PRIYA
As punishments went, it was… almost pleasant, like slipping back into her own skin. She’d done exactly this more times than she could count, in her year as a temple elder: washed her hands clean in salt water, to purify them. Entered a tent lined with cots for the sick. Sat down beside a man with rot whorling his hands and lining his face in scars of sap.
“I don’t want or need the help of an Ahiranyi witch whore,” one of the men snapped. At least this one hadn’t spit on her.
“‘Witch whore’ is a bit of a mouthful,” she said, baring her teeth at him in a grin. “I prefer ‘temple elder’ or ‘Elder Priya.’ You can pick.”
“Your preferences don’t interest me.”
“Fine, fine,” Priya said. Held out her hand. “If my lord would give me his palm, so I can heal him, as I’ve said I would?”
“I don’t trust you,” he said.
“You don’t need to,” Priya said. “You just need to give me your hand.”
“So you can infect me with your dark magic? No, I—”
“Enough,” said another man. He was older, lichen ringing his throat. His voice was forbidding. “You do what the woman tells you now, there’s a boy.”
“But, Romesh—”
“Prince Ashutosh gave his orders,” he said. “We obey.”
With great reluctance, the belligerent man held out his hand.
“Thank you,” Priya said, with obviously false grace, and reached for her gifts.
The men were all quieter, after the first was done. There was nothing particularly awe-inspiring about her work with the rot. She couldn’t erase it; only break it. Only stop it from progressing. But she’d learned, over the last months, that those with the rot always feltsomethingwhen its trajectory was halted. A kind of release. Air moving more easily in their lungs—hope worming its way into the places the rot would have filled, in time.
The man with lichen offered his arm obediently enough, though he refused to look at her.
“I heard you’re a friend of the prince,” said Priya.
“I grew up alongside the prince,” Romesh said gruffly. “We all did. He takes good care of us. Treats us like family.”
She thought of telling him about Sima, and Rukh and Billu—about the mask-keepers. How the hierarchy between them all, once so clear-cut, had become muddled. How they were a family of a kind, too.
But ah, she was no good at winning people over with words. And why would he care, anyway? She didn’t have Bhumika’s clever care with people, or Malini’s silver tongue. She just had her callused hands. Her magic. Her gift with the rot. And that was enough, usually. That was enough to be proud of.
“I would have done this without punishment,” she said, settling on a simpler truth. It seemed important that at least one of these men knew that, even if they had not asked. Even if they ignored her, or willfully forgot, or simply decided that she was a liar. “If someone had asked—I would have done it.”
He drew back his hand. Rolled down his sleeve, a wary look in his eyes.
“There are many rumors about what your people can do,” he said. “A good thing like stopping the rot… I wouldn’t have believed it. Knowing what your kind are, who would?”
Priya opened her mouth to respond.
There was yelling, beyond the tent. The sudden wailing of conches, calling men to war. The man’s eyes widened, startled, and Priya smiled grimly, even as her heart gave a sudden thud in her chest. Whatever was happening beyond the walls of the tent, it couldn’t be good.
“They’ve opened the gates!”
Priya was met with chaos the minute she stepped out of the sick tent. Men were running back and forth, dragging on their armor, yelling orders.
She stood for a moment, feeling the sting of the air on her face, the sharp scent of smoke, coiling through the camp.
“Where are you going?” A Saketan soldier grabbed her by the arm. He wore birds on his sash. One of Ashutosh’s men, then. “There’s no place for you in the battle,” he barked. And Priya gave him an incredulous look, and said, “After I just saved your own people, you think there’s no place—?”
“Stay back,” he ordered again, then grabbed his weapons and stormed off.
