“She vanished.” Billu’s face was impassive. “One day she was here, and then she wasn’t.”
So no one knew what had happened to Bhumika.
“Is Padma safe?” Priya asked. “And Rukh—”
“They’re both here and safe,” Billu said. “You don’t need to worry about Rukh. Or the baby.”
“Where are the soldiers who went with you to war? And where is Sima?” Ganam asked, eyes dark, expression grim. Like he already knew what her answer would be. “Are they safe elsewhere?”
Her throat closed up.
She did not, could not, know what had happened to Sima among the Parijatdvipans. But she’d left Sima there in the hope that whatever awaited Priya in Ahiranya, Sima would be safe from it.
“The war was risky,” she said. An answer and no answer at all—she’d let them make their own assumptions.
“They’ve done something to you,” Khalida blurted out. Then she covered her mouth with her hand, eyes frightened, darting. There was some uneasy shuffling of feet. Murmuring voices.
Priya thought of the vines and leaves around them—the way they were like an extension of her own eyes and ears. The way the yaksa lived in them, saw through them, felt through them, just as she did.
“Don’t worry,” Priya said. “Even if the yaksa can hear you, they know what they’ve done to me. It won’t upset them to hear you’ve noticed—me.”
“Lady Bhumika doesn’t look like this,” Khalida said, voice cracking a little, as she gestured one trembling hand at Priya. She swallowed, and when she next spoke there was a forced steadiness to her words. “She looks like herself.”
“Looked,” one of the mask-keepers corrected, their voice a mutter.
Priya resisted the urge to touch her own face—to feel the alienness of her skin. She clasped her own hands together.
“I am glad you are here to lead us,” Kritika said, her voice pointedly pitched to drown them out. “We need a thrice-born elder to lead us. Just as the ones who came before us had in the Age of Flowers.” She looked at Priya fiercely, as if she could reshape Priya into something worthy of all her hopes by just staring her down. “Everything will be better now.”
I’m not Bhumika, Priya wanted to say immediately.I’m not the one you should really be looking at for guidance. I did my work, trying to heal the rot and guarding our land from imperial soldiers, and it wasn’t enough. I’m not… not a leader. Not what you’re looking for.
But she could not say it. She couldn’t afford to hide in Bhumika’s shadow. There was no Bhumika to hide behind anymore.
Where are you, sister? Are you even alive?
The household was quiet. Wide-eyed. Hanging on her silence, waiting for her words.
“We can start making things better,” she said, trying to sound strong and practical. “I can tell the mahal is falling apart. I’ll see to that.”
“You’ve learned carpentry in the empire?” Ganam inquired, raising his eyebrows. Khalida gave a hiccupping cough, then covered her mouth hurriedly.
That was good. A little sharpness, a little humor, meant that they still recognized her asher.
“I can’t make things worse,” she said, trying for a grin. It felt strange on her face. She let it drop swiftly. “What else needs to be done? Whether you think I can do it or not—just tell me.”
There was a long pause—and then suddenly everyone was talking at once.
“—food stores aren’t enough for all the pilgrims, never mind the city, and the highborn arehoarding—”
“If we’re going to talk about the pilgrims—”
“—impossible to get all the raw materials we need with the borders shut as they are—”
Now that she’d asked, she regretted doing so. The words pounded against her skull. She felt suddenly weak. She was with her own people, and she was almost—almost—safe. It was enough to make all the exhaustion she’d been holding back come over her in a wave.
“Tomorrow we’ll make a start,” she said. “Today and tonight, I rest. But tomorrow—we do the yaksa’s work, and we do our own. And we survive.”
She collapsed on the bed in her old chambers. She slept curled up on her side, her knees tucked to her chest. Even tangled in her own dirt-stained sari, she could see the shimmer of green life under her own skin, and feel the pulse of Ahiranya beating like blood in her veins. She forced her eyes shut and tried, oh tried, to dream human dreams. Her body was animal-tired, but the rest of her was vast, drifting—
