A half step in front of her was a hewn tree, sharp-edged flowers growing red along its trunk. She paused before it, feeling that same strange tug in her scarred chest, in her heart.
Malini. You’re here.
“The box,” she said. Sahar passed it to her.
She opened the box. Set her own saber aflame.
Priya, she thought into the dark trees. Into the dark of her own chest, the void left there.If you are here, I hope the fire finds you. I hope you burn.
She struck her saber into the bark. It melted through the wood like a blade through flesh.
And Malini heard—her own name. In Priya’s voice.
And pain.
It was madness, utter madness, Priya wasnot here, but Malini’s scar was agony; her skin was soil where a root had been ripped free. She gave in and clutched a white-knuckled hand to her chest. With the other, she withdrew the saber, wrenching it free from the wood. It was easy enough; the wood gave way, with a cracklike bone and marrow.
The flames spread wildly.
One step back, and another, with Rao’s hand tight on her arm and Sahar holding her shield between them and the trees, and they were in the open air again. The fire was spreading like a sparking wheel, a sickle of flame. Around it the wood blistered and burned—birds flew screeching from the branches, and the whole forest rippled, alive and furious.
Thorns shot roughly from the ground. The air was thick, vibrating like a plucked string—and with a crash of pressure, an unfolding, the soil closed over the flames, smothering a vast swathe of them. Not all. But enough that one of Malini’s questions had been securely answered.
So. False mothers’ fire was not enough. Not enough to burn Ahiranya in a breath.
Not enough, most likely, to kill the yaksa.
But it was enough to begin the assault on Ahiranya.
Malini withdrew, back to her chariot. Sahar climbed on with her. The charioteer, with obvious relief, turned them toward the line of men.
Her waiting generals—Khalil, Narayan, Prakash—were visibly restraining themselves from comment.
A sharp nod from her was all it took. Khalil moved forward, raised a hand, and signaled the archers.
A golden flock of arrows flew, each tipped with what remained of Chandra’s stolen, murder-borne flames. The forest burned once more, and the ground shuddered and roiled. The horses made an awful noise, trying to resist the control of their charioteers and riders; Malini gripped tight to her chariot and held on.
“Lord Mahesh,” she called out. And her generals took up the cry for her.
“Now!”
In the gaps that burned through the trees, warriors raced into the forest, flames upon their swords.
Malini watched them go. Her tongue tasted of ash. Her chestached. It was like a thrum, a pulse inside her—a sinew strained, a string that could not be cut.
As the forest burned, so did something inside her. Where she had been stabbed. Where her heart had been stolen from her.
What had Priya done to her?
ARAHLI ARA
The forest was burning, and Arahli Ara was not afraid. He was exultant.
To be yaksa was to be part of green—enmeshed in its trees, its water, its deepest roots—and yet vaster. He kneeled at the zenith of the Hirana with his kin, the sunlight painting their bodies in golden light. But his will, hisself, extended far beyond the limitations of his body. He was not the leaves that haloed his skull, or the striations of lustrous wood that braided his bones. He was also not the Ahiranyi trees that cracked and splintered from the heat below them as arrows wreathed in fire thudded into their marrow. But he watched through those trees as they burned, listened through falling branches and rotting wood to the cries and yells of mortal men. The heaving Parijatdvipan army swarmed helplessly on Ahiranya’s border, as faceless and insignificant as ants.
They amused him.
The fire could not hurt him or his kin. He and his kin had laughed when they had felt the Parijatdvipans approach with their churning chariot wheels, their false fire.
