Chapter 34: Priya

PRIYA

Priya tugged at the heavy bucket of water, swearing as it tilted precariously, a wave spilling out over the hem of her ghagra choli. “Nandi! Help me!”

“I can’t help,” Nandi said, sounding affronted. He was sitting in the center of the room with his hands clapped pointedly over his eyes. He had been sitting that way, wailing, for a good ten minutes. He’d had a run-in earlier with the handiwork of some of the elder temple children, who’d been growing deep bursts of spores on the walls. Nandi had touched where he shouldn’t have, and a burst of yellow pollen had hit him square in the face.

Usually, Priya would have dragged him directly to one of the elders for a scolding and to have his eyes washed clean and a tincture applied to stop infection, but the elders had expressly forbidden Priya’s group of children—the youngest and smallest—from leaving their rooms this evening. One of the twice-born had lost control of a seething knot of vines, which had cracked stone and burrowed their way under the surface of the temple, causing a fair amount of destruction. They’d already shattered the steps up the Hirana, stopping any pilgrims from making the journey.

The Hirana was always dangerous and changeable. Sometimes the path the pilgrims took vanished overnight. Sometimes strange wildflowers grew even upon the triveni, in violet and black and vibrant pink, and had to be plucked away with murmured prayers and reverence by the elders. But the Hirana was not vicious in its shifting moods, in the way mortals could be. Or so Elder Bojal said. Elder Bojal complained vociferously, to any other elder who would listen, that the “cursed” children had ruined the Hirana, totally and utterly. He’d only shut up when Elder Sendhil had cornered him and asked, in a low voice, if he wanted to confront the children directly himself.

Elder Bojal hadn’t been able to answer that.

Elder Chandni hadn’t commented on the changes to the Hirana. Not even the new cracks that opened to darkness, which had caught some of the general’s own men in their maws. No one had died—the elders had intervened—but one man had broken his leg at an awful angle, and that had made thrice-born Sanjana and Riti—who were elders now, although none of the other elders called them such—laugh and laugh, as if blood and bones were a terribly funny business. But when Priya had asked Elder Chandni about it, she’d only shaken her head and told Priya to be careful.

“You’re not quite like they are,” she said. “Be glad of that.”

Priya had thought that was an odd statement. Priya was exactly like the rest of them, even if she was only once-born. She had passed through the deathless waters during the festival of the dark of the moon, along with all the others: the youngest children trying to become once-born; the once-born ready to be twice-born; the twice-born seeking to rise to elderhood. She’d risen from the waters, gasping, when three of her age-mates had not. She’d sat in the sickroom, waiting to see if the waters would take her belatedly, with fever and wasting, as they sometimes did.

And like all the children who’d survived that journey, that unnatural and ill-starred journey, she’d grown… strange. The twice-born had suddenly been able to coax small blooms, burst pollen through buds. The thrice-born had sheared stone with leaf and thorn alone. And Priya and Nandi had stumbled through dreams of waters meeting, walking the sangam of ancient tales.

No elder has walked there in centuries, Elder Kana had whispered. And of the rest, as the keeper of old lore she’d said: No elder has had such power since the Age of Flowers.

Mythically gifted they might be, but Priya and Nandi were still children, and Nandi was still a crybaby. Priya thumped the water down, struggling not to snap at him again.

“Lean back your head and open your eyes,” she said.

“Don’t yell at me!”

“I’m not!” Priya. “And if you don’t want me to shout, stop being so, so…”

Nandi sniffled.

Relenting, Priya went over to him and tugged him gently forward. When he was near the bucket, she pried his hands away from his eyes and washed the pollen away as he blinked rapidly.

“Does it feel better?” she asked.

“I—I think so.”

“Good.”

“Are you two getting ready?”

Priya and Nandi turned as one to see thrice-born Sanjana leaning against the door. She wore a deep yellow sari, her hair loose over her shoulders, the maang tikka on her forehead ruby red, like a heavy drop of blood. A trail of moss had grown beneath her bare feet, but withered as she took a step forward.

“You’re taking absolutely ages, and I’m bored,” said Sanjana. “Riti’s grumpy today, and Ashok’s got some awful stomach ailment, he’s refusing to eat a single thing, and there’s so much lovely food laid out. Why are you dawdling?”

