“When you’re a temple child like I am and you survive passingthrough the waters, you gain strength and magic,” said Priya. “But surviving’s not promised.”
Murmurs and lowered heads, from her listening crowd. They knew how many had died trying to pass through the waters and rise.
“When you drink water broken from the source,” Priya went on, “you gain some of that strength. For a while. But it’s poison. Eventually it kills you. Unless you become once-born, there’s no chance of living out your full life. I won’t force you to drink. But if you’re willing to—you have the chance to carry this with you. To drink it when you need strength.”
A deep breath. “And if you must drink… this is your chance to grow strong and pass through the deathless waters. To perhaps become thrice-born, one day, like me. I promise you that chance, even if I can’t promise you your life.”
She held the vial out. “You don’t need to decide now. But you can carry the waters with you.”
“Elder.” A rough voice. One of the outsiders. A man, she remembered, called Shyam. “Would you trust those of us who came from beyond Ahiranya with this?”
A rumble of unease from the crowd. Priya met his eyes.
“I want to,” she said. “But tell me why I should.”
“I fought in the war,” Shyam replied. “I saw what you did. You’re stronger than the empire.” He said it bluntly, fiercely. Like he believed it. “I’d rather risk my life for the home you’ve given my family than side with an empire that left us to die.”
“That’s enough for me,” Priya said.
“If you turn on us, we’ll kill you, of course,” Ganam added. Priya had to work very hard not to roll her eyes.
They took the vials from her.
She led them to the seeker’s path. Above them, the bones on their ribbons wavered and spun. Some, absurdly, had sprouted flowers. It was like being in a macabre highborn lady’s garden.
Priya met Ganam’s gaze.
“How does it feel to be twice-born?” Priya asked.
“Terrible,” Ganam replied quietly. “The price was too high.”
“Ganam,” she said. He stopped, then turned, a questioning look in his eyes. “You don’t have to try to become thrice-born.”
“I do,” he said. “For Kritika. For all of them. I have to try. They’d want me to.”
“And what do you want?”
He shook his head.
“What good is wanting going to do either of us? Come on, Priya. Walk with me. Let’s talk about other shit until we get to Srugna.”
All these new paths, and here they were following the oldest of them.
“Can you feel any Srugani?” Priya asked Ganam, after a time. Parijatdvipa had left armed forces at Ahiranya’s borders. There were many in Srugna’s forests, too.
Shecould feel them. But she wanted to give Ganam the chance to test his own skill.
“I can feel mosquitoes biting me,” Ganam said, hacking his way through the snarl of branches that riddled their path. Once, he would have needed a hand scythe for that work. But now he only needed the sweep of his hand. His twice-born magic made the branches wither and splinter around him, parting to allow the two of them to pass. “That’s what I can feel.”
Priya rolled her eyes. He couldn’t see it, but that wasn’t the point. Derision bled into her voice when she said, “Can you feel the warriors waiting for us?”
“Not the way you can,” he said. “So maybe you do the seeing for both of us. I’ll focus on clearing the way.”
She could have cleared the blockage with a breath, with a single brush of her mind, bending the green on the path around them to her will. But Ganam’s shoulders were bunched with tension, and she was pretty sure he needed this: an outlet, a focus. Something to home in on that wasn’t the fight that lay ahead of them.
“Fine,” she said. “But don’t exhaust yourself, all right? Your strength is going to be needed.”
A crash. A rumble. A tree fell to the side, vanishing throughthe haze that edged the seeker’s path—where time melted and changed before returning to its normal shape.
