Chapter 36 Priya #3
The last time she’d been in water as tainted as this and drawn on her gifts, she’d fallen into a dead faint.
But she couldn’t think of that. She couldn’t allow doubt to creep in.
She was in the thick of a massacre now, after all—on the brink of the collapse of all Malini’s efforts, Malini’s war.
And if Priya had a part to play, then by the soil and sky, she was going to play it to the hilt.
She sucked in a breath. Shallower than she would have liked, as Emperor Chandra’s Parijatdvipan archers in imperial white and gold drew their bows once more.
She sank beneath the water as the arrows began to rain, and she let her magic free.
The water wasn’t in her grip. The silt beneath her feet—mud and fine rocks, the tiny bones of fish—wasn’t rich in plant life either, curse it.
But she could feel enough: algae, a faint shimmer of green.
The roots of things that grew abundant along the river bank.
And older roots, deeper roots, of the trees upon the islets that had once been islands, and of trees long dead, their husks still winding beneath the river bed.
She reached. And pulled.
The magic writhed.
It didn’t want to obey her. She was asking so much from the soil, the roots, the earth.
This was not Ahiranya, where the green sang and moved with her easily.
She was far from home, weaker and weakened.
But she was also stubborn, just like she always had been, and she was not going to give up now.
She reached deeper, and held on harder, throwing all her strength behind that movement of magic calling magic, of her soul reaching out, and the green reaching back.
Her head ached—it felt as if her skull were splitting, too tight for the power unfurling inside it, splitting through her with roots as vicious as teeth, gnawing her flesh open. Stop, everything in her screamed. Stop, this is too much, too fast, too far.
Her strength wasn’t enough. The water was too heavy. The green too small. And for all that she’d been healed—that Bhumika had healed her—Priya could feel the echo of the false fire like a scar through her lungs. Breathing around it was hard. It made her magic fracture, twist.
She reached harder. Grasped the strength of the world around her. Obey me, she told the green. I am a temple elder, I am thrice-born. I won my power by strength and sacrifice, and you will yield to me. You will.
You will!
A pause. And a moment when the pain in her skull sharpened to a knife—and then the green yielded to it. An animal pinned, throat bared.
It was hers now.
Come to me.
Everything she could touch with her power breathed and struggled and rose with her call.
The earth shuddered. Shuddered again. The pain in her skull grew and grew, and through it, she forced her eyes open in the murky water and saw, through the shifting gloom, the shape of the silt breaking in two.
Of roots rising up, reaching. Felt it, as the water moved, displaced by the violence of the ground beneath it.
She stretched a hand before herself and drew the soil toward her own body.
Even through the water she heard the cries of shock and horror on both sides of the river as the green banks crumpled inward, responding to her.
The water was clouding with dirt and blood, growing darker and darker as the water roiled and the earth churned, and the river began to collapse, pulled inexorably into her orbit. The water was hers. The earth was hers.
The tightness of her skull shattered, so swift it was like a blow, leaving her gasping—mouth open against the water, her nerves fraying with an agony so fierce it left her numb—and the darkness rushed over her.
Silence.
She knew she was in the sangam even before her eyes opened.
She was lying on the convergence of waters—lying with her arms spread out and her shadow of a body floating, and gentle hands carding through her hair, gathering the weight of it together, then letting it flow free again.
Those had to be her sister’s hands. When she tilted her head, water lapping against her forehead, she saw it was indeed Bhumika leaning over her.
“You’ve used too much of your strength, little sister,” Bhumika said. Her voice had a sweetness like sugarcane. She was all warm brown skin, dark hair, smiling mouth. No part of her was made of shadow. “In a moment, your flesh will need to breathe. And then you will drown.”
Above Priya—above the shape of Bhumika’s face—Priya could see stars blooming. She forced her mouth to open.
“I don’t want to drown,” she managed.
“No one does.”
“That isn’t what I’m here for.”
Bhumika’s hands moved from Priya’s hair to cup her face.
“What are you here for?” Bhumika asked curiously, keeping Priya’s face above water. As if, by keeping it above water here, she could do the same in the world of flesh. “What are you trying to do?”
“Use my power,” Priya said. “Win this battle. That’s what I want to do. Turn the river against them. In Ahiranya I could do it. I know I could.”
“You’re not in Ahiranya,” said Bhumika. “You’re on land that hasn’t known the touch of the yaksa in far too long. And you’re still weakened, Priya. You’ve made an error.”
Fond, chiding words. And yet…
“Bhumika,” Priya said. “Aren’t you—angry with me? Sad that I’ll die?” She looked up not at the stars this time, but into Bhumika’s eyes. “You don’t seem like yourself.”
“I can give you what you want,” Bhumika said calmly, eyes almost luminous.
“You can have your strength. You can turn the waters with your mortal hands. All of that can be yours, if you want it as much as you think you do.” Bhumika’s hand curled tighter around Priya’s face, fanning her jaw, the nails sharp points of contact.
“But every time you come to me, the bond between us grows stronger. Every part of you becomes more mine, and every part of me is consumed in turn. We’re changing and shifting together, sapling.
And it is sweet. I don’t deny the sweetness.
But you should know I’ll demand something in return, for the privilege of power, and the privilege of having me. ”
Sapling.
A cascade of memory swept over her like drowning waters: the yaksa with a mouth of thorns; the yaksa kissing her; a yaksa’s nails cutting her cheek open; Priya’s own hands carving open her own chest and offering all of herself, all that she had left, all that remained of her heart—
“Yaksa,” she breathed. “Why do you wear my sister’s face?”
