“You think we would hurt a child?” Ashok—notAshok—asked. But there was something assessing in the fathomless liquid of his eyes, in the leaf-rustle rasp of his voice.
“I think I know what nature does,” Priya replied slowly. And what were the yaksa, if not nature? “And I know how I was raised. And I know… what was asked of me.”
“Do you think,” Sanjana asked, “that you have the right to ask?”
“I am an elder,” Priya said. “I am thrice-born. Who else can ask, if not me?”
They said nothing, but the silence was weighty. There was a question inside it. It reminded her of her childhood—of her elders teaching her. They were waiting for her to fill the silence herself; to give aproperanswer.
“That’s what an elder should be,” she went on, her throat sore.“The one who can ask. Not just—a worshipper. If I am wrong, yaksa, then I am—sorry.”
Elder Chandni—or the yaksa who mimicked her—leaned forward. Her dark hair was shining with water.
“Your sister ran,” Elder Chandni said. “From her duties. From her purpose, in cowardice.”
Lie. Bhumika would never have run. But as ground down as Priya was, she knew better than to say it.
“Did you kill her for it?” Priya asked. Her voice trembled. She couldn’t help it.
“No,” the yaksa wearing Ashok’s face said. His eyes were fixed on the distance—on nothing, and everything. “We did not.”
Was that a lie, too? She had not seen Bhumika in the sangam in so long.
She bowed to the earth again. Flowers against her face, the smell of petrichor seeping against her lips.
“Yaksa,” she said. “I’m only mortal. Let me go. You’ve seen enough of my soul. My body needs to rest, too. To eat and to rest.”And I need to find my sister.
“How long,” the yaksa asked, “do you think you have been here?”
She turned her head, looking at him, then through him, at the rivulets of shining blue water, working their way down the stone wall. How long had the water run, bleeding like light in that same pattern, for the stone to scar as it had?
“I don’t know,” she said dully.
“If you were simply human,” Sendhil murmured, “you would be dead.”
She traced her lips with her tongue. It almost felt unnatural: tasting the salt of her skin, feeling the parched dryness of her mouth.Simply human.What was she meant to do with those words? She knew she wasn’t simply human.
But she was human enough to be thirsty. Her knees hurt. And for all they’d been picking her apart from the soul upward, every shadowy root-and-spirit thread of her, she was more than hersoul in the sangam. More than the sap under her skin. There was blood and flesh in her yet.
“You have my heart,” said Priya. “Mani Ara has my heart. And you’ve seen everything of me that matters. Let me leave here. Let me serve you properly.”
“And what service must you provide to us?” Elder Chandni prompted.
A flash of memory. Malini’s betrayed eyes. A thorn blade. The feel of blood and flesh. She knew what Malini would do.
“There’s going to be a war,” Priya said. “The Parijatdvipans—they’ll come. And you will need me. I’ll serve. Just as the elders served in the Age of Flowers.”
She raised her head, and saw as Chandni’s mouth shaped a slow smile.
“Let me out, yaksa,” Priya said. “So I can do the work you need from me.”
She almost asked again. But she bit down on her tongue instead. Begging wouldn’t get her anywhere. The yaksa would not respond to pleading. She’d learned a little more about them, in the time they had spent rummaging through her skin. She waited. Waited.
“Resting has fashioned something useful out of you,” Chandni said indulgently. “Go, then, Elder Priya. Tend to your flesh. And then we will prepare for our war.”
MALINI
Every night she returned to the court of the imperial mahal. She could not help it. Her dreams carried her there.
