Chapter 16 Bhumika #3
Khalida had prepared the bathing room for her without being asked, which was a relief. And Padma was covered in a layer of mysterious grime, so Bhumika took her into the bathing chamber with her.
She managed to lull Padma into stillness with the careful distraction of a story about a magical deer and oiled Padma’s short curls; softened them to buttery coils as she made the noises of the various animals to keep her daughter entertained, then ran water over Padma’s hair, careful to avoid her eyes.
“Now,” she said, lifting Padma up. “This is what you were looking forward to, isn’t it?”
She held Padma in the basin of water. Padma beamed at her.
Bhumika thought of the way water could consume you and change you and kill you—and how quietly, sweetly healing it was to hold her daughter up in a small basin and watch her splash at it with utter delight. It made Bhumika smile, in turn.
Padma slammed a hand into the water and drenched Bhumika’s lowered face. For half a second, Bhumika could only blink and splutter. And then quite suddenly she was laughing, and Padma was laughing back—her little joyful mirror, always marveling at her own chaos.
It was only once Padma was dry and drowsing on Bhumika’s bed that Bhumika realized her headache had returned.
Bathing, pouring warm water over her limbs, had eased the pain briefly.
Not long enough. She rubbed her fingers against her temples, sighing.
Before she could even consider whether she wanted to try tulsi again—or something rather more effective—Khalida entered.
“My lady,” Khalida said. “You need to dress.” She offered Bhumika a pale salwar kameez, waiting until Bhumika was dressed before continuing. “I’ve arranged your meal. I…” Khalida stopped, mouth still open. She was looking at the window.
Bhumika had a sudden sense of… shifting. As if her headache had tightened like a noose and twisted the world with it. Dizzying, as if she had passed through deep waters and risen to sunlight, but the water had gathered in her lungs. Her ears were ringing.
With some effort, she followed Khalida’s frozen gaze.
The flowers at the window had curled. Moved. The edges of the vines had sharpened, knife-like. The blooms had deepened to a riotous, bloody red.
It took her a moment longer to realize that the conch of warning had been sounded.
She snatched Padma up and strode from her chambers with Khalida at her side. Down, down the corridors. Out into the courtyard, by the watchtower on the walls.
“My la—elder!” The soldier was one of Jeevan’s old recruits, and he stumbled between one form of address and the other. “There are—dozens, maybe hundreds of people, calling themselves pilgrims. Outside.”
“There are always pilgrims,” Bhumika said, firm but calm. “Explain.”
“Not for you,” he bit out. “They are—they’re following something—someone. They are—”
The gates flew open.
No hands had forced them. No hands should have been capable of such an act. And Bhumika felt the strangeness again. Something new, choking her from within. Something coming.
Leaves. Leaves, everywhere. They were not growing through the walls—they were roiling, rising and tumbling as if caught in a great wind, pouring through the open gates, filling the air.
She raised a hand to protect Padma’s face but did not allow herself the same kindness. She looked through the tumult.
There were pilgrims indeed. A whole swathe of them, standing beyond the mahal’s walls, visible only in glimpses between the green swirling before them and around them: an eye here, a length of hair there.
A shoulder, an arm, a faceless torso. One figure stepped in front of the rest, walking slowly, steadily, toward the mahal.
Bhumika should, perhaps, have told her soldiers to prepare for a fight. Told them to gather their weapons, to form a perimeter. But those were not enemies in front of her. Not warriors. And whatever this was, it was a thing driven by magic and not men. Magic that she felt in her bones.
The figure was before her. The leaves parted and fell gently.
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. You died.”
“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.”