Rukh did not try to run or reach for a weapon. He merely sat up in the bed as ordered, hands in tight fists.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” Ashok told him. It did not sound like a lie, or feel like one, but the boy did not calm.
Last time, Ashok remembered vaguely, he’d told the boy he was going to help him. And then he had hurt him. So perhaps this was reasonable. Perhaps the boy was right to be wary.
Ashok stepped forward. Rukh’s gaze flickered—from Ashok’s face, down to Padma in his arms, and back up again. Ashok held Padma forward.
“Take her,” he said.
“Wh-where,” Rukh began. Cleared his throat, and forged on. “Where is Elder Bhumika?”
Ashok shook his head.
“Take her,” he repeated.
“Elder Bhumika,” the boy said again. “She—she wouldn’t. Wouldn’t leave. Her.”
What little you know, Ashok thought savagely. Hadn’t Bhumika left them all behind in the Hirana when they had been children, choosing to be a highborn girl instead of a temple daughter? Hadn’t she chosen to wed the regent and carry his child, instead of fighting tooth and nail for a better world, as he had?
Bhumika had looked at him, as she’d kneeled among the trees, and told him she was being selfish. Told him she was setting herself free.
“There is no one left for the infant but you,” Ashok said. “Keep her or the yaksa will keep her. Keep her, orwewill keep her.”
Rukh’s hands were trembling in his lap. Ashok stared him down, until finally the boy’s fingers uncurled, and he held up his arms. He took Padma. She looked bigger in his smaller arms. More human. Enough weight to pin the boy—slight and mind-wounded as he was—down.
“She’s mine now,” Rukh said hesitantly, as if testing the words.
“Yes,” Ashok said. “Yours.”
“I…” Another hesitation. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you keep her alive,” said Ashok. “You protect her. You keep her fed and clothed. You make sure we have no reason to harm her. Or don’t. But her life is in your hands, now.” A pause. He watched the words sink in. “The next time I meet you or her, I will not be like this,” Ashok went on. A warning. “I will not be as… as kind.”
The boy’s arms tightened. Padma stirred a little, making a noise of complaint.
You’re not kind now, every inch of Rukh’s body screamed.You frighten me.
Rukh would have to learn to hide those weaknesses, if he wanted to survive. The yaksa—he—would not accept weakness. But the boy would learn, or he would not, and soon it would be no concern of Ashok’s. He could feel himself fading. The waters were carrying him away.
He remembered—Meena, so long ago. The shadow of her, spools of ink in the deathless waters—
He remembered Priya. Priya. He would have liked to say goodbye. But what was there to say between them? Only grief and bad blood bound them, and there was no way to leave her happily. He knew what lay ahead of her.
Priya, in his arms. Priya, with only him to rely on. And here before him now, Rukh, a foolish child clinging to an even smaller child, trying to grapple with the cruelty that had been inflicted on the both of them. Trying to survive.
There was a vicious satisfaction in knowing that nothing ended, that all griefs in the world came back over and over again, spinning like a terrible wheel. He’d thought he would be able to forge a better world once. He’d thought he could bring back all of the goodness and joy Ahiranya had lost.
That he had only managed to bring back this—his own childhood made strange, as if seen through water—seemed… fitting. It seemed fitting.
He left the boy without another word. Now that Padma was no longer in his arms, he let them hang heavily at his sides. The strength was leaching out of them. These were no longer his arms, after all, and this skin no longer fit his bones.
Sanjana was waiting for him. She was sitting under a shaft of sunlight coming in through the broken ceiling, half in shadow, half in light.
“You have betrayed yourself,” she said. She sounded oddly delighted. In the light, her visible face was shaped into a smile. Elegant striations of wood shaped her mouth, her jaw, the rise of her cheek, moving liquidly as she spoke. “Turned upon yourself. Turned onus. Poured our secrets into the hollow gourd of a temple daughter and cut her from her roots. She’ll decay and die and go to waste, and it’s all your doing. Will you beg mercy?”
“You know everything,” Ashok said heavily. His legs felt like dead wood beneath him. He could barely move them. “What use is begging for pity from the pitiless?”
“What does she know?”