“Nandi got pollen in his eyes,” said Priya.

“Ah,” said Sanjana. “And—is that why your clothes are wet, Priya?”

Priya scowled in response, and Sanjana chuckled.

“Why did you hurt those men?” Priya asked suddenly, thinking of the man whose leg was broken. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked. Maybe Sanjana would box her around the ears for asking. But Sanjana’s expression was easy, her brow soft, and Priya didn’t think so.

“Who?”

“The Parijati soldiers.”

“Did it scare you, little dove?”

“I’m not easily scared,” Priya said. They both knew that wasn’t exactly a no.

Sanjana’s answering smile was crooked. “Because the Parijati should be afraid of us,” she said. “But you don’t need to be afraid of me. We’re family.”

Sanjana had hit Priya more than once, and stolen her dinner, and laughed uproariously when Priya fell during training or fell asleep at meditation. But Priya also knew she meant what she’d said. Cruelty was part of their training, callousing the heart the way a knife calloused the hands. Weakness had to be burned away. Sanjana had always tried to make Priya strong, so that Priya would survive two more journeys through the waters. So that Priya would live.

“They’re going to name Riti and me elders tonight,” said Sanjana. “So I want you to look nice.”

“I do look nice.”

Sanjana kneeled down. She touched her fingers to Priya’s hem. “Here,” she said. “Let’s make you a little prettier. Only a little, mind. I’m not a yaksa proper, I can’t do such great magic.”

“Ha-ha,” Priya said flatly. But then she fell silent as Sanjana lightly brushed her fingers back and forth across her skirt, and the distant sound of rustling grass filled the air.

A faint tracery of real leaves, their veins fine as spun gold, lined the damp hem of Priya’s dress.

“There,” said Sanjana. “Doesn’t that look lovely?”

She let the hem drop. It made a crinkling whisper as it brushed against Priya’s ankles, as if the leaves still lived. “You look very smart too, Nandi,” Sanjana added.

“Thank you.” Nandi’s voice was small. He was still hunched next to the bucket.

Sanjana laughed—not quite cruel and not quite kind—and swept out of the room.

To make his tears up to Priya, Nandi combed her hair, applying a little oil to it so that it would be shiny and supple and smell sweet. She dabbed a little on his head in return, and checked his eyes once more. They no longer looked swollen, and Nandi wasn’t sniveling, so Priya dragged him from the room toward the feast. She could smell something roasting and wondered if the servants had made her favorite festive platter, of rice dyed green and yellow and studded with almonds, pistachios, and fat raisins, heaped with dumplings, and a broth both sweet and intensely spiced.

“Wait, Priya. We should put the bucket back,” Nandi said to her urgently. “If Elder Chandni sees it, she’ll know we didn’t do as we were told. Stay in the room and go straight to the feast, she said, and she’ll know we didn’t.”

“She’ll only shout at us,” Priya said with a shrug.

“Or she’ll make us leave the feast early. Or tell us we can’t have any of it.”

It was the kind of punishment an elder would choose. Thinking longingly of that colored rice, Priya sighed. “Fine, let’s go put it back. But quickly, or we’ll be really late.”

It was easier work, carrying the bucket between the two of them, though Nandi whined at Priya for bringing such an overfull bucket, and Priya snapped back in return that she’d just filled it and brought it without thinking, and it was Nandi’s fault for hurting his eyes in the first place…

They heard voices. Stopped.

“The elders,” hissed Nandi, and without bothering to respond, Priya hauled the bucket into a side cloister room and dragged Nandi in after her.

Footsteps drew in closer.

“We should wait until Bhumika returns.” That was Elder Bojal’s voice.

“You think she’ll come back? Truly? The minute she passed through the waters the girl ran straight back to her family’s bosom like a coward,” Elder Saroj replied.

“Her family keep the faith. They’ll bring her back.”

A snort. “Keep the faith? Barely. The Sonalis know the direction of the wind. They’ll never return her, you mark my words, they’ll throw her into a suitable alliance and forget she ever served.”