“I don’t want you to speak to your sister,” the yaksa said simply. Smiling with Bhumika’s mouth, or something that resembled Bhumika’s mouth. Even as Priya watched, the teeth grew too pearly, too sharp, the lips as bruised and curled as petals. “I want you to speak to me.”
All this time. The first time she reached Bhumika in the sangam. The moment when she’d almost turned back to Ahiranya, and then seen Bhumika and changed her mind—all this time—
Dread pooled in her stomach and worked its way through her, turning her blood to ice.
Bhumika. Had she spoken to Bhumika at all, in truth, since she had left Ahiranya?
What had happened to her sister—to everyone she’d left behind?
The horror stroked fingers up along her spine.
Lies upon lies. Could she believe anything she had seen in the sangam?
Could she trust herself, if she couldn’t even recognize that her sister was not her sister?
Priya tried to move, tried to rise—and felt the yaksa’s grip tighten further.
“You want to win? You want to kill those who stand against you?” The yaksa was smiling, smiling, luminous in the haze of starlight. “Then we must work together. Your flesh, my strength.”
“My flesh,” Priya repeated.
“Your flesh,” the yaksa agreed sweetly. Her nail traced Priya’s cheek. A hot shadow of pain followed it. “My strength.”
“Last time, when I thought you were…” Priya paused, gathering her words. When I thought you were my sister. When I thought you were as human as I am. When I did not know you were a yaksa, with all that entails. “My body went—strange. I went strange. I thought it was my own weakness.”
“Not weakness,” the yaksa murmured. “Little bud. Tell me. What is worship?”
“Hollowing,” Priya whispered.
“And what is power?”
Priya said nothing to this. Power could be so many things. When she thought of it, she thought of Bhumika, tiredly working to hold all the shards of Ahiranya together; of Malini walking on a knife-edge. Taking Priya’s power to bolster her own. And Priya… letting her.
“I don’t know,” she said, feeling unutterably small in the yaksa’s hands.
“Sapling,” the yaksa said tenderly. “You are an elder. You must know that power is a magic like any other. It demands sacrifice.”
Sacrifice.
The waters swirled around them and the yaksa’s face continued to change: flesh to wood, hair to vines, the eyelids lush with lichen.
“If I say no?” Priya asked. “Will you let me drown?”
“Ah.” The yaksa’s fingernail traced her jaw again.
Possessive. “No. Death isn’t so bad, sapling.
I’d keep you even then. A fine skin, you’d make—a fine shell with good bones.
But no. I want you as you are, living. But this battle will be lost, and many will die if you refuse me.
” The yaksa leaned in closer, its hair a cloak around them.
Vine and darkness. “I do not care if mortals die,” said the yaksa. “Not these mortals. But you do.”
She didn’t care about that damn Ashutosh, or Romesh, or any of the other soldiers, even if she didn’t want them dead. Didn’t care. But.
She thought of Sima and of Malini. Of Lady Raziya and Prince Rao, and said, “What does it mean? What price must my flesh pay, when I’m already hollow for you?”
“You gave something away that is mine,” said the yaksa.
There was a reverberation: a great drumbeat that made the entirety of the sangam rock, and Priya’s own shadow form fracture into wisps that drew together again with a shocking snap as the yaksa snarled and held her skull still.
“You have no more time, little one. But you must get it back for me. Promise.”
A promise to a yaksa. A vow that couldn’t be broken.
Priya couldn’t feel her racing heart or tight lungs, but she felt fear—the kind of fear that doesn’t need a body to give it shape.
She thought of hollowness and magic; she thought of Sima on the bank of the river, waiting for her; of Malini, staring at her with want that was deeper than deathless waters; of the real water that surrounded her, heavy and thick with blood, and the people caught inside it.
Distantly she felt her body calling her home.
“I will,” she said. It felt like a mistake, even as she said it. And yet, it was also the only choice she could make. The only one. “I vow it. Yaksa.”
The yaksa’s eyes glowed, a brilliant vermilion. Hands pressed Priya beneath the three rivers of the sangam. She breathed in, one terrible breath that hollowed her lungs with cosmic waters, and she was full, whole, changed. She was—
—rearing up out of the Veri. She spat water. Bared her teeth in a howling laugh and threw up her hands, taking the silt beneath up with her.
She felt the water rising with the earth; felt it as Romesh scrambled up onto the island, sweating and bleeding, Prince Ashutosh in his arms. Felt it, as the tree above them split and unfurled and wound itself into a new shape. A shield, a carapace.
She felt it as the waters parted around her, and the roots she’d drawn up from the earth shaped a high bridge—open now, a path that Rao and Narayan’s men could take directly to the flank of Chandra’s waiting forces. They could do exactly what she’d promised. Malini would not fall.
But the water—she could not hold every mote of it steady forever. So she did the only thing she could. She let it go, and sent it where it would do the most good to her.
She saw everything in pieces:
The men on the opposite bank collapsing, snared by the ground around them.
The water roiling toward them, faster and faster, all of its weight driven by nature and by her unnatural hand.
The water hitting the bank with a roar, a beast swallowing them whole as wind whipped her hair and her magic howled through her, fiery thorns in her blood, her bones.
She heard. Screams.
The yaksa’s voice, a croon that rose in her skull like a song, drawing them out:
Good, sapling. Good. Just so.
Good, Priya thought nonsensically in turn. Good. It’s done.
And then she let her eyes close, and her body fell once more.