Sapling.
She rose to the surface of herself with the reflexive panic of a body on the verge of drowning. She lashed out: felt the soil churn and crack around her, sundered open. She heard a muffled shriek, and the thud of a dozen footsteps as the villagers watching from the edge of the field flinched back, caught between freezing and fleeing.
“Priya.” She recognized Ganam’s voice. Hoarse. Careful. “Are you back with us?”
Her eyes opened. Her vision cleared, like smeared glass rubbed clean. There was a blunt, winding rope, a noose of root, tangled around Ganam’s throat. It was… fairly tight.
Priya swallowed. Forced the noose to release. It slithered to the ground, back into the soil. The wet earth closed over it.
“Yes,” she said, voice thin and hoarse. “I am now.”
After a short rest and a cup of something sweet to soothe away the new tremor in Priya’s fingers—tea, this time—Priya attended to the village girl with the flowering arm. She placed her fingertips against the girl’s skin and broke the power of the rot in her. She told the girl and her family that the rot would spread no further.
“She’ll live, then?” the mother asked, voice small and tight with hope.
“She will,” Priya confirmed gently, and the woman broke down into tears.
Untouched by a thrice-born’s hands, the rot was a death sentence. The girl would always carry this small mark of magic on her—would always need to conceal it with long blouses, and pluck away the petals with her fingers, so only the buds riddled her skin’s smoothness—but she would not die. That, at least, was something Priya could do.
There was nothing to be done for the field. Ganam used his own small once-born magic to help her build a barrier of trees around it, enclosing it from the surrounding fields and the village itself. Deep-rooted trees that ate moisture were best, so Priya poured her strength into forcing banyan after banyan from the soil. When it was done, she sat down on the exposed roots of one tree and chugged a carafe of water, exhausted, while Ganam explained to the village leaders that they would return if the rot escaped its carapace; that they could not fix it. That they were sorry, but even the temple elders of Ahiranya, newly empowered and ensconced, could only do so much.
“Thank you,” she said, when he came back.
“I don’t think I was tactful enough,” he muttered.
“You were fine,” Priya said. True or not, what was done was done. She stood. “Come on. Let’s walk back.”
“What about the palanquins?”
“We’ve already failed.” She kept her voice light, dismissive, even as the shame of it curdled into a hard knot of determination in her chest. “We don’t need to pretend to be grand anymore.”
As if sensing her mood, the guards didn’t try to force them back into the palanquins. They all walked together instead, through the forest. Insects whirred in the air, so thick between the trees they formed clouds that undulated like dark gauze. The ground crunched underfoot. Ahead of the others, Priya and Ganam had no stick for beating the path to scare off snakes, as was customary. But there was no need for one: Ganam was applying his once-born magic to the carpet of leaves and twining flowers before them, shaking it in warning.
It was a trick Priya had suggested to all of the once-born as a good method for refining their magic. The once-born—the rebels who’d fought and killed, brutally, for the independence of Ahiranya—had seized on the exercise as a way to hone their control.
Ganam was one of the best. He moved the vegetation before them in elegant waves, a ripple that grew and spread like the aftershocks of a stone meeting still water. So it was no surprise to Priya when he opened his mouth and said, “If you had help, maybe you’d be able to do it. Maybe it’d be easier.”
Priya was damnably tired. The mud on her knees had dried, crusted over into twin crescents of soil. She didn’t want to have this conversation again.
“Bhumika doesn’t have time to help with things like this,” she said.
The once-born had magic. But it was nothing like the depth of power that lay in Bhumika and Priya. Only the thrice-born could stop the rot in its tracks. Only they could do what Priya had tried—hadhoped—to do.
Only they had a hope of curing the rot.
“You and she don’t have to be the only thrice-born,” he said.
“I know,” Priya said. “I really do know. But we don’t want—neither of us…” She stopped. “It’s dangerous.”
She wouldn’t have dragged him along on these journeys if she didn’t think that one day he’d pass through the waters. But her words came out of her clumsy.
“No man or woman who fought at Ashok’s side is unaware of that,” he said. He didn’t sound angry, but they’d had this argument often enough that she didn’t need to look at him to know that a spark of mingled grief and fury had lit in his eyes. She felt the same thing—always—at the mention of her dead brother’s name. “But we’re not afraid to die for the sake of Ahiranya.”
“Maybe right now Ahiranya needs you to live for it,” Priya said as gently as she could. “We can’t afford to lose anyone.”
Ganam said nothing. After a moment, Priya shook her head.
“I don’t want to argue,” she said. “Let’s just get back.”