“Still…”

“They’ve grown so much stronger.” The new voice was an urgent whisper. Elder Sendhil. “Every minute. Every hour. You can’t waver in this now. Soon we will not be enough to manage. The emperor will send armies. Ahiranya will bear the consequences.”

Nandi opened his mouth. Priya clapped a hand over it before he could let out a noise. “Make a sound,” she whispered, “and I’ll pinch your nose shut too.”

He went silent.

“They’re strong in the way we’ve taught them to be strong. Perhaps this is needful.”

“What Emperor Sikander demands is unconscionable. Inhuman.”

“That is why we go with them,” Elder Saroj said calmly. “They are our family. We go together.”

“But surely we must discuss—”

“No.” Elder Chandni’s voice. It was sad but unwavering. “No, I think not. And we’ve discussed this enough. We agreed.”

A silence. Then, Saroj spoke, her voice heavy: “It will be the end of us.”

“A necessary end, I think,” Chandni said softly. Priya bit down on her lip at that. “In this, the general isn’t wrong.”

There was a murmur that Priya could not catch, and then footsteps once more.

Elder Bojal. Elder Sendhil. Elder Saroj. Elder Chandni. All of them, conferring over strength and strangeness. Over the temple children.

Priya had never been commended for her intelligence, but she knew enough to feel a bristle of fear. She met Nandi’s eyes. Uncovered his mouth.

“What do you think they meant?” Nandi whispered.

Priya swallowed. “I don’t know.”

The feast was in full swing in the northern chamber, cushions arrayed in a circle, platters set on the ground including—as Priya had hoped—the dyed rice and dumplings. Once they arrived, Elder Chandni shut the doors behind them. They were the last children in attendance.

There were cloths draped across the walls, in a vibrant array of colors. Priya brushed near one. It smelled sweet, resinous, like ghee or sugarcane, and was faintly… wet.

Elder Chandni touched a hand to Priya’s forehead. Then she leaned down and kissed her cheek.

“The left door,” Chandni murmured.

The elder’s fingers felt cold and trembled a little.

She said nothing else to Priya, and that—ah.

“Stay here,” Priya hissed at Nandi, and he sat down without complaint.

Sanjana and Ashok were seated next to one another, and when Priya sidled up next to them, Sanjana said, “Finally. What are you going to have? Not wine, I hope, though it would be funny to watch you be sick, I suppose.”

“I need to tell you something,” Priya said in a quiet voice. She must have sounded upset, because they both looked at her—Ashok clutching a tepid glass of water and looking faintly ill—and listened intently. As Priya continued, Sanjana’s face went pinched with fear or fury, Priya couldn’t tell. Sanjana took her by the wrist and said, “We’ll talk to them. Now.”

She stood up and… stumbled. Raised a hand to her head, fingertips to her temple, and swallowed.

Fell.

Priya would never be able to remember what followed with any clarity. She remembered only shouting, and her siblings trying to use their water-given gifts. They managed, somewhat. The ground splintered. The stone churned, moved by vine and root, by their magic-flecked fury. But there was something wrong with all of them, and little by little they all slumped, sickened.

“The food,” Ashok murmured suddenly, his face twisting as he looked around them. He stood rapidly and took Priya’s arm. “We’re going.”

He dragged her forward, between fallen bodies.

She heard a noise—a puncturing noise, and a cry—and Ashok dragged her forward farther, farther, aiming for the left door as she’d told him to. She turned her head back. Nandi, she needed to get Nandi—

“Come on, Priya,” Ashok said sharply. “Come on. Ah.”

There were soldiers, Parijati soldiers, blocking the doors. It made Priya’s stomach jolt to see them here, these outsiders in a place reserved for Ahiranyi pilgrims and servants and her own temple family.

Ashok shoved Priya behind him.

He had always been a good fighter. They all were. But the other temple children were drugged and barely conscious, unable to fight as they normally would have. Ashok wasn’t similarly stricken. He raised a hand before him, and vines shot through the walls and floor. One soldier made a noise of horror—there was a clang of falling steel.

Ashok took the soldier’s weapon and made a slash, his arm jerking.

