Ashok said nothing.
“A mortal can only remember so much, I suppose,” said Sanjana. “Never mind. Whatever she knows, the war ahead of us has only one outcome. What did you do with her baby?”
“It’s not her child any longer.”
“We took that child from our temple elder,” Sanjana agreed. “But we told our temple elder she had to obey or the child would die, and she has not. By rights, we should kill it.”
“As Bhumika is now—the death would cause her no sorrow. So what does it accomplish?”
“Balance.”
“The child will grow,” Ashok said, with a calm that wasn’t his own. “The child will become stronger. She will learn to hollow out her weaknesses. And she will survive the deathless waters, thrice, and she will serve us as her mother should have. That’s balance enough.”
“You do not remember yourself,” Sanjana said, rising. “But—curious, curious, dear heart—all the same instincts guide you, as they always have.”
He could not respond. He was breathless. Fraying, fraying. He’d misplaced his lungs. She crossed the distance between them.
“You always adored them,” she said, with great fondness. She touched a thumb to his chin, and beneath her touch he felt his skin writhe and change—flesh to bone, bone to wood, and then upon the wood, the pulpy softness of lichen began to grow, licking the whorls of her finger. Her smile gentled. “You raised the first temple children. You hollowed them out so tenderly. And when they died for us you mourned. Bound the echoes of them in your roots, as if you could keep them—”
“Stop,” he begged. “Stop, yaksa, please.”
“Shh,” she hushed. Petted his face, as if he were an animal or a child to be gentled. In the wake of her touch his skin tore and remade itself, a pain that erased him.
He could not pull away from her, only make wounded noises, as the inevitable overcame him. Memories unspooling. The shape of Ashok falling away like the dust it was. Dead, dead, dead.
“I told you then: There’s too much mortal weakness in you. Too much mortal, and not enough of what you trulyare.”
“Sacrifice,” he managed to say. He felt as if his teeth did not fit his mouth. “It was—inevitable. To be—mortal.”
“This has gone on long enough, I think,” said Sanjana. “Before Mani Ara returns—ah, dear heart. You must remember yourself now. I think you must.”
“I am,” he told her—even though he did not want to. He was forgetting and remembering all at once. And then he could speak no more, as the waves came over him, and the tide drowned him.
And he was—
He was.
He was. Kneeling on the floor. Taller now—new, elongated bones, a longer body and graceful fingers, a drapery of leaves trailing from his skull as he raised his head to meet her hands, which reached for him. He knew her hands. Beneath the veil of flesh she wore, he knew her hands.
“Arahli,” she said. Framed his face. A half name for a half him. “Arahli Ara. Do you know yourself?”
Arahli opened his eyes.
“I do,” he replied.
MALINI
There was fire, and then there was nothing.
Priya was gone.
The thorn blade was still in her side. She was bleeding, red spilling between her fingers as she felt around her own chest.
I will not die.Her own voice, in her own head, was detached. Limbless, lungless, it could not feel the pain coursing through her, and it could not tremble. It was calm and it made her calmer in turn, even though the blood kept pouring, hot between her fingers.I have won my throne. I will not die.
Not yet.
She knew she should not remove the blade. She knew she had to seek out help. A physician. Medicine. Something to stem the blood loss and keep infection at bay.
