“Would you really condemn me for doing what I need to in order to survive?” Malini asked. When Priya didn’t answer, Malini said swiftly, “We could make a deal, you and I. There are other things I could offer you in return for your help.”
Priya stopped. Turned back. “Like what? You have nothing.”
“Tell me what you need and want. Bargain with me. So I am not as tenderhearted and naïve as you thought—so I want to live and I am willing to use you to do it—so what? Don’t let that anger you, Priya.Usethat. You will never have this kind of power over a royal of Parijatdvipa again. I am a princess. I know the heartbeat, the innards of the empire. Beyond this prison I have allies waiting for me. You have things you want, Priya. You told me. I know it. Use me.”
Priya looked at Malini. At her pale brown, dark-eyed face surrounded by knotted curls, a face thin with sickness, and thought of how much of a fool she’d been to not see that Malini could read her like a book.
“You are useful,” said Malini, when Priya continued to stare at her, heart pounding with fury and shame. “What you are—you have use. But so do I, to you.”
“I make a good weapon, I suppose,” Priya said faintly. She thought of Meena again—of rage, and Meena’s body falling, and the smell of fire and cooked flesh that had haunted Priya for years.
Oh, spirits, thought Priya, with a kind of despair.What am I choosing to turn myself into? What am I becoming? Is remembering myself worth this?
As if summoned by her thoughts, a new memory came over her. A spill of water on the floor. The smell of ghee and resin in the air. One of her temple sisters turning to her, eyes wide, clutching her own throat. An elder, mouth curled downward, sorrowful, lighting a flame—
She didn’t want to remember this.
“Priya.” Malini exhaled. “Please.”
Priya realized she was shaking.
“I can’t,” Priya said abruptly. “Not now.”
“Priya—”
“Not now.”
She left the room abruptly.
She didn’t make it very far.
Away from the guttering lantern light, away from Malini, she kneeled alone, crouched with her head on her knees. She was shaking.
She needed to know if Bhumika was safe. If the general’s mahal—if Rukh and Sima and Gauri, if all those people who made up the mahal—if they wereallsafe.
If she could not go in person, she would take the only way out of the Hirana that she had available to her.
Ragged breaths. One after the other, and the other, winding deeper. Deeper.
She sank back into the sangam. The river water rose to meet her.
ASHOK
He always wore a spare vial of the waters around his throat. He touched it now, as they slipped through the forest, the smell of blood in their nostrils, caked in their clothes and their nails. Kritika turned back to look at him for a brief moment. There was a smear of darkness across her cheek.
“Keep moving,” he said.
The vial was not hot, not burning with power the way sacred trees burned. But something felt—strange. Within the deathless waters in his blood. Within his skull.
Around him were his fellow rebels, winding through the forest with the familiarity of people born to it. A few wielded long-handled scythes and were clearing the way ahead of the rest of them. This was undisturbed land, untainted by the presence of empire, not even populated by Ahiranyi settlements. There were no shrines to the yaksa, hung in the branches or nailed to the vast trunks of the trees around them. It was no one’s territory, and therefore ideal. They needed somewhere to hide. And rest.
They had hit the imperial regime with a strong blow. That was only right, only fair, after what the regent had taken from them. Parijatdvipa wanted to use fear, turning faith into a blade? Then so would Ahiranya.
There was a noise ahead. A thump. The others stopped, and Ashok gritted his teeth and strode forward. Just like the rest of them, he knew the sound of a falling body when he heard it.
Sarita lay still where she’d collapsed, in a heap of bloodstained clothes and red-brown fingers, her scythe fallen at her side. Even standing above her, Ashok could see that her skin was wet.
When the vial waters were first consumed they brought on an intense rise in physical strength, along with some of the waters’ magic. But as the influence of the waters faded, the body would begin to tremble, terribly weakened. After a short time, water and blood together would begin to leave the body, pouring out of the mouth, the ears, the eyes. That was the way a poisoned death began.
