“If we survive, I will speak to the head priest,” he said, “and to a nearby highborn lord. I will ensure that they are cared for.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“Come,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable. “We need to return.”
She returned to the hall. The villagers were gone. A handful of priests were waiting for her, many of them young, fervent light in their eyes.
“Kneel,” she said. “We’ll begin with prayer. Reach for your god.”
“And you?” Ishan asked.
“Reaching for the nameless is your task. I have no gods to reach,” she said. “What I need lies inside me.”
She kneeled too and closed her eyes. And breathed. And breathed.
She did not leave her body. She did not, indeed, pray. She closed her eyes, and she was kneeling in darkness—empty and vast and velvet beneath her.
A lake that had once opened to the nameless god—and to the void the god resided in. Kneeling on its remains, a part of her felt the void too.
Her watchers surrounded her. Against the darkness, they glowed with deathless light.
“Will you drink?”
“Tell me what you are to me first,” Bhumika said calmly. She was within the confines of her mind, where such things could be spoken.
“We are yours,” said a watcher. “Your kin, temple born and temple drowned, tangled forever in the weeds of magic, carrying the knowledge you cannot carry. We are your oldest grief, forgotten.”
She swallowed, seeking strength inside herself.
“I am ready to feel the weight of the knowledge now,” she said to them.
“It will hurt you,” said another watcher, with the voice of a terribly young child. “It will make you weep.” The face that stared at her through cloth had deep black eyes, miserable hollows. “We know.”
“Thank you for carrying the burden of it for me,” she said gently. “Ask me your question now. I am ready. I will answer.”
A chorus.
“Will you drink?”
“Yes.”
“What will you drink?” Green water, red and gold flowed from their bowls and their skin.
Heart’s blood. Immortality. Soul.She knew them.
“This one,” she said, holding her palms open to a boy with his bowl. “I will drink this one.”
A sigh like a song ran through them all.
But the boy grasping the bowl held it tighter. His knuckles, beneath the pearling water on his mottled brown skin, were pinkish with tension. “If you give them this knowledge, you condemn your own kind,” he said, his voice rich with urgency. “Do not drink, sister.”
“I condemn the yaksa,” Bhumika said. “Only the yaksa.”
“You will give these outsiders the knowledge of how to destroy Ahiranya,” he said. “Not the yaksa alone. But all that Ahiranya is. All that you love.” He leaned forward, and on his breath she smelled salt water. “They spared the Ahiranyi once,” he said. “Human and degraded, they allowed us to continue when the Age of Flowers withered. They will not make the same mistake again. The Parijatdvipans will obliterate our people.”
“I must have known this before I sacrificed all that I am,” Bhumika replied, finally. “I must have believed it worth the price.”
“You have a daughter.” A baring of teeth beneath water-drenched cloth. “Will you be another temple-born who sacrifices her children for a greater good? Youknowwhat they did to us, Bhumika.”
