“I’m not very human anymore,” Priya said as Malini’s hands mapped her skin: the vulnerable backs of her arms, the skin of her back, flushed with traceries of leaves and flower.
“You are life,” Malini said, hushed. “There’s nothing shameful in that.”
She moved Priya, turned her until she was on her side with Malini behind her, looking at her and touching, cupping the curve of her hip, the softness of her stomach, the swell of her breasts. When Malini brushed her thumb over a nipple, as cruelly and tenderly as she’d brushed away Priya’s tears, Priya felt a want so painful she thought it would drive her mad.
“You have always been life to me,” Malini said quietly. “Always all things living and good.”
“Even when you hated me? Even when we dreamt of each other?”
“And even then you were life,” said Malini. Priya could feel the flowers at her arms winding tighter, drawing her elbows closer, raising her into Malini’s hands. That wasn’t her doing. It was all Malini’s. She did not know if Malini was doing it on purpose. She didn’t care.
Malini’s fingers studied her, mapped their way down beneath the folds of her skirt, pushing them aside. She swept a hand over the tracery of vines and leaves at Priya’s thighs, but her mouth was against Priya’s ear, her body was hot at her back, all warm skin and the cold jewels still pinned to her throat, her wrists. “Even then, I needed you. How else could I have reached for you in sleep, in dreams?”
“Malini,” Priya said.
She felt Malini’s slender, knowing fingers slide into her and tipped back into her arms, surrendered, as Malini’s mouth covered her.
Afterward, Malini used her own shivering magic to unwind the flowers. Used her mouth to soothe Priya’s skin.
“Where will you go when the war ends?” Malini asked, in the dark, in the quiet.
“Nowhere,” Priya said. It was the most honest she could be. She felt the sting of her wrists, the echo of teeth at her throat. “Nowhere,” she whispered again.
Malini pressed a ghost of a kiss to Priya’s hair.
“Sleep,” she murmured. “I have you, Priya. I have you.”
ARAHLI ARA
Ashok was dreaming.
He was drowning. The water was deep and blue, and then not blue at all. The waters were a darkness so vast it had no color. Stars raced through it, as keen and cold as thrown blades. He was trying to swim to the surface, but he did not know where the surface lay. His lungs were full of water. He was dying. He had, perhaps, been dead a long time.
He saw Riti and Sanjana and Nandi reaching for him, tangled in weeds like golden chains. Their eyes were empty. Their hands when they grasped him were cold. They were mottled blue, drowned, their clothes floating around them in white clouds.
Priya, he thought.Bhumika. My foolish sisters. I’m sorry. I tried—
Arahli Ara opened his eyes.
Yaksa did not dream like this.
He went to Taru Ara first. She was sleeping on the mahal’s roof, curled in a bed of jasmine flowers. From her perch, the edges of the forest were visible. From here, he could hear and feel the Parijatdvipan army, bristling once again on the borders of Ahiranya. But this time, he could not simply laugh at them. The mortals had killed a newborn yaksa.
This time, he and his kin were… changed.
There was a strange pallor to Taru’s skin: a brownness of mortal flesh, flushed with red mortal blood. Her torso, beneaththe masking perfume of flowers that surrounded her, smelled of human decay.
She had wept when they had felt their kin in Alor perish. Wept like a mortal, fever in her veins and her wound rotting her from the inside.
He placed a hand against her brow. The skin of his hand was no different from her own.
No time, he thought. The panic clawed in his throat. He could not deny it any longer. Taru Ara’s wound, their strange skin, the humanity stealing over him, the dreams…
They had sacrificed so much of their green to return and survive. They had donned faces of their dead worshippers. They had consumed mortality. Andthiswas the cost. This awful fleshliness.
He had not known it would be like this.
When Mani Ara returned it would be better, he told himself. She was the most powerful of them. She would fix everything.
