A hand closing over his own. “Live.”
He returned to his own skin. His hand was closed into the fist Aditya had made of it. Inside that fist lay the hilt of his heart’s-shell dagger. Even unconscious, he must have reached for it.
Hemanth was raising his spear of fire for a killing blow. Rao raised his heart’s-shell dagger to meet it.
The fire broke around the blade, spreading wild tendrils in every direction but Rao’s own body. Hemanth’s eyes widened. It was distraction enough.
Rao surged to his feet, ignoring the pain in his leg. He roughly pushed Hemanth to the ground, pinned him, and raised his blade.
“Your death will not save the empress,” he said. “But your death will save Malini’s heir. It will save Parijatdvipa from your influence.”
“There will be other priests who fight for our faith, who speak truth,” Hemanth said raggedly, fighting him still. “You will never be forgiven for killing me.”
“There will always be men like you,” Rao agreed, pinning him harder. It was easy. “But they will not beyou. That’s enough for me.”
He held the knife to Hemanth’s chest.
“I don’t kill you because it is right or good, or because any great sense of justice compels me to,” Rao told him. “I am killing you because you deserve to die, and the world will be better with you gone. I am killing you because you do notdeserveto choose the shape of your own death.”
“Rao, Prince Rao, do not—”
He stabbed Hemanth in the heart. Hemanth seized under him, his face a rictus of agony. His hands scrabbled uselessly against the blade. Rao did not move.
In a matter of moments, the High Priest’s eyes dulled, and he was gone.
PRIYA/MANI ARA
Once, she had been starlight. Once, she was a fish in a great river. Now she was flesh. Ugly, and heavy, with death written into its very nature.
Her heart was beating. The weight of it hurt. Her lungs were a fragile weft. Blood and breathing were a compulsion. Her fleshiness was monstrous. The world was changed, rot-riven, green and sweet, and yet it made her retch. It did not want her. She did not want it.
Mani Ara had wanted to take the world for her kin. That part of her keened in horror for what she had lost, for the kin she had carried over cosmic waters who were dead and lost to her. She had felt them die—the pain, the fire, and the utter nothingness that followed.
If they could not live in the world, then she would tear the world apart. Rend it to shreds. For so long, she’d shaped it tenderly for them, and now. Now, now—
Now the part of her that was Priya was being overwhelmed. A human life was so small. No more than a flicker—swiftly born and swiftly lost.
Stars raced over her. She dreamt, in a blink of an eye, of her temple siblings. She dreamt of Bhumika and Ashok and Sima and Rukh and Padma and Malini, Malini, always her, always all of them.
She could not overcome Mani Ara. She had been a fool to hope. Even if Mani Ara did not want to continue. Even hernotwanting was a tide, as strong as her hate.
She tried to speak their names. Tried to suck in a breath. The waters filled her lungs. She had no room left in her, nothing left to hollow, and nothing left to give.
She drowned.
A voice was calling her. A light.
Priya.
Golden light. Fire and starlight. The fierceness of the sun.
Tender hands, reaching for her own.
The sangam was not truly a river, and yet—she saw her. Malini, on the shore, with a light in her hands. Malini, with her tangled hair and her eyes like wells of gravity, like the darkness that light could be stitched upon.
A part of Priya remained human. A part of her remained in the world. She had left it there, even though she had been told to cut it away, to hollow it.
Sometimes a hollowing was a space where the echo of you remained. It was a place where a new thing could grow, take root. A vine, tying Malini to her, and her to Malini.
