“Ignore it for now,” Priya said. “It’s the work of the yaksa.Nothing to trouble over.”
They didn’t relax at her words. Their eyes were wide, black and frightened in the flicker of their lanterns and the night-dark.
“Keep on patrolling,” she said.
“We should walk you back, Elder.”
Priya snorted and shook her head.
“No, I’ll be fine.” She wasn’t going anywhere they could follow anyway. She needed to go to the deathless waters. “Keep away from the bower tonight,” she said.
“Of course.” They bobbed their heads, eyes wide.
She walked away from the new path—the salt of it, and its mouth, all thorn-toothed trees, silver-striped, waiting to swallow bodies whole.
A voice in the forest called her name. The green around her shivered. Turned as if called.
Yaksa, she thought. And turned with it.
She found Chandni in a lake within a clearing. The green led her, and there Chandni was: silver-skinned, bark-whorled. Deep in the water.
“It’s almost the dark of the moon,” Chandni said. Her voice was a silvery ripple. “Priya. Little elder. When it comes, tell your mask-keepers that my kin and I have decided it is time for them to enter the deathless waters again, where they will become true elders. Tell them we’ll await them.”
“I will, yaksa,” Priya said. A thud in her chest. So there would be more deaths, soon. And maybe—finally—other thrice-born. True elders.
“You’ve opened paths,” the yaksa said. “Where do you wish to go, little one?”
“They’re Mani Ara’s paths,” Priya said. “I’ll go where she wishes me to go, of course.”
A musical hum. “Then you must speak to her.”
“I will, yaksa.”
Priya looked at the yaksa’s reflection in the water. Hermirror-self was even less human: silvery, liquid, and changing. She thought, not for the first time, of the real Chandni, who’d maybe been her mother. Who had killed her siblings, and given her the chance to live.
There were things stirring beneath the surface of the water, things growing, blooming in shadows, breaking her reflection into nothing but ink.
“Come into the water,” the yaksa called. The water rippled again, a beckoning hand.
Priya didn’t bother to argue. She’d expected this from the moment she’d been drawn into the clearing, under the hushed arch of those trees. She knotted her sari so it wouldn’t billow, then lowered herself in.
The water was blood-warm. She tried to ignore the feeling of the silt under her feet, uneven like teeth, silken-rough like tangled hair. The yaksa held out her hand, and Priya took it.
“Look,” Chandni ordered gently again. And Priya looked—down at Chandni’s palm, and the flower held within it.
A lotus. But not a lotus. A thing that had bloomed in shadows under the water, summoned by her presence, her magic, her call. Its petals were perfect, its roots long and coiling. It was rot-riven, there was no denying that; she could see it in the puckered sheen of it. In the way its roots pulsed, like something with a heartbeat…
“It took us so long to return,” Chandni said. “So long to sacrifice pieces of ourselves so that we could change the world to fit us. But look what we’ve made. You think the rot is a curse. An ugliness. You recoil from it, all of your kin and kind. But it is beautiful, little one. Can’t you see it?”
The yaksa pressed the lotus into Priya’s hand. Priya felt the weight of it. Blood ran between her fingers. She stared down with a detached kind of horror, very far from her own body, outwardly calm.
“You don’t understand the beauty and fragility of your own bodies,” the yaksa was saying, with singsong softness. “You seethe beauty in an ancient tree, a flower, and fail to see it in yourself: in the architecture of your lungs, the veins and bones that make a thing of you. Can’t you see how beautiful it is, for us to be one?”
Priya should have lied. But she could not make her mouth move into a yes, could not force herself to nod. The yaksa closed Priya’s own fingers over the lotus. An inexorable pressure.
“Can’t you see what a beautiful thing we have made of you, Priya?” the yaksa asked, with great and terrible tenderness.
A shuddering breath left Priya.
