“No sacred wood?”
Rukh shrugged.
“Okay,” Priya said levelly. “What did they want you to do in the mahal?”
He said nothing.
“Come on,” she coaxed. “Surely you can tell me now.”
“Just to be their eyes and ears,” he muttered. “To watch you. And—anything else interesting. Anything they could use. That’s all.”
She nodded. “Are any other servants doing the same?” she asked, and he immediately frowned.
“A few, I guess,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know. There might be more of us hidden.”
“Us?”
“Rebels,” he said.
“You’re not a proper rebel,” Priya said immediately.
“Iam,” he insisted.
“Meena was a rebel,” she said. “She knew how to kill. You don’t.”
“How do you know?” Rukh asked. There was a mulish set to his chin.
She looked down from his sharp little face to his clenched fists. With his hands as they were, prickling with threat of new green growth, she wondered if he would be able to handle a knife, even if he was given one. Knives required delicacy.
“You don’t,” she said simply. “Whatever she is to them, you’re not that.”
“You don’t know everything about me,” Rukh muttered.
“Clearly not,” said Priya.
There was no sign of anyone around them. No villagers, no hunters, no rebels. Priya supposed she and Rukh would just have to wait. She lowered the lantern to the ground. Then she straightened.
He stared at her. She stared at him.
“You’re not the only one allowed to believe in things,” Rukh said in a low voice. Priya was disturbingly reminded of the tone she’d taken with Bhumika. “I’m allowed to want the world to be better. I’m allowed to want to help make that happen.”
Ah, soil and sky, she needed to learn how to talk to her temple sister with more authority and less petulance, when they were alone. If this was how it made Bhumika feel when Priya spoke to her, then it was a wonder they ever managed a civilized conversation.
“I didn’t say anything, Rukh,” Priya said evenly. She made herself stay calm. The calm was an armor that she wrapped around herself, as she stood on ground laden with the dead, and listened to the wind, and thought of the decisions Rukh must have made to bring himself here, only a boy but beholden to killers. Only a boy, and she had not seen the signs that the rebels had set their claws into him. She had notknown. Her evenness sounded like steel, because it was. “But I think you should try to believe in things that won’t get either of us killed in the future.”
“They won’t hurt you,” said Rukh. “I told you. I promised. They asked me to make sure you wouldn’t climb the Hirana. That you’d be safe.”
“They asked you to do that?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I thought you’d know,” he said.
She couldn’t think of that yet. There would be answers soon enough, probably. So instead she said, “If I had listened to you—if I had remained in the mahal and let the others climb on their own—Meena probably would have tried to kill someone else.” She thought of Sima’s scream, of Gauri’s body crashing against the pillar.
“I didn’t know she would hurt anyone,” he whispered.
