“Priya,” she called out, the sangam rippling, twisting. “Priya, please, can you hear me? You idiot, you fool, what have you done?” She crawled through the water and held a hand out.
Priya’s eyes met her own. Gold flowers. Brown eyes.
“Bhumika?” she whispered. “You remember? You remember me?”
Bhumika could have wept.
“Even when I didn’t know you, I never forgot you,” she said, her voice trembling. “Come on, Priya. Wherever you are—come home.”
Slowly, shakily—as if she didn’t know how her flesh worked—Priya reached out a hand.
For a moment they touched across the sangam. Two sisters. And Bhumika remembered herself, utterly remembered herself. She saw Priya through the waters and remembered Priya as an angry child; Priya as a sullen adult; Priya smiling at her when she left to fight the empress’s war, that last time Bhumika had seen her and known her.
The water grew wilder and wilder. The sangam was churning into an endless sea, and Priya was at the heart of it. Priya was bound to a yaksa, and Priya was being swallowed whole.
“I have to destroy the waters,” Priya said. “Bhumika. I have tomake them nothing. Or Mani Ara—or I, or we—will never be gone. The world will be twisted by magic that shouldn’t be here. I’m so sorry. I have to fight her. I have to win.” Flowers turned to starlight on her face. Turned, inexorably again, to flesh.
“Priya,” she called. “Priya, don’t. Priya, Priya—”
Her sister smiled. Her sister mouthed a word.
Goodbye.
Back into her body. She coughed and coughed, lungs aching. Found her voice. “I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t worry. I remember. Jeevan, I remember.” She was herself. And she did grieve then, as her memories rushed over her, as she realized what price she had paid. Her family.
She reached out her arms. “Padma,” she said. “Please.”
Rukh came to her. Padma in his arms. Her daughter tucked herself tighter against Rukh, and Bhumika wept, joyous and grieving, because her daughter was alive, and because her daughter did not know her.
But knowing didn’t matter. The love and relief Bhumika felt were enough.
The ground of the Hirana was trembling, the triveni’s stone cracking.
“The Hirana is going to fall,” Bhumika said. She could feel the magic fading in the stone around her. Somehow, Priya’s battle in the sangam was weakening it. “We need to go.”
“If we go down, we’re going to die by fire,” said the boy Ashish tightly. “It swallowed the yaksa, but it hasn’t stopped burning. I know. I watched.”
“I don’t want to die,” a little girl wailed.
“Hush, Pallavi,” Rukh said. He drew her against his side. “You’re not going to. We’re going to be okay. The fire’s just taking time to die away, that’s all.”
The ground shook again, more violently.
“We need to climb,” Ganam said firmly. “All of us. Can you do it?”
“We can climb,” the boy Ashish said. His expression was grim. “Priya told us to learn. She started teaching us—and we kept on going.”
Bhumika looked between the children and adults gathered together. She remembered, distantly, her own childhood—the temple siblings who’d died, falling to their deaths, on their first climb down the Hirana. How Bhumika had cried herself sick after her first climb, muffling her tears with a pillow so Sanjana would not judge her. How Priya had laughed all through her own climb, jumping down on light feet, delighted with her own strength and with the Hirana’s love for her.
“Come,” she said, and watched a dozen eyes fix on her trustingly. “We need to move swiftly.” She looked at Ganam’s arm, bound close to his chest. “Can you do this one-handed?” she asked.
“I’m going to have to.”
It was a terrifying journey down. The children were moving slowly, carefully, with the eyes of the adults on them. Bhumika had quietly ordered a number of the strongest people who’d been trapped on the Hirana to move down directly beneath the children. If one lost their footing and fell, those people had a chance of catching them—and not toppling down to their own deaths in the process.
Climbing was hard. Perhaps it was because she had only just returned to her body. But she didn’t think so. Something had changed in the sangam, and her magic shuddered and broke along with it. Even maintaining her own footing—a task she had never struggled with on the Hirana—was difficult. She was glad that Jeevan carried Padma, safely wrapped against his chest.
The sound of a storm roared in her ears. But the air around her only smelled of smoke, and sang with fire.
