Chapter 6 Priya
PRIYA
I wish they wouldn’t bow to me, Priya thought. Even in her own head, she sounded embarrassed.
The waiting crowd of villagers, huddled together at the edge of the forest and already bending forward into genuflections of respect, was large.
Priya tried to keep her face impassive. She straightened her shoulders and held up her chin, trying to look proud, ready.
But it was difficult, perched as she was in an unveiled palanquin, her legs crossed beneath her, her back straight, as if she were some noble lady instead of—well. Herself.
She hated the palanquin. Alighting from it always felt like an embarrassing affair.
There were always eyes on her, and cheers.
Sometimes fresh petals were scattered on the path before her.
Today, there was an older woman with a basin at the ready, who offered to bathe Priya’s feet as a gesture of respect.
Priya rejected the offer with as much as grace as she could muster, which wasn’t much.
Spirits, she hated politics. Hated smiling sweetly, and pretending she wasn’t sweating through her fine, pale sari.
She adjusted one of the wood and gold enameled cuffs on her upper arms, resisting the urge to fidget with the seam of her blouse.
It was getting tight. She’d developed new muscle in the last months, ever since she’d started training in earnest alongside her sister’s guards.
She’d have to let the seam out, or get one of the maids to unpick and resew it for her.
Ganam’s ungainly jump down from his own palanquin blessedly distracted the crowd’s attention from Priya.
He straightened up awkwardly, offering the villagers a stilted greeting.
This was his first time accompanying her, and as soon as he’d found out about the palanquins, he’d desperately tried to avoid riding in one.
“You want those poor men to carry a big ox like me?” he’d asked, when it had been brought to him at the mahal’s entrance. He’d gestured at the guards waiting by the palanquin—all of them smaller than him by far. “Why torture them when I can walk?”
“Because we have to present a certain image,” Priya had said. “We need to look grand.”
Ganam’s expression had been skeptical.
“I think,” he’d said slowly, “that packing my body into that little palanquin won’t make me look grand. People will laugh.”
“They wouldn’t dare,” Priya said. And then, with a sidelong glance at some of the watching guards, she’d raised her voice and said, “But if you refuse the palanquin, I suppose we can both walk—”
“Absolutely not.” The voice had come from one of the latticed windows above them. Through the bands of wood, Priya had seen her sister’s face, narrow-eyed, staring down at them. “Priya, you’re taking the palanquin.” A pause. “Both of you.”
Ganam had grimaced, even as Priya had smiled in return, all teeth.
Sometimes—often—she forgot that she wasn’t meant to like him.
“Well, Elder Bhumika has spoken,” Priya had said cheerfully. “Cheer up, Ganam. Maybe if you keep on accompanying me, someone will build you a bigger palanquin.”
Now, Ganam moved to stand beside her. He let her lead, allowing her to greet the chiefs of the village and accept the sparse garlands they offered, and the cups of sweetened milk, covered in a thin filigree of saffron.
He let Priya nod and smile and pretend at grandness.
And when she said, “Will you show us to the fields?”—Ganam heaved a small sigh of relief and followed behind her.
Niceties were excruciating. But work—and the rot—they both understood.
The field they were led to was half marsh, and laden with deep, green water rippling with algal plant life, insect larvae, and small, strange, darting fish, glimmers of onyx and silver in the dark.
The croak of frogs sounded in the air. The water smelled stagnant: both bloody and sweet as sugar, a honeyed and unnatural scent.
One of the village elders told them, with some anxiety, that the field had long served them well.
Their village sat not far from it, the houses perched on stilts to keep them clear from the regular floods.
There were families that had cared for this land and its waters for generations.
The insect larvae were a delicacy, and exquisite when fried in oil and dipped in sweet tamarind.
In other circumstances, the elders would have offered the finest of them to Priya and Ganam, as respected guests.
But of course, nothing from the marsh could be eaten right now.
Nothing could safely be touched, for that matter.
One of the village girls who regularly set her nets in the water had returned home with a rash on her arm.
Overnight, it had burst into small white flowers.
The rot was in the marsh: in the plants, in the green algae on the water.
That was why Priya had come, of course. To put it right.
Well. To try to put it right.
“Has anyone else become infected?” Priya asked one of the village leaders. He shook his head.
“No, elder,” he said—and Priya, mindful as ever of her grandness, bit down on her tongue to avoid laughing at the absurdity of a man at least thirty years her senior calling her elder. “We’ve been careful. We have other fields.”
The for now went unsaid.
The rot spread. That was its nature.
“I’ll see to her after, then,” Priya replied, and the leader murmured his thanks, his gratitude for her benevolence. The words prickled over her skin in a hot itch of embarrassment. But she nodded regardless, and smiled, and said, “If you could step back…”
“Of course, of course,” the leader said hastily, and as one the villagers stepped back and out of harm’s way.
Ganam and Priya stepped forward, out on the marshy ground.
“It’s a big tract of land,” muttered Ganam. “And a lot of water.”
As they walked, Priya stared down. The algae on the water’s surface moved: a visceral pulse that spoke of lungs breathing and muscles contracting. The stench of it was unpleasant, metallic. It was drawing in flies.
“It is,” she agreed.
“Have you ever…?”
“Nothing so large as this.” She’d put right the odd tree. A small copse, once, at great cost. No more.
A pause. Then Ganam said, “Are you sure about this?”
A deep breath. “Well, I have to try somewhere,” she told him. “And you’re here.”
“What should I do?”
“Just watch for now,” Priya said, because in truth she wasn’t sure if there was anything he could do. She’d succeed or fail on her own.
She took another steadying lungful of air and kneeled down. The mud immediately seeped through her sari. Maybe that would convince Bhumika that high-status clothing did Priya no good. A nice brown tunic and dhoti, like the guards wore, would be more suitable—easier to clean, too.
Focus.
She closed her eyes. Breathed. Deep, winding breaths. Mouth closed tight, she felt the hum of her own inhalations against her teeth, a subtle reverberation. Put some voice in it, and it would feel like a song.
The rot hummed with her—every deep, fleshy strand of it, knotted into the soil and the water, the green and the blue. It moved with her magic.
As it should. She was a temple elder, after all.
Elder Priya, thrice-born. She had traveled three times through the holy deathless waters and survived.
She had the gifts of the ancient yaksa in her.
And whenever she closed her eyes—closed them as they were closed now—she felt the whole of Ahiranya like a winged insect, beating its body against the cupped palm of her hand.
This field—rot or no rot—was no less hers.
She stretched out her magic. Breathed. Breathed. Just so.
Reached for the rot.
This was no different from fixing the rot in a mortal body. No different, she reminded herself, as the skeins of the sickness tangled and lashed and writhed around her. She could do this.
She sank deeper.
Distantly, she could hear voices. Ganam’s hand on her shoulder, five points of warmth, beams of light around the sun of a palm. Was he trying to call her back? Was the urgency in his voice?
Priya.
The roots of the rot wound around her. They had hollowed themselves a place in the earth, just as they hollowed a place inside the bodies of rot-riven mortals.
She could not erase the rot in this field without murdering it entirely.
But she had stopped its growth in human skin. She could stop it here.
She reached deeper.
Priya. Priya! Oh spirit’s sake, fuck—
Sapling. My sapling.
A hand on her jaw. Tight grip. Wood-grain-whorled fingertips. Nails of thorn.
Priya.
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.