What else could she do? She had come here, hadn’t she? If a yaksa wanted her to kneel, she would. If they wanted her to walk again—walk and walk until her feet bled and she reached the edge of the world, and beyond—then she would. What else could she do but obey?
She was so impossibly tired.
“Yes,” she said thinly. “I will.”
The shadows of his leaves, points of cool darkness on her skin, rustled. They drifted away, leaving her in bare sunlight.
She was alone now, in silence, but the green was a cry in her ears: the susurration of growing things. The sharp, sap-bright crack of things rising from the soil, gasping for sunlight. All of Ahiranya, under her knees, inside her, around her.
Someone was approaching.
She raised her head again. But this figure did not tower overher. This ghost was small, slight—no more than a boy. Silvery, flat eyes. Soft petals flowering from his shoulders.
“Nandi?” Her mouth shaped his name without her say-so. Her little temple brother. A memory struck her like a clear bell: Nandi laughing, cheeks dimpled.
Nandi, lying dead on the ground in a burning room.
This Nandi smiled. Too many sharp teeth.
She touched the ground beneath him. Green things were growing beneath his bare feet. The world at this angle was all vibrant soil and falling leaves the color of moonlight. He curled his toes, and she heard the click of wood.
“You’re not Nandi,” she said. “I am sorry.” She bowed, or tried to bow, in the way she’d always done before the effigies of the yaksa, with her forehead pressed to the ground and her hands beneath her. But her body had other ideas, and took that moment to collapse. Mouth full of dirt.
Hands on her upper arms. Lifting her back to her knees. The yaksa wearing Ashok’s face was holding her up.
“You’re tired,” Nandi said. “Come with us.”
“Where is Bhumika?”
“Come with us,” he said again, and it was not a gentle urging any longer. It was an order. And because it was an order, her body obeyed. She rose, until she was standing. Walking.
She followed the two yaksa to the Hirana. There, in front of her, were familiar carvings. Familiar stone, weathered and ancient. She felt an ache: a pang like homesickness or homecoming.
Nandi touched a hand to the stone and it shifted, parting to open a way for them. The tunnel ahead was dark, but it called to her. She heard a song inside it.
My sapling.
Into the darkness she went. She walked, and walked, and the darkness opened—softened by blue light. And there before her were the deathless waters, and before it three more figures. Against the light behind them they were faceless, fleshless. No more than shadow.
A sudden fear gripped her heart like a fist. A yaksa would step forward wearing Bhumika’s face. Bhumika, hollowed out, with flowering eyes and wooden smile, Bhumika gone—
Then one stepped forward, and it was Sanjana.
It was better. Terrible, but better, and when Sanjana told her to kneel again Priya did so without complaint, with something almost like thankfulness.
Elder Chandni and Elder Sendhil followed, and for a brief moment Priya wondered, wildly, whether she had died. How could she be meeting the dead if she were still alive?
“Priya,” Sanjana said softly. She stepped behind Priya and took hold of her hair, her touch nearly tender. She gathered it up in her hands. “You’re home.”
She felt Sanjana’s fingertips move up to her scalp—ten points of sharp touch, ten seeds ready to take root.
“Why am I here?” Priya asked. “Yaksa, ancient ones—why here, by the deathless waters? I’d do better resting in a bed.”
There was something like laughter—rustling, rippling.
“Your soul needs rest,” the yaksa who was not Sendhil said. “More than your body.”
The one wearing Ashok’s face kneeled before her.
