“You left this behind,” the man said. He dropped an item to the ground. A heart’s-shell blade, broken, hiltless. When he released it, a shudder went through him, and his shoulders straightened.
“The others are coming,” he said. “You’ll feel them soon. But I’m the first. I wanted to beg you to come back. To end this.” His eyes were reflective in the semidark. “The yaksa are very angry, Elder Priya.”
“Shyam,” Priya said shakily. “You’ve drunk the waters broken from the source. You’ve poisoned yourself.”
“For power, yes,” he said, inclining his head. “The yaksa would have taken the children. I offered myself in their place.”
“Ah, Shyam.” Priya swallowed. “Thank you for protecting them.”
“Someone had to,” he said. “You would not. And I am protecting them still. Come with me, Elder Priya. Please.”
“I’m not coming back to them. I can’t. Let me pass, Shyam.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I can stop you,” she said. “I can stop all of you. Even Ganam. Even the yaksa.”
“Can you?” He looked, then, at Malini. Bowed his head a little. “Empress. I served in your army once.” A thin smile. “But I had the rot, you see. I had nowhere to go but here.”
“Get out of my way, Shyam,” Priya said. “Please.”
“No,” he said. “You may be able to fight us all, Elder Priya. But I have made my choice. You may have chosen to betray Ahiranya, but I have no choice but to die for it.”
He raised his own hand in front of him, and thorns suddenly erupted from the ground beneath her and Priya. Malini leapt away as her own guards desperately scrabbled to move to safety. Priya stood firmly where she was. The thorns did not touch her, as if they didn’t dare try.
They avoided Malini too. Priya looked at her sharply, the whites of her eyes wild.
“The others are here,” Priya said, voice tense.
It was all the warning she could give. Malini saw them appear between the trees: Ahiranyi in wooden masks, magic flowing through them and scythes in their hands. They moved with brutal swiftness, hacking their way through Malini’s soldiers with metal and green alike.
Malini whirled, taking in the gruesome sights around her. She saw bodies being speared between the trees and swallowed by the soil, saw blood spray and figures collapse to the ground. Only her soldiers with heart’s-shell weapons were making an impact—hacking thorns, cutting through ropes of vines.
“Does it hurt you to betray Ahiranya?” Shyam was yelling, his voice ragged. “To betray us, the people you promise to protect?”
“Of course it does.” There were tears in Priya’s voice.
“Then we may stand a chance of surviving after all,” he said. “Stop this, Elder Priya. Come home. Then we may live, we who came here for our families, for survival. We can stop fighting—”
Malini saw Priya pause, vulnerable to his words, and saw the man’s hands rise. She felt the tug of his magic as he drew upon it.
She didn’t wait to see what he would do. She drew her saber.
Sanvi, foolish girl, tried to grab her. “Empress, don’t. You can’t do this! This isn’t your purpose. You’re no warrior, please!”
Malini shrugged off her hands. Unfamiliar magic thrummed in her blood. She tasted metal, soil—the sap that made life.
“You do not know what I am,” she said, and felt Priya’s magic sing through her as she raised her saber again and stepped into the fray.
She was not as strong as a soldier, and she had only a shadow of Priya’s power, and none of her control. But she had rage, honed all her life to a knife edge: rage and a cruelty in her, carefully leashed to her purposes. She unleashed it now.
The man was not looking at her. All his focus was on Priya. So he did not expect it when she lunged at his side and stabbed her saber through his abdomen—angled it upward, through flesh that resisted but parted with a sudden release, smooth as oil. She wrenched the saber out, then struck it deep again, then wrenched it free entirely. It happened in a breath, a moment. He was dead.
Priya’s expression moved from incomprehension to devastation.
“You didn’t have to kill him,” Priya said, voice choked.
“He was going to hurt you.”
