“It has to be enough,” whispered Priya, “that I’ve lost you. That we’re severed from one another. It has to be enough.”
Priya touched her own hand over her own heart.
“It has to be,” she said.
And maybe it was.
The fire twisted wildly. And there were flowers, blooming from Priya’s skin. Leaves feathering through her hair. Sap, pearling at her eyes.
Priya, she thought. Priya was not human at all.
It was awful to still love her.
“I’ll never forgive you,” Malini choked out, through a mouth of blood, salt. “I’ll never—I’ll never…”
One hand, twined with white leaves, touched her face. Wiped the blood away.
“Live, then,” said Priya. “Hate me. Justlive.”
There was an awful noise. The lattices, entwined with flowers, were cracking. Splintering open.
Malini felt lips against hair. The faintest brush. The wound in her chest pulsed in response. Hot, livid, living. Her vision grayed as she was lowered. But she saw Priya walk away from her. Saw the marigolds rupture the ground behind her. A trail of gold.
Saw the shadow of Priya, vanishing through the broken lattice, a hollow to the night.
ASHOK
Ashok returned to the mahal alone.
For good or ill, Bhumika was gone. And soon Ashok—whatever he was now, a ghost, an echo, a cloth already half frayed to dust—would be gone too. He could feel himself slipping away. It was a little, as he remembered it, like dying.
There was an ancient sentience stirring under his own. He was nothing but a boat on its waters. He walked forward slowly, on legs that felt like strangers beneath him, carrying him forward along the mahal’s corridors. The green, the flowers, even the soil, turned with him. Watching him go.
There was no one in the nursery watching Bhumika’s baby sleep. But Ashok could feel the flowers in their bowls of waters, the vines with their limbs wound through the lattice windows, and knew the yaksa had their eyes on her. And on him, now. But they did nothing when he leaned forward and brushed Padma’s fine hair back from her face. Her eyes were screwed tight shut, her cheeks stained with salt. She’d cried herself to sleep.
Distantly, he felt a pang of emotion. It ached like a rotten tooth.
He picked her up. She didn’t stir. He carried her from the room, unimpeded.
Perhaps the others were curious. Perhaps they wondered what he would do with his sister’s child—his niece, in a way, even if no blood bound them. Perhaps they thought he would destroy her, as he’d almost destroyed Rukh.
He remembered the yaksa who wore Sanjana’s face. Remembered the tilt of her head.I’m curious to see what you’ll do.
Padma was light in his arms.
She was, he thought distantly, small for her age. Like Priya had been. There was no shared blood between Priya and Padma either, but Padma had the same scrunched forehead, the same way of curling her hands into fists, the same banked fury written into her flesh. She’d be formidable one day, or dangerous, if she lived long enough to grow into herself.
Bhumika would want her to live.
Did Ashok?
He had not lived long enough to know Padma or love her; to hold her in his arms and want the world for her.
So he held a different scrap of memory—Priya’s small body, Priya’s weight in his arms, the love and fear that had welled up in him as he’d held her close instead. He kept on walking.
The infirmary was nearly empty. Only one body lay curled on a cot, blankets thrown back. Ashok was met with a bowed spine spiked with leaves. Then the body stiffened, and turned, and Rukh looked up at him.
“Sit up,” said Ashok.
