“Do you think the greatest of us obeys your whims?”
“No,” Priya said. “I don’t.”
“Give her prayer. Give her offerings. Give her yourself, wholeheartedly. And then perhaps she will answer you. But for now…” A rustling sigh. “You can feel all of Ahiranya, can’t you?”
Priya nodded silently.
“You are Mani Ara’s creature,” the yaksa continued. “More than a mere mortal. More even than a temple daughter. Wherever the rot spreads, our magic spreads. Where it goes, the soil and the trees change to welcome us. Where Mani Ara can go,youcan go. Because you are more than any elder before you—not because you are deserving, but because you are chosen.” The yaksa’s breath,the fragrance of rainfall and loam, touched her cheek. Then the yaksa released her. “Reach. Look.”
Priya squeezed her eyes shut. She stretched her senses, feeling all of Ahiranya laid out around her. Feeling beyond it. Reaching, reaching—
She winced. Pain shot through her skull.
The yaksa tutted.
“Perhaps this will help,” she said. “Turn your head. Open your eyes.”
Like an obedient puppet, Priya did.
Behind her, in a newly raised bed of vines, lay an offering.
She walked toward it and kneeled down, green crunching beneath her knees.
It was a mask. Beautifully wrought, its wood polished and dark, emanating heat.
The crown mask.
She touched her fingertips to it and felt a small shiver of power rush through her. Before she’d become thrice-born—before she’d traveled three times through the deathless waters and risked death with each immersion—touching the mask would have peeled the flesh from her bones.
She placed all her fingertips to it. Five points. Then she clasped it and raised it up. Beneath it, the vines that had held it were withered and strange.
This mask had belonged to Bhumika. Because Bhumika had been the High Elder.
But Bhumika was gone. And there was no one left but Priya. Kritika had been right about that.
“Keep your spirit open,” the yaksa said. “Be watchful. And see what Mani Ara’s strength can do.”
“Thank you, yaksa,” Priya said. “I’m grateful.”
“It’s meant for a High Elder,” Sanjana said lightly. “You should have asked for it long ago.”
As Priya looked at the mask—as she felt its power—she thought of what Ganam had said. That the yaksa should havebeen powerful enough to fight alone.
She thought of fire, and the fury in Malini’s eyes, when Priya had stabbed her through.
“Yaksa,” Priya said carefully. “I—”
“Speak.”
“Even with Mani Ara’s power…” She turned the mask over in her hands again. “The Parijatdvipans will have fire. Mothers’ fire, or something akin to it.”
She believed—hoped—Malini would not willingly burn. She was less sure Malini would not burn others as her brother had.
A laugh left Sanjana. A high, thin reed of noise.
“They have the promise of fire. Butwealready have the rot. We have already seeded ourselves in the worlds: in their flesh, their fields. Do you understand? Of course you do not.” The trees seemed to laugh with her, seemed to creak and shudder. “To destroy us they must burn everything they need to live. They must burn their own kind. The world is almost ours. They simply do not know it yet.”
Almost.The word rattled through her.
