Chapter 23 Priya
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 felt something when 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.
Well. Fine, then.
She hurried back toward the Ahiranyi encampment.
Priya and Sima had been sleeping with a partition up to keep them separate from the soldiers, but it was a far cry from the relative luxuries of home, and a world away from the way the highborn of this army lived.
Even the sickroom tent Priya had just vacated had been better appointed, deep in the Saketan section of the camp, which was green, well shaded, and vast enough to hold a branch of the army made up of innumerable highborn lords and not more than a few low princes.
But it had one benefit: It overlooked the fortress.
There was a sea of men pouring out of the fortress, so thick that it reminded Priya of ants heaving out of an anthill doused in boiling water.
Some of them were on fire.
The sight made her dizzy.
She heard footsteps behind her. Turned, and saw Sima running toward her, followed by Jeevan’s men.
“Priya!” Her voice was high with relief. “Priya, I was going to look for you, but they wouldn’t let me.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Priya said. Jeevan’s men—the pitiful group she’d brought with her—clutched their weapons, clearly unsure of what to do.
“Elder,” Nitin said grimly. “They—the Parijatdvipans—weren’t expecting a sieged fortress to open its gates and pour out men. They don’t know how to respond.”
“You can tell all of that simply by looking at them?” Priya asked, impressed.
“I heard someone yelling as he ran past,” he said, which made significantly more sense.
“What,” another soldier said, faltering. “What should we do?”
“I’m not sure what we can do,” Priya said, pitching her voice loud enough so that all the men could hear her, despite the tumult of noise.
“I’ve been told armies usually have plans and strategies and this one certainly has some damn big elephants and we have—what, a few scythes and sabers?
Me?” She gestured at herself helplessly.
“We stay here and we wait and we see what happens, all right? You keep watch,” she ordered, gesturing at the outcrop of rocks.
The man nodded and went where she’d told him to.
It only took a moment for her to realize her error. A split second for the yell of the man on the outcrop to ring out, and for her to turn.
Her own tent had a good view of the fortress city, but it was also exposed to it.
Fire shouldn’t have been able to move like that. But of course, the fire here wasn’t normal fire. She knew that.
Priya did not even have time to curse before a dozen arrows, tips aflame, cut through the air, right at them.
“Run!” she yelled at Sima. “Run, run away now!”
“Priya—”
“I can protect myself! You know that!”
She saw the fire hit one of her men, then two—saw Nitin fall.
Fire rippled through the air, leaping off arrows—not falling as it should have, as nature demanded, but flying with all a predatory bird’s deadly grace.
She raised the earth—trying to smother the flames with heavy soil. But the flames burst through it violently.
She only had a moment to fling herself to the side, but the surprise made her slower. Clumsier.
The fire caught her at the waist. Set her clothes alight. She dropped to the ground, rolling, but it burrowed into her skin with nails, with teeth. It was like an animal, a beast—something cruel and sentient, eating its way through her.
It reached for her magic and grasped.
Her strength flickered. She tried to draw on her magic and felt it flutter within her, choked by fire. A stuttering fear ricocheted through her.
Her magic. Her magic was wrong.
The fire was stopping her magic. Something about the fire was obliterating it—
“Sima,” she gasped out. Tried to look around, wild. But her vision was wavering.
She could see the gates being closed on the fort again. Clever: one ferocious attack, cutting a bloody swathe through Malini’s army, then a retreat to where they couldn’t be reached. Devastating.
“Sima,” she gasped out again. And Sima was there, reaching for her. Dragging her to her feet—
She woke in the sangam.
Bhumika was before her—had heard Priya, perhaps, crying out as the fire hit her. Bhumika’s eyes were molten.
“You fainted,” she said.
Priya sat up.
“I don’t faint.”
“That isn’t true. You did. You’re here.”
“I was in—a battle. An unexpected battle and…” Priya scrambled, touching her fingertips to her side. She hissed.
There was a wound. Sap poured from it, strange and unreal in the sangam.
Bhumika tutted.
“That’s not good,” she said.
“I would have thought you’d be more worried about me,” said Priya.
“I am worried,” said Bhumika. But her face remained eerily calm, her voice devoid of feeling.
Something wasn’t right.
Priya was in the sangam but her body was not shadow, and neither was Bhumika’s. And that was—different. Wrong, perhaps.
She bit her tongue and looked down at her side again.
“The fire caught me,” she whispered. “Fire of the mothers, they called it. Should I—am I hurt?”
A sigh from Bhumika. The water rippled. As it rippled, it sang.
“I can’t fix everything for you,” said Bhumika. “Not when you’re so far. Not always. But this I can put right.”
“You… can’t,” said Priya. “You can’t do that. We don’t have the gift for that.”
Bhumika frowned. “You should talk to me with more respect.”
Her sister grabbed her arm.
Flowers clambered up her side: small, virulently white and pink and red, the colors of viscera. They curled around the wound. Began to burrow into it.
There was no pain. Perhaps there should have been pain.
“Still,” Bhumika said, when Priya tried to flinch away. “Stay still.”
“Bhumika,” she said helplessly. “Bhumika, what’s wrong with you?”
“Oh, Priya,” she said in response. Her eyes gleamed. Marigold bright. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
One breath. Another.
Priya’s eyes opened. She could see the sky above her. Brilliant blue, scarred with smoke. There were still people shouting. It couldn’t have been long since the attack. And below it all, Sima, leaning over her.
“Get up,” Sima was saying, and Priya blinked at her.
“Is anyone here…?”
“Just us,” said Sima. “I dragged you behind a tent. Look, we were lucky—this one isn’t even on fire.”
Sima hoisted her up.
“Our guards…?”
“Some are—alive. I think,” Sima said curtly. There was something grieving and frightened under her hard expression. “Maybe they were taken to a sickroom. Maybe they’ve run home.”
“Don’t think they have,” Priya said, forcing the words out through her own pain. Sweat dripped into her eyes.
“No?”
“They don’t know the way back to Ahiranya. They’ll be around somewhere.”
Sima laughed wildly. “You have a point.”
She leaned in closer.
“The burn healed up while you were unconscious,” Sima said, keeping her voice small. It took Priya a moment to realize that she was worried about being overheard. “It… it flowered, and you were growing things. Through your skin. And then the flowers were gone and it healed. Just like that.”
“Flowered,” Priya echoed, dazed. But Sima was still talking, blinking back tears.
“I thought it had killed you, Pri. You don’t know how you looked. For a moment. A moment…”
Priya swallowed, and clutched Sima’s hand.
“It could have killed me,” Priya said. “I was lucky.”
“Lucky how?”
Priya didn’t know how to explain Bhumika. Those eyes gleaming gold. The flowers pouring over her, seeping into the burn. So she settled on saying, “Bhumika helped me somehow.”
“Ah. That’s good.”
“It was—temple elder magic. But I can’t. Can’t rely on it again.” A deep thrill of wrongness was working through her.
If the fire could kill her magic? Well. The fire could kill Ahiranya, too.