All those people, she thought.All of them, gone. If I had blinked, I would not even have seen them die.
Joy bloomed out of horror, suddenly, fiercely.
Ah, Priya, she thought.Priya, you did it.
The wave settled.
In its place, something grew out of the water, a bridge, vast and strong, a thread binding the two banks together.
Only then did the water grow entirely calm. She watched for a moment as her Aloran and Saketan forces crossed the bridge where there had been no bridge in a sudden press of bodies, shouting in triumph.
She wanted to yell with them, wanted to scream a kind of vicious triumph out. But she hadn’t won yet.
She turned her focus on Chandra’s army.
There was a kind of impossible, awful forward motion to an army in battle that could not be easily halted, only slowed. Chandra’s men could not simply turn back and fight the enemies at their flank—Rao’s men. The Saketan soldiers. Chandra’s men had faltered, were wavering, frightened by the strangeness of the water, just as her own people had been frightened by the unnatural fire at Saketa.
At the maze fort, fate had turned against her. But today it was in her favor, and it was all thanks to Priya’s presence. All Malini needed to do was let the tide carry her.
She raised her saber in the air and finally let out the cry bottled inside her—a thin, wild thing, like a bird of prey taking flight above a wounded hare. The sunlight caught the edges of her saber, giving the polished blade a hue like bright fire.
“For Parijatdvipa!” she yelled. “For the mothers! For your empress!”
She heard the answering cries around her, a noise that swelled and swelled, already triumphant, drowning her enemies in its song.
RAO
The waterroared.
There was noise, crushing weight, and then—the noise of the water faded. Rao was on the ground, smeared in earth, gasping for air. The ground had sunk around him, as if the riverbed had swallowed it back into itself, churned it into silt. He got his hands under himself. Dragged himself back to his feet, wild energy roaring through him.
He saw the bridge.
He stared at it, eyes wide, wondering if he’d finally gone mad. Then Sima’s hand was on his arm. Sima’s voice, as if through a thick fog, demanding he move. “She’s done her part!” Sima was yelling. Her eyes were wet.“Now do yours!”
That snapped him back into his skin. He yelled for Narayan. Called to his men to run, to ride, and the cry was taken up as they surged as one toward the strange bridge that covered the expanse of the water.
Rao swung into an empty chariot and took up the reins. “Sima,” he said. “Get up here. I’ll be your charioteer. You shoot.”
She stared at him. Wiped an arm over her eyes and clambered up. The chariot jerked, and then the horse was guiding them swiftly over the bridge, over the water. And Sima was raising her bow, and nocking an arrow, and they were crashing into the flank of the Parijatdvipan army in a wave of motion.
Chandra’s forces were crushed between Rao’s half of the army and Malini’s. Behind them stood Aloran and Saketan soldiers, garbed in their turbans and liegemarks. Before them were Parijati gleaming in their white armor, Srugani and Dwarali cavalry. They had nowhere to turn.
There was no clear ending to it. Only a moment when he was guiding the horse as Sima grimly shot a man through the chest. And then, as if darkness had descended and lifted abruptly in his mind, he found himself stumbling from his chariot.
There were bodies everywhere: men’s screams and groans as they died, and carrion birds already wheeling hopefully overhead. But it was over. It had ended. And nameless bless them, they had not lost. They had not lost.
Prince Ashutosh had survived, to Rao’s surprise. Ashutosh’s men were huddled around him, watching as he was attended to by one of the camp physicians. He was gray-faced, lips mottled with cold, but when he saw Rao he gave a jerky bow of his head. Rao returned it, a strange shadow of relief blooming in his chest. He did not like Ashutosh, exactly—but he had been sure the man would die, the moment the arrows fell on the river. His survival was a small miracle.
Priya’s miracle, Rao reminded himself. He couldn’t entirely let himself recall the sight of her in the churning water, glassy waves rising up around her, unearthed roots spiraling above her. It made him feel as if he’d been unmoored from his skin. He breathed around the panic of it—the sense of wrongness and elation, all entangled together and impossible for him to unknot—and turned toward the ford.
He remembered the vision of the nameless that Aditya had shown him, long ago in the lacquer gardens. The way it had filled his skull with strangeness and terror. This was… possibly worse. He felt small and helpless in the face of it; painfully conscious of his mortal body and mortal bones.
He forced himself to concentrate on what was around him: the mud beneath his feet. The corpses strewn around him.
Sima, ahead of him.
Sima was striding onward without pause. It was only when she started wading into the water that he realized anything was amiss. There was a soldier yelling at her from the bank, trying to call her back. She was submerged to the chest: Rao could only see the shape of her shoulders, the snaking line of her braid, as she waded forward through the corpses. Rao stepped to the water’s edge and cupped a hand to his mouth to make his voice carry. “You don’t want to be out there!” Rao called. “Please, come back to the shore.”
