The rot spread. That was its nature.
“I’ll see to her after, then,” Priya replied, and the leader murmured his thanks, his gratitude for her benevolence. The words prickled over her skin in a hot itch of embarrassment. But she nodded regardless, and smiled, and said, “If you could step back…”
“Of course, of course,” the leader said hastily, and as one the villagers stepped back and out of harm’s way.
Ganam and Priya stepped forward, out on the marshy ground.
“It’s a big tract of land,” muttered Ganam. “And a lot of water.”
As they walked, Priya stared down. The algae on the water’s surface moved: a visceral pulse that spoke of lungs breathing and muscles contracting. The stench of it was unpleasant, metallic. It was drawing in flies.
“It is,” she agreed.
“Have you ever…?”
“Nothing so large as this.” She’d put right the odd tree. A small copse, once, at great cost. No more.
A pause. Then Ganam said, “Are you sure about this?”
A deep breath. “Well, I have to try somewhere,” she told him. “And you’re here.”
“What should I do?”
“Just watch for now,” Priya said, because in truth she wasn’t sure if there was anything hecoulddo. She’d succeed or fail on her own.
She took another steadying lungful of air and kneeled down. The mud immediately seeped through her sari. Maybe that would convince Bhumika that high-status clothing did Priya no good. A nice brown tunic and dhoti, like the guards wore, would be more suitable—easier to clean, too.
Focus.
She closed her eyes. Breathed. Deep, winding breaths. Mouth closed tight, she felt the hum of her own inhalations against her teeth, a subtle reverberation. Put some voice in it, and it would feel like a song.
The rot hummed with her—every deep, fleshy strand of it, knotted into the soil and the water, the green and the blue. It moved with her magic.
As it should. She was a temple elder, after all. Elder Priya, thrice-born. She had traveled three times through the holy deathless waters and survived. She had the gifts of the ancient yaksa in her. And whenever she closed her eyes—closed them as they were closed now—she felt the whole of Ahiranya like a winged insect, beating its body against the cupped palm of her hand. This field—rot or no rot—was no less hers.
She stretched out her magic. Breathed. Breathed. Just so.
Reached for the rot.
This was no different from fixing the rot in a mortal body. No different, she reminded herself, as the skeins of the sickness tangled and lashed and writhed around her. She could do this.
She sank deeper.
Distantly, she could hear voices. Ganam’s hand on her shoulder, five points of warmth, beams of light around the sun of a palm. Was he trying to call her back? Was the urgency in his voice?
Priya.
The roots of the rot wound around her. They had hollowed themselves a place in the earth, just as they hollowed a place inside the bodies of rot-riven mortals. She could not erase the rot in this field without murdering it entirely. But she had stopped its growth in human skin. She could stop it here.
She reached deeper.
Priya. Priya! Oh spirit’s sake, fuck—
Sapling. My sapling.
A hand on her jaw. Tight grip. Wood-grain-whorled fingertips. Nails of thorn.
Priya.