Priya felt something wet and hot against her face and forced herself not to squeeze her eyes shut. Instead she grabbed a little carving knife from the table, from beside where one of her siblings had fallen unconscious, their forehead pressed to an upturned plate of food, and clutched it in a sweat-slippery hand.

She and Ashok rushed forward, and there was no grace to it: just an ugly press of bodies and blood, and Ashok dragging her, and Ashok slamming the door with his hands, and Priya turning back, meeting Nandi’s eyes across the room, his head at an awful angle, nothing living in the wrongness of it.

The last thing she saw before Ashok grabbed her in his arms was Elder Saroj touching a lantern flame to one of the hanging cloths. The room began to burn. Saroj dragged the cloth from the wall, and Priya saw it fall on one of her siblings.

“Don’t look.” Ashok dragged her out.

He attacked the soldiers brutally, economically, slicing through one artery, breaking another neck, losing his knife in an eye socket. He lowered Priya so he could fight, but when a dagger hit the ground at her feet, he swept her up into his arms and ran.

“Priya,” he bit out, against her hair, his voice breaking through the pounding clamor of her own blood. “Priya, where is the way to the deathless waters?”

“I don’t know!”

“You do. You do. Don’t fail us now.”

Like all other parts of the Hirana, the entrance to the deathless waters moved. Sometimes the Elders made a ritual of seeking it out. But Priya had never struggled to find it. She was not the best fighter—not the cleverest or strongest—but even with her eyes closed she could find the way unerringly.

It had astonished Elder Chandni when she’d realized. The elders had all tested her. Blindfolded her. Spun her about until she was dizzy with it. Asked her at night, at dawn, in the heart of the day. She always knew the path.

No one could explain her gift. She’d heard the elders discuss it once, in Chandni’s room, when she’d been curled up asleep on the floor beside Chandni’s pallet.

“It’s a strange affinity,” Saroj had murmured. “Oh, the longer we’re here, the more we feel connected to the Hirana, to be sure. But the girl is… different.”

Chandni’s fingers had carded gently through her hair.

“Not many children are born on the Hirana,” she’d said. “It’s no surprise that she shares a special bond with the temple.”

“Children shouldn’t be born here,” Sendhil had said, and there had been something in his tone that had made Elder Chandni still.

“As you say,” Chandni had murmured, drawing the covers over Priya.

She hadn’t mentioned it again. And it didn’t matter anymore. Priya squeezed her eyes tight shut. Raised a trembling hand from Ashok’s shoulder, and pointed the way. He swore an oath—of fear or thanks, she didn’t know—and followed her guidance.

The entrance was set into the floor of an unlit corridor. Ashok skidded to a stop. Still holding her, he jumped into the darkness, stumbling a little down the first step, then the second. Priya opened her eyes then, and watched as he used his twice-born gifts and touched his fingers to the aperture above them.

The way closed, and they were in darkness.

They made their way down. Down to the heart of the Hirana, the yolk in the egg.

They reached ground. Even through the closed lids of her eyes, she could see and feel the press of the luminous water. The tug of it, more stars than river.

“Don’t look, Priya,” he whispered. So she didn’t. She pressed her head against his shoulder, hard enough that she could feel the firm pressure of cloth against her eyes, sticky with her own tears and his sweat. She could smell smoke, still. “Don’t look. Just show me the way.”

“The way where?”

“Out of here,” he said. His voice trembled, faintly. He smelled of copper. “You know the Hirana better than anyone. And it knows you.”

The distant drip of water. Luminous blue light, all around them, seeping under her eyelids. He wasn’t wrong. Sometimes the Hirana felt like another limb to her. He carried her near the water’s edge, seeking a way through. She pointed the way. Tunnels. There were tunnels after.

“I can’t touch the water,” she gasped, “I can’t, I can’t. What if I die?”

“Hush,” he whispered. “Hush. I won’t drop you.”

He tucked her face beneath his chin. He was holding her up, even though his arms trembled, even though he was sweating and she could hear him crying.

“We’re going to be fine,” he said, muffled and shaky. “Just fine.”

They opened the way together, in the end. Reshaped the stone and emerged free and alone, on the green surrounding the Hirana.

Above them the pyre still burned.

