“Bhumika,” he said.
Bhumika. The name felt like nothing. It did not slot neatly into her heart. She did not know who Bhumika was.
“Call me that, then,” she said.
In the morning, the man swept their helper’s steps and washed them clean. He brought the older woman firewood and uttered a terse but heartfelt thanks. The woman had clearly softened to him.
“You have a good husband, my dear,” she said. “I hope you find a safe home together.”
“As do I,” said Bhumika.
Their helper clasped her hands. “I am sorry about your brother and sister,” she said sympathetically. “I’ll pray to the mothers that our empress will set them free from Ahiranya one day.”
Her head was pounding. She thought of the watchers in their veils.
“Thank you,” she replied. “I would not have survived without you.”
The man named Jeevan walked with her away from the forest, through undergrowth under the palely rising sun. He turned to her.
“Where will you go?”
She had someone to find.
She was a vessel for knowledge. She needed someone else to carry it. Someone who could see far; someone with the power to be heard.
In the swirl of knowledge inside her lay an image: a lake. A holy place that trained its people to listen to the voices beyond the mortal world. That was where a seeker had learned how to end the Age of Flowers and kill the yaksa long ago. A seeker would return there again.
She turned to the watchers who stood in the distance. The dirt road to them was shining like a river: a twining, beckoning thing. She pointed a hand toward them. Her mouth tasted of silt, of water-smooth stone. The taste of stolen knowledge.
“To Alor,” she said.
PRIYA
Priya walked slowly toward the mahal, trying to ignore the dread that was worming its way through her. She didn’t know what she would find.
The yaksa had not come with her. They had simply let her leave, let her stumble back into the cold, bright air beyond the Hirana. But she could feel them as if they were with her. They were in her ears, her beating heart, her blood.
The green was within her, after all. And they were within the green.
Once, she’d felt Ahiranya like a limb—all its green a stretching, powerful part of her. Now she felt like shewasAhiranya: so enmeshed that when she breathed, the trees swayed, and the soil shifted, moving with her.
She could feel the mahal too, through the green that had consumed it. Its once beautiful sandstone was splintered. Lichen and creeping vines had crept through the stone; the flowers that grew from them were pulsing, bright, breathing alongside her. She could feel them all—like she could clench a fist and crumble the mahal in its entirety.
Could she? Surely not. Surely.
But Mani Ara had made something new of her. She didn’t know the limits of her new strength.
She walked into the mahal, through once familiar corridors.Pillars—once carved from sandstone, high and sweeping—were broken. The roof should have fallen in without their support, but the stone had been replaced by living trees, the trunks rising through the ruptured floor, branches clasping the roof, fronds of leaves falling like curtains.
I can hold the ceiling, she thought coolly,or destroy it. With a twitch of my fingers.
The voice in her head didn’t sound like her own.
She forced herself to think normally: to think like a human, with the kind of practical, bone-deep compassion she knew was human too.
People can’t live like this, Priya thought. And then the realization hit her, on its heels.
People can’t live like this, but yaksa can.
