Priya was already there. Sitting on the plinth at the center of the triveni. Around her, the triveni was open to the night—the stars shining on her through the open disc above the plinth, the lights of the city shining up from the velvet dark below.
“Tell me how it went,” Bhumika said, by way of greeting.
“Oh, it was fine.”
Bhumika pursed her lips. Something had gone wrong, then, but she’d have no answers from Priya now. Not without an argument she wasn’t in the mood to have.
“Why don’t you walk with me?” Bhumika asked instead.
Priya slid from the plinth and joined her.
Priya was so often gone, patrolling to deal with imperial soldiers or gather their bodies, traveling across Ahiranya with one of the mask-keepers or with Sima or one of Jeevan’s men, managing rot in the fields and orchards, or stopping the rot’s progress in sickened mortal bodies. But she and Bhumika were never truly apart.
They met in the sangam. Beneath skeins of stars, on strange rivers, they spoke to each other. Shared truths and tales. They were temple elders, and flesh could no longer limit them.
But every time Bhumika saw Priya in person, she was struck by howwornPriya looked: her skin unevenly sun-darkened, her body in restless motion, her eyes tired but always searching, always rising to track the movement of birds on the horizon or swaying leaves on distant trees.
Like Bhumika, Priya could feel the pulse and lifeblood of Ahiranya: every vein of green, every blade of grass, every insect burrowing under the soil. Unlike Bhumika, she seemed to lack any ability—or desire—to ignore it.
Even now, with Bhumika maintaining a slow and even pace as they circled the triveni, Priya was restless—moving to the edge and back again, seeking magic in the stone around her. The Hirana responded to her eagerly.
“Maybe I should ask Billu for some of his hashish,” Priya said, carving grooves into the triveni with her heels. The stone shuddered under the press of her foot, pulsing in time with each swift, thoughtful blink of her eyelids. “Maybe it would make me feel calmer.”
“You could just grow your own,” Bhumika pointed out dryly.
Priya wrinkled her nose.
“Too much effort.”
Bhumika rolled her eyes. “It would be no effort and you know it. I don’t know why you insist on saying things you don’t mean.”
“Next time let me bring some wine with me and I’ll keep quiet.”
“I can smell the wine on you already,” Bhumika said dryly. “Besides, you need to be able to concentrate, Pri.”
“Oh, you know me,” Priya said. She smiled, a kind of reflexive twitch of her lips, as she looked at the edges of Ahiranya in the distance. “I never let my focus falter.”
“I met with Lord Chetan today,” Bhumika said instead of lecturing, and told Priya everything.
“I can’t believe you of all people told a highborn that we need to be self-reliant,” Priya said with a grin. “I don’t care for politics, particularly…”
“As I’m well aware,” Bhumika said.
“… but you’ve always been very, very clear that Ahiranya can’t survive alone. And now you’ve changed your mind?”
“My mind hasn’t changed.” Bhumika looked over the lip of the triveni—off, off at the horizon as Priya had done. “I would never have chosen this path. But since we’re here, we must make the best of it. And for all the empress’s promises—and generosity—we cannot rely on Parijatdvipa to trade with us when Parijatdvipa is ripping itself apart.”
There was a certain expression Priya wore sometimes. It came over her most often in the dark of an evening, or in the lulls in conversation about the Parijatdvipan empire: its politics, its city-states, its ugly and grinding war. She wore it now.
“Priya,” Bhumika murmured.
Priya blinked. The look flitted away, swift as a bird in flight.
“We have to discuss the mask-keepers,” said Bhumika.
“Ganam spoke to me about it again.”
It.The deathless waters. The power waiting for them there, if they were willing to risk death.
