“Thin,” Chandra repeated. “I do not want her forces thinned. I want them destroyed. Do you understand?”
Silence from his advisors. They did not seem to want to look at him.
Somehow this was his sister’s fault. Somehow the curse of her had cursed his land in turn. She did not deserve to burn. She did not deserve to rise. She only deserved pain. Only deserved nothing. Tobenothing.
“Emperor,” said Sushant. All eyes turned on him. “My people are from the land surrounding the Veri. And I… I may be able to suggest a way to meet her. And defeat her.”
Sushant began to speak. And Chandra—pain a lance behind his eyes and through his heart—listened with clenched fists. He wished he could place his hands around his sister’s throat. The sick fear that had coursed through him at the sight of the rot-riven crops had alchemized into a rage so encompassing that his only choice was to unleash it.
It was what his sister deserved.
Tomorrow, he would let Hemanth talk to him. He would let Hemanth tell him of the rot in Parijat—for surely, that was what the High Priest wanted to speak of.
And then he would trust the knowledge the mothers had surely placed directly in his heart.
I am the answer, not my sister.
Never my sister.
He would send his men to the Veri. All the men he could afford. And he would crush her. Obliterate her.
She did not deserve to burn—torise. No, the only thing Malini deserved was to die.
Chandra went to the temple long after dawn. He went, and saw Hemanth approach, smiling, to greet him.
He watched as Hemanth’s smile faded at the sight of Chandra’s face. “Emperor,” he said.
“High Priest,” Chandra said in response. “Tell me what threat faces me beyondmortal men. Tell me what you’ve been hiding from me.”
Chandra flung the sack to the ground. Rot-riven flowers tumbled out, the stench of flesh and decay filling the air.
The High Priest did not flinch back. He looked at the flowers, then raised his face to meet Chandra’s eyes. He looked like he had always known this would come.
“Ah, Emperor,” he said sorrowfully. “This is not even the smallest part of what I fear.”
BHUMIKA
The sickroom was tense. Dark. There was no noise but the rasp of breath; one small body laboring over air, and Ganam matching the cadence of it. In, out. In, out. As if he were keeping them both going by sheer determination alone.
“Ganam,” Bhumika said. She entered the room quietly.
“Kritika’s just been.” That was Ganam’s low voice. “She doesn’t know what to think. She doesn’t want to admit it to me, but I know her. I saw it in her face.”
“How is he?” Bhumika asked. She was not far from the bed now. There was a blanket over Rukh’s body, but he’d managed to kick it aside, or it had been shifted, and Bhumika could see one bare foot; one thin ankle, vulnerable, limned green.
“He’s sick,” Ganam said in a low voice. He was sitting by Rukh’s bed. “He said Ashok—did something to him. Before he stopped talking again.”
Rukh was unconscious. There were new veins of green at his throat. The rot had spread further upon it; reached its tendrils through his blood, his organs. Priya would be heartbroken.
Bhumika touched her fingertips to that ankle. The boy didn’t even twitch. But he was warm, still. And the realization brought a lump to Bhumika’s throat.
Rukh. Her daughter. Herdaughter.
The fear was constant inside her. The vise of it was only tightening, with every single thing the yaksa did.
“I’ll return,” she said softly. Ganam said nothing as she departed, his eyes still fixed on Rukh.
She didn’t seek out Ashok. She didn’t have to. Everywhere she went she felt him like a shadow. And sure enough, when she walked into the orchard—beneath canopies of leaves laden with strangeness, the rot that watched her with the yaksa’s terrible sentience—he followed her.
