Shit.
What did she look like? She didn’t know anymore. Oh, she’d seen the horror in people’s faces, and the awe too. And she’d been able to ignore it all, more or less, until now. But if she was growing stranger still…
It was a foolish impulse, but she didn’t resist it; she knee-walked to the edge of the deathless waters and peered in.
The water shone blue. It shouldn’t have reflected her like a mirror, but when she pressed her hands into the glowing surface, it stilled and dimmed, rippling into a sheet of silver.
Priya met her reflection’s eyes.
She wasn’t vain. She never had been. She knew her nose was crooked, and her face unremarkable—that she was small and strong and not particularly pretty. But she’d never needed or wanted to be pretty. She’d been comfortable in her own skin.
She thought she had accepted how changed she was. After she had—afterMalini—she had walked home to Ahiranya with flowers growing at her feet and sap bleeding from her skin, and shed petals from her hair. But the woman she saw in front of her…
She did not have rot. That was clear. There was something cruel and twisted about the rot. What had become of her looked—natural. Like it belonged.
Her hair was still straight, but there were strands of dark leaves twined through it. Her eyes were still her eyes, but flecked in the whites with green—shards like algae blooms that dissipated when she blinked hard, then returned again.
On her face, at the places where bone sat closest to skin, lay a thin tracery of flowers—small blooms in pale rose and deep redalike. They shifted when she tensed her jaw, withering and then bursting into richer life when she forced herself to smile.
She looked almost like one of the yaksa. Almost.
She touched her fingertips to the side of her neck. The burn mark there was still a livid, bright slash of color against her dark brown skin. Perhaps her skin gleamed like bark or earth, and maybe her mouth was the deep color of a bruised flower, but that scar was all flesh, and all human.
She’d dreamt, a few times, of what it had been like when Malini had burned her. The scrabble of desperate hands. The pain, and the smell of her own flesh. Now when she touched the scar she felt nothing. The skin was nerveless.
Her reflection blinked away marigold petals, golden tears. But Priya’s own eyes were dry. She touched fingers to her cheek and felt nothing.
Sapling, her reflection mouthed.
Priya took a deep breath and put the crown mask of sacred wood on her face, blotting her skin out once more.
Yaksa, she said in return.
Mani Ara.
Priya emerged from the Hirana to bright sunlight and a sea of pilgrims. They parted as she walked. Many bowed.
She did not look at them. She had no desire to. They were nothing to her. A sea of faces. A sea of flesh.
She was not like them.
Some of the guards from the mahal had gathered, waiting for her. Ganam was at the head, dressed for battle with a scythe hooked at his back. His eyes widened at the sight of her. He gave no other sign of shock. Swiftly, he lowered his head and bowed as the pilgrims had.
“Elder Priya,” he said. “We’re ready.”
She swallowed. It was hard to find speech.
“I will fight from here,” Priya said. Her voice was a rasp.
He nodded in understanding. Her weapon was her power. Not a blade, but what lay inside her.
“We’re relying on you, High Elder.”
“Yes,” she acknowledged. She knew there were more words she would have said, if she’d felt more like herself and a little less hollowed.
She stood still, the soil under her curdling like milk as her Ahiranyi soldiers walked away. She drew a perimeter around herself: a thorny carapace, sharp enough to keep the watching people at bay.
She reached into the green and felt what she’d known would come, and feared.
