The people behind them surged forward, panicked. Priya was forced to grab them with her power to stop them from crushing one another.
“Priya.” Malini was striding toward her, blade drawn, theguardswomen ringed around her. Her gaze darted from the yaksa to Priya, her face taut with tension. “We need to run.”
“Did the priests…?” Priya shook her head, shock holding her fast. “Did they choose to die? Did they make this?”
“It doesn’t matter where the fire comes from,” Malini said tightly. “What matters is that it is cominghere.”
Malini grasped Priya’s arm fiercely. “Take us to the Hirana, Priya. Take the priests and me now, before—”
Too late. Malini’s words were swallowed by a roar of fire. The fire was quick, too quick. There was notime. Flame raced through the trees lining the path, setting them alight. With horror, Priya felt the people she was holding with her magic turn to kindling in the blaze. She released them, but it was too late for some. The smell of burning bodies filled her nose.
The rest surged forward, moving toward Priya and Malini and the guardswomen in a wave. Sahar grabbed Malini, shielding her, even as Malini’s grip on Priya tightened and she tried to draw Priya close to her.
They should have been crushed by the press of bodies, but Priya was using all her focus to carve a defense around them—a wall of stone and soil and raised roots to force the wave of soldiers and priests to part around them. The trees were golden, as good as bars on a cage, pinning them onto the path. Her head pounded. The fire hurt. It felt her yaksa magic, the green in her blood, and ithungered.
“I don’t need to be protected,” Priya protested, struggling to breathe. “Let me go, I need to carve a way out—another path, a way free of this—”
Malini’s hand spasmed. She released Priya with obvious reluctance, teeth bared, terror in her eyes. “Do it,” she commanded.
She tried. Oh, she tried. But her magic was like tangled thread between her fingers, impossible to unknot.Run, she thought wildly.We should just run.But they could not run between the trees, slipping from the seeker’s path to the embrace of the forest. The trees of the path were burning, burning, and they would not part at her command.
There was nowhere to go. The fire was everywhere.
Cira Ara stepped back from the flames, wind and motes of ash brushing her hair into a dark flag that streamed behind her. The flames were moving intently—rippling through the air in a scythe aimed squarely at her. Holy fire seeking out a yaksa. Marking her for death.
Cira Ara flinched. Her human eyes were wide in her face as she met Priya’s gaze.
“They were right to fear,” Cira Ara said tremulously. The fire consumed her.
Priya felt her die. The pounding of her skull intensified, and something in her chest began to pulse. A foreign heartbeat. Malini’s magic tangling with her own, panicked and powerful. She drew upon it. Too late for Cira, the trees tore open into a crooked arch before them, cutting through the path. Providing an exit.
“With me,” she yelled, and grasped Malini’s arm and dragged her through.
Bodies followed her. Malini, and the guardswomen, and a handful of priests. The gate was not enough. The fire was following them. So Priya ran, and ran, carving paths and exits with speed and finesse only fear could give her. She tore through the green, struggling to outpace the fire, as heat and pain nipped at her heels. She drew on every part of her strength, every green and water-drenched part of her—until finally she could go no farther.
One last archway. They tumbled together to the ground. The fire was coming for them, but Priya had strength enough left to shut the path brutally behind them.
One last gout of flame spiraled through the door as it vanished. Exhausted, she watched the fire turn, rippling toward them.
TowardMalini.
Priya did not think. She was breathless from the feel of the yaksa’s death—from a god’s agony stretching hands inside her rib cage. The sangam was wild and churning, a blackness between her eyes. But even if she had not been shocked to numbness, if magic hadn’t been rising in her like a mist, she would have donewhat she did then. It was in her nature, written into her like ink on paper, or stars upon the sky.
She leapt in front of Malini.
The fire hit her square between the shoulders. Heat, so much heat. And then it stretched, arcing like vast wings, and she felt her pain stretch with it. She was burned skin, flayed open—she was in agony so black and vast and formless that it was like tumbling through the sangam, through its rivers and stars, and drowning, drowning. She felt her hair singe and her legs give way.
She saw Malini’s mouth move, through the halo of flame surrounding her own body.Priya. Priya. Priya—
Please, no, no—
Something knocked against her. There was a thump and a sizzle of flesh.
Priya stared, uncomprehending through her agony. Sahar was in front of her, panting. Sahar’s arm was burnt from the fingers to shoulder. She was still holding her heart’s-shell blade in front of her in that burned hand, wielding it like a shield. Her grip trembled. Priya’s ears were ringing, and there was blood in her mouth, and as if from a great distance she looked at her own body. Burnt, blistering. Wounded beyond her comprehension.
I will not survive this, she thought. And that, too, seemed distant. Strange. Was this how death felt, all lightness and horror?
Someone reached for her. She screamed, or thought she did, as she was raised from the ground. Her face against a shoulder; hands on her, holding her still.
