“That wasn’t death,” he rasped. “You don’t know what death is like. True death—it’s something unlike anything else. I was picked to pieces. Scraped clean, the bones of me reassembled into something of use to them—to me.”
He took a step closer to her.
“Bhumika,” he forced out. “I am a yaksa. No different from the one who wears Chandni in her smile, or uses Sanjana’s voice. No different, although I believe I am.”
“You are still you,” she said, but saw her own uncertainty mirrored in his face.
“I am only the scraps of myself. The tatters. Take this armor apart, this thin skin, and I won’t be Ashok anymore. I know it. The yaksa know it. They don’t know why I cling on but it makes them curious. They’re waiting to see what will happen. They think it’s funny. You always loved humans, they told me. And I did. Maybe I still do.”
Bhumika felt the thud of her own heart, painful as a fist.
“You are a temple elder,” he said. “Bound to us by choice and sacrifice. Bound by my—bya yaksa’s—choice. We can give you so many things. Wehavegiven you so many things. Strength. Power. The earth and plants at your bidding. And I can give you more. I can give you knowledge, Bhumika, the kind of knowledge that could kill us in the right hands. A secret that can be forged into a weapon. Is losing yourself not worth that price?”
What capacity did she have to do anything with that kind of knowledge? What could she possibly accomplish? To know the right knife for a task was one thing—to actually be able to wield it was another matter entirely. And yet her hands shook and her voice trembled as she said, “If I take this knowledge with me, I can stop the war?”
“You can try,” said Ashok. “And that is more than you can do now. You’re bound. Good as chained. This is all I can offer you.”
“If you know how the yaksa can be stopped—if you feel guilt—why will you not act to stop the war yourself? Why must it be me?”
“Because it’s only the part of me that is Ashok that wants to,” he said. “This—skin of me.” He gestured, helplessly, at his own body. “And I’m not going to be here much longer, Bhumika. You must see it. I’m fraying. I cannot leave, but—but you can. For a price.”
She closed her eyes, searching for calm.
“Everything demands sacrifice.”
“Of course,” she said. “Of course it does.”
“You’ve forgotten. But once, beneath the waters, a yaksa offered you a blade of sacred wood. It told you to cut out your heart for it, and you did.” His voice was quiet but deep. Ashok’s voice but also—not quite. Not quite. “You made space for the sangam inside you. The rivers are in you, flowing through you. We can find you anywhere, because you carry the waters. We can live in you, because you carry the waters. But if you are not bound to the waters…”
“I understand,” she said. Closed her eyes, one brief moment, then opened them. “A typical Ashok strategy,” she said tiredly. “To risk my health and my life—and all those who rely upon me—for the slimmest chance of success.”
“When I risked death, I did it for a higher cause,” he said. “Our autonomy. Our freedom. Risk is not shameful.”
“Shame! You talk of shame. You wanted a return to our glorious past,” she said, with all the savagery she had never been able to direct at him when he was living; that he had denied her by being her enemy, then denied her by dying and leaving both her and Priya behind. “What do you think of it, now that we have it?”
“I think you’re asking a ghost about wanting to resurrect ghosts, sister,” he said, with a weight and quietness she’d never heard from her brother’s lips. “I’m not real anymore, Bhumika,” he said. “What I once wanted doesn’t matter. But you are real. And the choice is yours.”
“You want to give me knowledge forbidden to me,” Bhumika said, closing her eyes, feeling the night press against them. She was burning inside. This was not magic, not the fire of sacred wood. This was how panic felt. This was how it felt to have the walls close in. This was how she had felt in the moments before she had passed through the deathless waters as a girl: all her choices narrowing, and the air in her lungs with them. “You want to—risk all that I am. On the vague hope that someone may be able to use the knowledge I have.”
“Yes.”
“And my alternative?”
“You stay here,” Ashok said. “You play the coward’s game, like you always have. You play nicely with your masters, as you always have.”
“I stay with mychild,” said Bhumika. “I stay with the people I’ve promised to protect. I do not abandon them for—for vague hopes.”
“Ah, Bhumika,” said Ashok. “You think we’ll ever give your baby back to you?”
“You think she will survive if I leave her?”
“You think she will survive if you stay?”
“You’re saying this to sway me,” she said tightly.
“I’m telling you what you already know. We were trained to cut out our weaknesses for a reason.” He shrugged—a sound that creaked like wood in a high wind. “You created a weakness, Bhumika. Brought your weakness into the world. Every time you fail the yaksa, they’ll use her against you, and they’ll blame you for being foolish enough to leave her there for them to take. And one day they will destroy her. Whether by accident or design.” A pause, a breath. “They’ve always let children die,” he said. “It’s what shaped us, after all. How many temple children do you think were lost to them?”
He was manipulating her. She knew. Sheknew.
