She reached the water. The arrows didn’t find her.
She hoped Sima and Rao were leaving now, retreating as she had asked them to. But she couldn’t look back.
Feet in, first. The water was cold, dark with blood. Someone was floating facedown near her. Fingertips skimmed the edge of her tunic as it billowed when she waded deeper.
She kept on moving. The bodies of Lord Ashutosh’s men lay around her, the water barely buoying them up.
She could let herself sink now. Could reach for her magic. Could try—
Not yet, some instinct inside her said. It had a sibilant voice—rich, slithering, coiling through her blood and softening the panicked fire in it.Not quite yet.
It was hard to swim, weighed down as she was, shoving rafts and bodies and weaponry out of her way. But she was at the curve of one of the islets now. And there—there was Lord Ashutosh, turning his head and groaning, blood in his mouth but alive. He would have been submerged, if not for one of his men holding him up. The soldier was struggling, his left arm wounded.
She swore, half under her breath, and grasped Ashutosh under one arm. He blinked at her.
“Get out of here, you unnatural witch,” he groaned.
“I’m trying to get us all out of here,” she hissed, her mind working frantically. First, to get Ashutosh and his men from the water. Then, to deal with the archers. Could she do both? Was that even possible?
She looked back at the bank. Too far. It couldn’t be done.
“You,” she said to the soldier. “Romesh. How badly are you hurt?”
He shook his head, even though she could see the blood matting his sleeve. “I won’t leave him,” he said stubbornly.
“I’m not asking you to. Do you have the strength to drag him out of the water?” Priya asked, gesturing at the island with her chin.
“I’ve been trying,” he said. “But every time we move the damn arrows—”
As if on cue, there was a whistling noise. Priya ducked her head reflexively. The arrows, thankfully, landed nowhere near them.
“I see,” she managed. Water sloshed coldly over her; her fingers were pruning, her body trying to shiver for warmth. “I’m going to need you to try again.”
“We’ll be hit,” he said flatly.
“I need you to do it,” she said.
“I won’t die because of your fool orders—”
“Don’t try right now,” she said hurriedly. “In a moment, I’m going to do something. When I do, drag him up here and you’ll stand a chance.”
He gave a choked, incredulous laugh.
“And what are you going to do? Murder them with your yelling? Stupid woman.”
Priya ground her teeth together. As insults went, it wasn’t her favorite. At leastunnatural witchimplied she had a certain level of skill and ability, even if she wasn’t being lauded for it.
“I saved your life, didn’t I?” She bared her teeth into a smile; sank deeper into the water, drifting carefully away from him. “I can do anything.”
The last time she’d been in water as tainted as this and drawn on her gifts, she’d fallen into a dead faint. But she couldn’t think of that. She couldn’t allow doubt to creep in. She was in the thick of a massacre now, after all—on the brink of the collapse of all Malini’s efforts, Malini’s war. And if Priya had a part to play, then by the soil and sky, she was going to play it to the hilt.
She sucked in a breath. Shallower than she would have liked, as Emperor Chandra’s Parijatdvipan archers in imperial white and gold drew their bows once more.
She sank beneath the water as the arrows began to rain, and she let her magic free.
The water wasn’t in her grip. The silt beneath her feet—mud and fine rocks, the tiny bones of fish—wasn’t rich in plant life either, curse it. But she could feel enough: algae, a faint shimmer of green. The roots of things that grew abundant along the river bank. And older roots, deeper roots, of the trees upon the islets that had once been islands, and of trees long dead, their husks still winding beneath the river bed.
She reached. Andpulled.
