“Everything has changed too much.”
“… betrayed,” another whispered. “We need strength. We need what was murdered and should have lived.”
“Onlyher—”
Priya didn’t look up at them as they argued around her. Out on the grass surrounding the Hirana, where the yaksa were ringed around her, she was growing and plucking flowers to weave into garlands to lay on the bodies that would be buried. She pressed her magic into the soil.Grow, she urged.Live, flourish, so that I may crown the dead.
The mask-keepers deserved better than a funeral of fear and shame and quiet. They deserved a reverent burial. They had entered the deathless waters to make themselves strong enough to protect Ahiranya, to become powerful enough to make up for all the ways Priya was weak, unable to defend and protect and govern Ahiranya the way it deserved. Kritika had been frightened, but she had still gone into the waters. She’d done it for Ahiranya, and she’d done it so Priya wouldn’t be alone.
She’d never liked Kritika, and Kritika had never really liked her. But they’d come to rely on each other.
I need you here, Priya thought.You deserve so much more grief than I can give you.A flower, woven with another, and another.But I can give you this.
“I lived in this earth,” Sanjana was saying, her voice a wild bird, a saw to bone. “The soil ate me and I ate it in return. Bones buried within me, and bodies drowned, and I am telling you this, my kin: I willnotdie now.”
“You should never have let the other one go,” Avan Ara said. “Bhumika was ours. You were too human, Arahli. Rotten—”
“Hush,” said Vata Ara, the yaksa who wore Sendhil’s face.
“We need temple elders reared from babes.” Chandni’s voice. No.Bhisa Ara’s voice. She could not let herself forget what they were. “That is what we need and what we shall have. The ones who entered the water were imperfect. We will have better.”
Priya’s hand stilled on the flowers.
“The children aren’t ready,” she said.
Silence.
“Speak again, child,” Vata Ara said. “If you must speak, then speak.”
She did not turn to face them. Did not bow. She only sat, her hands and her lap brimful of flowers.
“Arahli Ara can tell you how long it takes to make a child hollow and strong,” she said. “If they enter the waters now, the children will only die. Give me years to teach them and they might live. Instead of using them, give me the deathless waters broken from their source. Let me feed my warriors those vials of poison and strength. And… let the best of them, the ones who prove their strength, try the waters. It’s another chance for all of us. A way to turn strong worshippers into strong temple elders.”
An approving noise, a murmur that moved through the yaksa.
“Spoken like a leader,” Vata Ara murmured.
Spoken like a desperate woman, Priya thought.
“The waters are yours,” Avan Ara said. “Take them. Feed them to your people.” Then he leaned down and tugged her by the braid, as Padma so often did, a childish, urging hand. “Go and bury your bodies now,” he said imperiously.
She walked back toward the mahal, holding flowers—wearing them around her arms and shoulders, a living cloak. It took her a moment to realize Arahli was walking with her. She’d been too numb to really care.
“Yaksa,” she murmured.
Was he here to comfort her or show her another cruelty? His eyes met her own. His wood-whorled face was unreadable.
“You did well,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“It is a plan your brother would have approved of,” Arahli said, and ah, there it was—the sting, the words meant to poison and cut.
MALINI
On the journey to Srugna, Malini saw forests and fields rich with rot. Despite the work of her army, the rot was spreading.
One of her guards claimed that at night, in the wind, the trees sang, like their branches were strung through with the cords and sinew of human throats. Malini stayed up one night until dawn and heard nothing, not even the natural groan of trees, and was glad.
