Underneath her palm, the life beneath that soil thudded like a heartbeat.
She must have moved, because Jeevan called her name, low and alarmed.
“It feels me,” she said, hushed. “It thinks I am calling to it.”
Jeevan kneeled beside her. She looked at him, meeting his gaze.
“There is a yaksa sleeping beneath this forest,” she told him. “I can feel it awakening. When it does so, the entire forest will flower with rot, and the people…” She paused, trying to shape her horror into better, calmer words.
“They will die,” he said. “I understand. Can you stop it?”
She shook her head. Maybe she’d had that power once, but not now.
He rose to his feet and offered her his hand. “We’ll go to the village and warn them. We can lead them from the forest to safety.”
“That will only save one village,” Bhumika said. She knew the enormity of what a yaksa could do. Sheknew. “What if they don’t listen, Jeevan?”
“We will convince them, Bhumika,” he replied. As if it were so simple.
She took his hand and stood.
Manjeet was already waiting for them, standing between the fallen trees at the base of the hill where the village stood.
“I don’t seek to bring you trouble,” Bhumika said. “But I fear your village is in danger.”
Manjeet walked toward her, and Bhumika realized she needed no convincing. The headwoman’s face had a gray pallor.
“It came so suddenly,” Manjeet said. Her voice trembled. “We don’t know what to do.”
She led Bhumika and Jeevan up the rising hill to the village. The people were huddled together in the center of the cluster of homes, whispering. They watched Jeevan and Bhumika pass them, no smiles on their faces now.
The old hut at the edge of the village where Jeevan and Bhumika had slept beside one another was gone. In its place was a rictus of trees, shaped into an arch. Bhumika walked toward it, one step, then two, then stopped. Every inch of her body felt cold in its presence. She knew what the arch was, and she knew what lay beyond it—even if she did not know where it would take her.
A seeker’s path.
The words came to her in a whisper. Bhumika bit down on her cheek hard enough that she could now taste blood, metal-sweet, flowering in her mouth.
“Don’t go any closer,” Manjeet said. “There’s rot in those trees and in the soil. You don’t want to get sick.”
Bhumika wouldn’t get it. Couldn’t. But it didn’t seem wise to say so.
“You can’t stay here,” Bhumika said. If a path existed, anyone—and anything—could walk through it. And surely they would. A yaksa was sleeping under the ground. Someone would come for it. The yaksa loved their kin too much not to. “We need to hide somewhere safe.” She turned to meet Manjeet’s eyes. “The monastery.”
“They won’t help us,” Manjeet said wretchedly. Then she cursed, rubbing her knuckles roughly against her forehead. “Thosereligious bastards, they won’tcare. You understand that, don’t you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bhumika said. “The danger here is coming for them too. Soon they’ll see we may only stand a chance of surviving it together.”
PRIYA
As a group, they moved deeper into Srugna. Like Ahiranya, it was thick with trees, but as they moved farther from the border the trees began to open into dipping valleys, cut through with shallow streams and low hilltops.
They avoided villages and paths and walked through silence broken only by their own voices and soft footsteps.
Once, they crossed paths with two hunters searching for deer. They were young—no older than the warrior Ganam had spared, perhaps. When they saw the mask-keepers their eyes went wide, faces ashen. She thought, for a moment, they would freeze like prey—but then one darted off, swiftly followed by the other.
She could feel fallen twigs and branches snap under their feet. The pressure of their racing footsteps in the soil.
It was easy to snare their feet and make them crumple to the ground.
