“Yaksa,” she breathed. “Why do you wear my sister’s face?”
“I don’t want you to speak to your sister,” the yaksa said simply. Smiling with Bhumika’s mouth, or something that resembled Bhumika’s mouth. Even as Priya watched, the teeth grew too pearly, too sharp, the lips as bruised and curled as petals. “I want you to speak to me.”
All this time. The first time she reached Bhumika in the sangam. The moment when she’d almost turned back to Ahiranya, and then seen Bhumika and changed her mind—all this time—
Dread pooled in her stomach and worked its way through her, turning her blood to ice. Bhumika. Had she spoken to Bhumika at all, in truth, since she had left Ahiranya? What had happened to her sister—to everyone she’d left behind? The horror stroked fingers up along her spine. Lies upon lies. Could she believe anything she had seen in the sangam? Could she trust herself, if she couldn’t even recognize that her sister was not her sister?
Priya tried to move, tried to rise—and felt the yaksa’s grip tighten further.
“You want to win? You want to kill those who stand against you?” The yaksa was smiling, smiling, luminous in the haze of starlight. “Then we must work together. Your flesh, my strength.”
“My flesh,” Priya repeated.
“Your flesh,” the yaksa agreed sweetly. Her nail traced Priya’s cheek. A hot shadow of pain followed it. “My strength.”
“Last time, when I thought you were…” Priya paused, gathering her words.When I thought you were my sister. When I thought you were as human as I am. When I did not know you were a yaksa, with all that entails.“My body went—strange. I went strange. I thought it was my own weakness.”
“Not weakness,” the yaksa murmured. “Little bud. Tell me. What is worship?”
“Hollowing,” Priya whispered.
“And what is power?”
Priya said nothing to this. Power could be so many things. When she thought of it, she thought of Bhumika, tiredly working to hold all the shards of Ahiranya together; of Malini walking on a knife-edge. Taking Priya’s power to bolster her own. And Priya… letting her.
“I don’t know,” she said, feeling unutterably small in the yaksa’s hands.
“Sapling,” the yaksa said tenderly. “You are an elder. You must know that power is a magic like any other. It demands sacrifice.”
Sacrifice.
The waters swirled around them and the yaksa’s face continued to change: flesh to wood, hair to vines, the eyelids lush with lichen.
“If I say no?” Priya asked. “Will you let me drown?”
“Ah.” The yaksa’s fingernail traced her jaw again. Possessive. “No. Death isn’t so bad, sapling. I’d keep you even then. A fine skin, you’d make—a fine shell with good bones. But no. I want you as you are, living. But this battle will be lost, and many will die if you refuse me.” The yaksa leaned in closer, its hair a cloak around them. Vine and darkness. “I do not care if mortals die,” said the yaksa. “Not these mortals. But you do.”
She didn’t care about that damn Ashutosh, or Romesh, or any of the other soldiers, even if she didn’t want them dead. Didn’t care. But.
She thought of Sima and of Malini. Of Lady Raziya and Prince Rao, and said, “What does it mean? What price must my flesh pay, when I’m already hollow for you?”
“You gave something away that is mine,” said the yaksa. There was a reverberation: a great drumbeat that made the entirety of the sangam rock, and Priya’s own shadow form fracture into wisps that drew together again with a shocking snap as the yaksa snarled and held her skull still. “You have no more time, little one. But you must get it back for me. Promise.”
A promise to a yaksa. A vow that couldn’t be broken.
Priya couldn’t feel her racing heart or tight lungs, but she felt fear—the kind of fear that doesn’t need a body to give it shape. She thought of hollowness and magic; she thought of Sima on the bank of the river, waiting for her; of Malini, staring at her with want that was deeper than deathless waters; of the real water that surrounded her, heavy and thick with blood, and the people caught inside it.
Distantly she felt her body calling her home.
“I will,” she said. It felt like a mistake, even as she said it. And yet, it was also the only choice she could make. The only one. “I vow it. Yaksa.”
The yaksa’s eyes glowed, a brilliant vermilion. Hands pressed Priya beneath the three rivers of the sangam. She breathed in, one terrible breath that hollowed her lungs with cosmic waters, and she was full, whole, changed. She was—
—rearing up out of the Veri. She spat water. Bared her teeth in a howling laugh and threw up her hands, taking the silt beneath up with her.
She felt the water rising with the earth; felt it as Romesh scrambled up onto the island, sweating and bleeding, Prince Ashutosh in his arms. Felt it, as the tree above them split and unfurled and wound itself into a new shape. A shield, a carapace.
She felt it as the waters parted around her, and the roots she’d drawn up from the earth shaped a high bridge—open now, a path that Rao and Narayan’s men could take directly to the flank of Chandra’s waiting forces. They could do exactly what she’d promised. Malini would not fall.
