“Yes,” she said. “Because I’m not changed at all.”
“That doesn’t make me happy,” Rukh said seriously. “Everyone says the yaksa… transformed you. Under the Hirana.”
“They changed me before that,” said Priya. “But it doesn’t matter. I’d rather hear about you.”
Rukh shrugged, careful not to jostle Padma too much. She had her eyes fully closed now. “You know everything that happened to me,” Rukh said. “That one big thing—that was it.”
She gave the child in his arms a pointed look.
“Oh yes. Nothing else has changed,” she said dryly. “Where did you get Padma from?”
“She’s mine now,” said Rukh. “The yaksa gave her to me.”
“What?” Priya sat up properly. “Gaveher to you?”
“After Bhumika—left,” he said haltingly. “One of them said to me—she’s yours. Mine, I mean. So I can’t give her to anyone else. Not even Khalida, though she’s told me how to brush Padma’shair. And Billu makes her food properly for me, all soft so she can eat it.”
“Why would the yaksa give her to you?”
“I don’t know why they do anything,” said Rukh. “Do you?”
She thought back to the Hirana. The things she’d seen there.
I might. I just might.
“She’s sad,” Rukh was saying, looking at Priya with careful eyes. “She used to run around everywhere, but I think she’s scared. She’s all clingy.”
“That’s no surprise.” Not after what Padma had lost. Spirits, she was sosmallstill. Priya didn’t think she’d ever been as small as Padma was. “Do you have a sling for carrying her?”
Rukh shook his head.
“I’ll make you one,” she told him. “But for now…” She patted the blanket. “Come lie down next to me. You can keep on holding her if you like. And I’ll tell you what it was like, out there in Parijatdvipa. I won’t touch her.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
He told her how Ahiranya had been in her absence. About the forest closing in, shutting them off from the world, and the way food and supplies had run ever lower. How pilgrims had come to rely entirely on the yaksa. They’d come at first out of faith, and later they had come for food and healing and hope, which was another kind of faith.
He told her, and then when he started to cry again—silent, tired tears—she told him a little about the war. Just the softest, safest things: about how Saketa looked, the blueness of the sky, the vastness of it. Of the Veri river, and the white horses of the Dwarali riders; of the imperial mahal, and its grand, strange beauty. Tale after carefully woven tale, until finally Rukh stopped asking her questions. His head was tilted forward. He’d fallen asleep.
She looked at his slack face, the lines of green through the skin of his throat, and Padma’s closed eyes, their soft breaths mingling together—and felt her resolve solidify.
She couldn’t go after Bhumika.
She couldn’t have Malini again.
You are nothing, she said to her thoughts of Malini.You have to be.
She could protect the people here. She could protect Ahiranya. She could be their voice. Whatever the yaksa had done to Bhumika, Priya was Mani Ara’s, and she was too valuable to destroy.
That had to count for something.
She touched one of the leaves that grew profusely from Rukh’s head. The lightest touch.
You are nothing, she said again, to the ugly ghost of love still lingering in her own sap-rotten heart.
And this. This is everything.
