Priya bowed her head.
“Yaksa,” she said. “I was coming to seek you out.”
“We knew,” he said. “We heard them. Their prayers. And you.” The chiming rustle of leaves; the click of Nandi’s neck as he looked at each of the mask-keepers, then looked at her. “They cannot enter,” Nandi said. “They’re not wanted. Ahiranya is a closed place. Our place.”
“They need help because of what you’ve made of the world,” Priya said, without thinking. She heard one of the mask-keepers hiss under their breath and bit back her own curse.
Foolish. She should have thought before saying it. But it wastrue, so she pressed on.
“They’re rot-riven,” she said. “They’re what you made, yaksa. They belong here. So let me bring them where they belong.”
“You are a temple elder,” Sendhil said, from somewhere in the trees. He emerged, his wood-whorled face dark. “You do not question. You obey us.”
She thought of Mani Ara, and of the way Priya had defied her. Mani Ara needed her, and the yaksa needed her too.
She thought of the people waiting for her permission to enter Ahiranya. Their terror and their hope.
“Mani Ara gave me the right to her power,” Priya said, raising her head. “Mani Ara bid me wield it. This is part of her power too, isn’t it? The right to order instead of obey. The right tolead. I’m letting them stay.”
Nandi’s pearly eyes were cold, his expression sharp.
“No,” he said. “That isn’t for you to decide.”
Sendhil strode toward her. She felt his fingers at the back of her neck, rough-textured, pinching to the point of pain. He was going to lower her head. He was going to show the mask-keepers that obedience could be compelled from her.
Rage flickered up in her like a candle.
She reached into herself and grasped at the power inside her.
She felt Mani Ara’s voice rise behind her teeth, hot as blood.
“You do not tell me no, Avan Ara.”
Behind her, Sendhil—no,Vata Ara, she knew his name now, as she knew her own—went utterly still. Before her, Avan stared at her with eyes that were twin moons, filled with light.
Something skittered away from Priya within her skull. Names and knowing, knowledge too big for her own brain or body. Mani Ara’s knowledge.
“Release me,” she rasped, and Sendhil—Vata Ara—did. He obeyed.
The rush of it was heady.
She heard the rustle of bodies as slowly, reverently, the mask-keepers kneeled. She watched them lower in a wave.
Vata Ara bowed with them, his great body elegantly lowering.
They were bowing to her, she realized. Because she had spoken the names of the yaksa in a voice vaster than her body, a voice that wasn’t her own.
Shaken, she forced herself to remain calm. She had to use this while she still could.
She crossed the border of Ahiranya. The rot-riven strangers scrambled to bow again.
“Come,” she said, and felt the trees behind her widen into a path, the yaksa allowing the way to part for them. “You’re welcome in Ahiranya,” she said. “If you are loyal to the yaksa, you will have a home here.”
You should understand, Priya thought of saying,that loyalty means hollowing. That loyalty may mean more than your life.
But she didn’t say it. It would have done no good. Instead she simply guided them into Ahiranya and let the trees close behind them.
BHUMIKA
