdle in her, at the thought of them using a starving boy, a dying boy, turning his heart to their ends. It wasn’t right.
She raised the lantern higher, the dark night staring back at her between fronds of leaves and bone.
“What usually happens, when you meet the rebels?” she asked.
“I give them information,” he said. “Before they sent me to you, I told them whatever I heard in the markets. They used to give me food.”
Not much food, she thought.
