A familiar face stared back at her.
For a moment his mouth moved, soundless. As if he was trying to understand the shape, the shift of his own facial muscles. His face. The wholeness of it: the shape of his jaw, the cut of his hair. He looked as he had on the day he had entered the deathless waters. Entered and not come back.
“Ashok,” she said. Her voice sounded distant, even as she felt her own mouth move. Her own heart hammering, faint with a nausea that threatened to swallow her.
“Bhumika,” he said. He too sounded dazed. “I’ve found my way home.”
The tension in her skull fell away.
“You died.” Bhumika’s voice wavered. Her whole body threatened to waver. “Priya and I. And your rebels. We waited for you. By the deathless waters. We waited.” She’d stood by the water for a full night. Leaving Padma in Khalida’s care. Watching the gleaming, shining blue of it and hoping, hoping even as some terrible part of her had been glad she would not have to fight him in the days and months and years of Ahiranyi rule to come. “You were gone.”
“Priya isn’t here,” he said in reply. She wasn’t sure if he intended it to be a question or a statement.
“No,” Bhumika said. Lips numb. She wondered if she would swoon like some kind of soft maiden—if he had brought her to this. “You. We waited. By the waters. Youdied.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t die.” He didn’t try to move closer to her. His face was strangely blank. His hands were flexing at his sides. Opening, closing. Fingers moving. “I… I do not think I died.”
You did, she thought, with absolute certainty. It was not the new strangeness writhing inside her that told her. It was her own familiar gut instinct. It was the way his skin had not changed from sunlight or the lack of it. It was the leaves that surrounded him and clouded the air.
It was the absence of him in the sangam. She was breathing unsteadily, her body unable to resist the brunt of the shock roiling through it. Only Padma’s weight against her skin kept her steady.
He was far too uncannily himself, a picture painted a shade too perfectly.
“I didn’t come alone,” he said.
Behind him, she saw pilgrims fall to their knees. Murmurs of prayers, and cries. An ecstasy of weeping.
“It was inevitable,” said Ashok. “Like we were inevitable. Like—the tide.”
When you have lost people, they haunt you in ways large and small. Bhumika had always known this. She dreamt often of her brother, her uncle, even of her husband—strange dreams that verged on nightmares, that woke her with salt in her eyes.
She did not dream of the temple council often. But she had not forgotten their faces.
She recognized them the moment she saw them. Four figures, standing behind Ashok.
Elder Chandni, with her familiar, gentle eyes. Elder Sendhil, his face carved in forbidding lines. And there, next to them—oh.No.
Two of her siblings. Sanjana, with bright eyes and laughter on her lips.
Nandi, small and wide-eyed. Still a child, and forever a child.
They walked toward her. As they walked, green things rose from the earth: buds, soft ferns, life forcing its way out of the ground. Flowers blooming like a mantle from their shoulders and hair. Arms flecked with swirls of wood.
Bhumika could only kneel. It was not awe that took her to her knees, but a lesson carefully written into her when she was so young that it had become a part of her blood, her bones, and could not be later undone.
You show the yaksa veneration, her elders had taught her. Even an image, even an echo of them—
“Bhumika,” said the yaksa with Chandni’s face, smiling. Speaking in her dead elder’s voice. “Our temple daughter. We have finally come home.”
PRIYA
At first, Yogesh had struck Priya as a nervous man. But it didn’t take her long to realize he was simply nervous ofher. As they rode their horses along the winding dirt tracks and roads that led to Saketa, she saw him touching the prayer stones he wore around his neck. Each stone grasped, one by one, between his fingers as he mouthed the names of the mothers of flame to himself. As if that had the strength to ward away Priya’s monstrousness.
She would have been irritated by it, normally. But she was too worried to think long on Yogesh.
“I can’t reach Bhumika,” she confided to Sima on the first evening.
“What do you mean?”
