“Will you serve?” Malini asked again.
His breath shuddered from him.
“Will I be believed, Empress? Would you believe any of us?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “I know your nature. I give you this chance not out of mercy but because of one truth: A priest died to save me from the yaksa. Priests of the mothers are my allies by nature, by duty, by fate. I believe in this. So. Will you fight for a glorious Parijatdvipa, where the yaksa lie dead, where we rise—or will you die here, forgotten?”
He said nothing. But the silence from the cells around her was weighty. Thoughtful.
She waited. Her hands ached with the promise of a weapon that was almost hers to use.
“I will allow you all time to consider,” she said. “But when I return, I will seek your vow. A blade in your hands, or a blade tothe throat.”A blade in my hands, or a blade I must break. That is what you are.“Tomorrow I will be turning to Ahiranya. And a new war will begin. You may come, and fight. Or not.”
She walked away as his mouth parted; walked away knowing what answer she would receive.
“Do you consider this unwise too, Lata?” Malini murmured as they emerged from the darkness.
“I think perhaps this isn’t a time for wisdom,” Lata said just as quietly. “Perhaps wisdom and war cannot go hand in hand.”
Malini laughed, mirthless. “A sage’s answer,” she said. “I suppose we’ll see soon enough.”
PRIYA
Reshaping the mahal was a good place to begin.
She could break the earth with a casual breath, but carefully bowing trees to carry the weight of a domed ceiling, or closing the fractures in the columns that held up the roof with thick sap and root, was work that required absolute focus. When she wasn’t working, her brain was full of Bhumika, and the hungers of the yaksa, and the heartache in her own chest, and all those feelings like rot-riddled roots knotted her up until she couldn’t breathe through them. Focusing on the mahal pushed it all away.
Sometimes, after a day spent at work, she felt nothing at all. Just calm so vast it was like the deathless waters, shaping her into something hollow and new. It was bliss.
She soon moved on to the task of shoring up Hiranaprastha’s defenses. New traps in the forest. New walls of thorn and root, and new pits of spear-sharp wood to keep enemies at bay. The defenses they would need against Parijatdvipa—againstMalini—were vast. She knew Malini’s stubbornness and cunning.
Her chest ached. She buried the thought of Malini.
She considered asking Ganam or one of the other mask-keepers to help her but soon decided against it. She’d known what once- and twice-born strength was like. It was nothing to her thrice-born power, and even less than nothing, somehow, to the strength Mani Ara had given her.
That strength still wasn’t enough.
Mani Ara, she prayed, as she walked barefoot on sun-touched marble, as the leaves and flowers that rose and withered on her skin turned to the light.Eldest yaksa, if I am your priestess, then speak to me. If I am your priestess, then give me the strength you offered me when I raised a river and murdered an army.
Give me the strength to destroy my enemies once more. Let me keep Ahiranya safe.
But still, when she reached for Mani Ara, when she prayed, she found nothing. No matter what she did, the results were the same: Her hands and her magic reaching and reaching, straining for a power they couldn’t touch.
Kritika wouldn’t stop trailing after her.
Through corridors bursting with vines, down a narrow walkway with a living carpet of blue-green flowers that rippled like water, across a hall with columns of ancient trees. The older woman followed Priya through them all with all the bullish determination of a general going to battle against enemy forces.
“There are people who need to speak to you,” she was saying.Again.“The harvest and grain supplies are things you must care about. You need to take up the burdens of leadership.”
Priya wiped a hand across her forehead. It was midday, and the heat was relentless. She couldn’t sink into her magic with Kritika prattling at her, and now Priya was sweaty and annoyed, and very ready to be left alone.
“Then help me deal with the harvest. Help me lead. How many times do I have to say it, Kritika? I’m not Bhumika. I need you to do what’s needful.”
“The yaksa have made you strong enough for the burdens of your position,” Kritika said. There was a plaintive edge to her fervent voice, as if she wanted reassurance that Priya had, in fact, been shaped into a perfect leader.
Well. Tough.
That isn’t what they’ve made me for.The thought was a voiceflowering up inside Priya’s skull. It was barely her own.