“Don’t look,” Ashok repeated. And though he should have been too weak to pick her up again, she heard him inhale and do it anyway. She wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, and didn’t try to be strong. And for once he did not ask her to be.

It took two days for the leaves on Priya’s skirt to die.

Years. Years she and Ashok had spent on the streets, hungry and mosquito-bitten, stealing food and begging for it when there was none to steal. He’d beaten other men a few times, taking their coin. He’d made allies out of bad men, and men like Gautam, who could be bound by fear and favors and debts unpaid. But as he’d grown sicker, his gifts had seemed to fade too. And Priya’s gifts had always been small. They’d grown smaller, beyond the Hirana, along with her grasp on her own memories.

Chandni had seen something in her. But that had been in another life.

Now, Priya stood on the plinth, the rain in her eyes, and heaved such deep, sobbing breaths that her lungs ached with them.

She’d found the way through. That night. She was the one who’d saved Ashok, and he had saved her.

He saved me. I saved him.

She realized she was crying. She dashed her eyes with the backs of her hands, furious with herself for weeping like a little girl. No matter how old she grew, family it seemed still had the power to hurt her.

They had saved each other. He’d left her for Bhumika to raise, because he’d loved her. He’d hurt her because he loved her.

Love. As if love excused anything. As if the knowledge that he was cruel and vicious and willing to harm her made her heart ache any less.

She stepped down from the plinth. The cloth of her sari blouse clung to her skin. Her hair was dripping. Her footprints, as she crossed the triveni and walked out into a corridor leading to the kitchens, were damp, the stone beneath them shimmering with movement, as if it walked with her.

There was no void in her any longer. Whatever she was—weapon, monster, cursed or gifted—she was whole. Beneath her the Hirana was warm. An extension of her.

She’d known the way all along.

The Hirana led her to a cloister room—a small, unassuming cloister room—that had once been tended to carefully. Even in those days long gone, it had been plain, bare but for the pattern of waves etched into the walls and floor.

The lines flowed around Priya’s feet as she walked.

The way to the deathless waters was not fixed. It appeared where it chose to. As a little girl, Priya had sprawled more than once over the opening, her head tipped over the edge in room after room, listening to the howl of the cavern beneath, the hollowness inside its stone shell. It had sounded mournful. Like sea. Like song.

The floor had no opening now. But Priya kneeled down. She set her hands to the stone.

She should not have been able to open the way alone, only once-born, with none of the stronger gifts of her fellow children. But the deathless waters wanted to be found. The Hirana had been shaped by temple hands, temple child flesh—living and dead—and it moved and clung and changed around her with the ebb and flow of her own heart. It wanted this for her.

The ground rippled beneath her, great waves of stone drawing back. The earth opened.

Priya stared down into the darkness. Pressed her teeth to her tongue, a light and grounding pain, and sat on the edge. She lowered her feet. Nothing met them, for a moment, and then the earth moved once more, vegetation forming a step beneath the soles.

She straightened. Took another step. Another.

It was a long way down into the dark. At least her memory hadn’t lied about that. By the time she reached the bottom—felt cool loam beneath her feet, and the chill of deep darkness around her—she was parched, all the magic in her run dry.

But she didn’t need it any longer. The deathless waters lay before her, a long coil like the great sinuous curve of a snake. In the dark beneath the world, it glowed a faint blue. She heard it in the silence: a drumbeat, a whisper, a music in her soul.

Priya looked at the waters. She thought of Bhumika begging her not to follow this path, the look in her eyes saying she’d had no real hope of controlling Priya and never had. She thought of Ashok, twisting his hand in her chest, driven by fury, and how he had held her when she was small and they were alone. She thought of Rukh, whom she’d tried, in her own small way, to hold and protect in turn, living her childhood all over again.

Priya was not here for them, or despite them. Their voices remained with her, but underneath it all was one simple truth: Priya had wanted to find the deathless waters not for Ashok or her dead temple siblings, but for herself. She had always hungered for it. And now she was here.

She didn’t allow herself to think anymore. She took a step forward, and another, and immersed herself.

A rush of water. The grip of pressure around her skull, a band like clutching bones around her lungs, luminous blue meeting the snap of her opening eyes and—

Silence.