“Well,Icare if you get sick,” said Priya, but she didn’t truly have the heart to send him away. Besides, she was almost sure the fever was part of her magic—a symptom of that broken dam of power inside her, that rush of strength that had made her eyes swim.
“You don’t need to look after me,” Priya said, in a last attempt to get rid of him.
“You’ve looked after me,” he said quietly, after a moment. “You still do. It’s only fair. Now sit up, Pri, and eat.”
She dreamt of Malini again.
The fever burned in her. The fever was her power growing and growing, blooming to life inside her. Changing her.
In the dream, she felt her power crack wider. A cosmic egg, a golden yolk. She exhaled and watched the dream splinter around her. The imperial court’s walls cracked. A fissure formed ahead of her—ahead of Malini, too. The fracture was a lightning burst through stone. It grew, and it grew.
Malini was not looking at the break in front of them. Her head was turned. She was looking at Priya.
Malini was watching her cannily, hungrily. Priya felt a tug in her chest, painful and strong.
“I can feel it,” Malini said. Her rich voice was a hand at Priya’s throat, drawing her another step forward. “Power. What are you doing, Priya?”
The walls of the court of the imperial mahal had splintered entirely. They should have fallen, but they stood, all their shards like cracked shell, light oozing through their frayed edges. And between the shards, between the light—
Priya took an unsteady step toward the path that lay before them both.
The path was green. It smelled of salt-rain, of somewhere distant where the sea pressed its strange hands to soil. Priya had never seen the sea. Only imagined it. Only heard it described in Malini’s words. Vast, vast like a mirror of the sky.
She took another step forward. Heard a whisper of skirts beside her, and watched as Malini’s shadow melded with her own. Malini came to stand close to her, brow furrowed, blood dripping from her chest, marking a path beneath her feet.
Priya turned her head. Their eyes met again.
“Tell me what you’ve done,” said Malini.
“Paths,” Priya said. “Malini, I think. I think somehow I’ve made new paths—”
Priya woke up.
She walked into the depths of the forest with her hair still wild, her feet bare, clothes rumpled. She went to the bower of bones.
The seeker’s path lay before her: that ancient path through the forest where time moved strangely and a person could become lost for weeks or reach Srugna in the blink of an eye.
There were new paths visible between the trees. She couldfeelthem—as if she were a tree and the paths were her own roots. Above her the bones bound by ribbons to the trees were utterly still. There was no wind here. No noise at all.
Her fever was fading. She could finally think.
She hadn’t chosen to make these paths. But Mani Ara’s magic had made them through her. She was Mani Ara’s way into the world—her hands, her beloved. And so Mani Ara had used her.
Thudding footsteps behind her. There were mask-keepers there—one once-born, another twice-born. They must have felt the paths appear too.
“You took a while,” she said.
“We—we went to find you. But the boy Rukh said you were sick, and when we went to your sickbed—”
“I’m not sick anymore,” Priya said. “Don’t worry. You don’t need to explain. You’re here now.”
She took a step closer to one path, feeling it out with her bare feet and in the taste on her tongue. Salt-rain. Strange winds. She’d dreamt this, and it was real, and Malini had dreamt it too.
Somehow Malini was part of this.
There was a cough behind her. An uneasy rustle of bodies. She turned and saw the patrol of mask-keepers waiting expectantly, their anxiety palpable.
“Elder?” one prompted.
