A laugh leapt out of her, ragged at the edges.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll have to do, won’t I? I need to talk to you about the Parijatdvipan army. Their soldiers are coming for Ahiranya, and we need to be prepared.”
He patiently answered her questions about their weaponry and their numbers of guards, the people who’d run from the mahal when Jeevan vanished, and the ones who’d stayed. But there was a faint tension around his mouth that didn’t fade when she gave him suggestions on how to defend the city.
“Are my thoughts really that foolish?” Priya asked. “Come on. Be honest.”
He shook his head.
“You’re no expert, but you do well enough,” he said. A pause. “Kritika trusts the yaksa. And most mask-keepers feel the same. But I… when I think of war…” He trailed off. Then, in a flat voice, he said, “I do what’s needful. But it strikes me that the yaksa can defend Ahiranya without us. They’ve already turned our trees into a cage. What are we needed for? They’re gods. We’re just flesh.”
“No,” Priya said, shaking her head. “They need us.”
They would not have tended to and tortured Priya beneath the Hirana if she weren’t vital to them. But it was more than just her. They needed Ahiranya. They needed the rot-riven, the once-born, theyneeded…
She was on the edge of some kind of vast knowledge, a heavy thing she couldn’t quite face or touch. Every time she reached for it, that truth eluded her.
She wished Bhumika were here. Bhumika would have been able to grasp it.
“It’s the will of the yaksa that we be ready to fight,” Priya said instead. “Will you help me?”
“Of course I will,” he said. “You’re the High Elder.”
Below them, the guards were putting away their weapons. She could hear their voices rising and falling, though she couldn’t make out the words. They vanished into one of the entrances to the mahal.
Ganam leaned back and cleared his throat.
“I have something for you,” he said. “From Elder Bhumika. She left it for you.”
He reached into his tunic and drew out a folded paper. Priya took it from him and unfolded it.
She recognized Bhumika’s handwriting immediately.
The letter trembled in Priya’s hand. It took her a moment to realize that it was her hand that was shaking, not the paper.
“Where did you find this?” Priya asked in a whisper.
“In her study,” Ganam said. “I broke the door. I made a guess that if you came back, you’d want it. And if you didn’t…” His hand flexed at his side; a spasm of feeling. “Maybe one day Padma would,” he added, voice low. “That’s what I thought.”
“Have you read it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s—fine.”
Priya couldn’t read it. The words were swimming before her eyes.
“Maybe you should go somewhere quiet,” he said, looking carefully away from her. Letting her rub a furious hand against her own cheeks, wiping unwanted tears away.
“Right,” she said thinly. “Maybe I should.”
She went to the only place she could think of going.
Bhumika’s old chambers had once been called the rose palace. Now they looked more like a ruin than any other part of the mahal. An impressive feat. Cracks in the ceiling let the light pour through. She could hear birds trilling, rustling where they were nested in the hollows left by fallen and fissured stone.
There, in the song and hush and decay of Bhumika’s chambers, Priya finally read the letter.
Priya—
