Chapter 59 Ashok
ASHOK
Ashok returned to the mahal alone.
For good or ill, Bhumika was gone. And soon Ashok—whatever he was now, a ghost, an echo, a cloth already half frayed to dust—would be gone too. He could feel himself slipping away. It was a little, as he remembered it, like dying.
There was an ancient sentience stirring under his own. He was nothing but a boat on its waters. He walked forward slowly, on legs that felt like strangers beneath him, carrying him forward along the mahal’s corridors. The green, the flowers, even the soil, turned with him. Watching him go.
There was no one in the nursery watching Bhumika’s baby sleep.
But Ashok could feel the flowers in their bowls of waters, the vines with their limbs wound through the lattice windows, and knew the yaksa had their eyes on her.
And on him, now. But they did nothing when he leaned forward and brushed Padma’s fine hair back from her face.
Her eyes were screwed tight shut, her cheeks stained with salt. She’d cried herself to sleep.
Distantly, he felt a pang of emotion. It ached like a rotten tooth.
He picked her up. She didn’t stir. He carried her from the room, unimpeded.
Perhaps the others were curious. Perhaps they wondered what he would do with his sister’s child—his niece, in a way, even if no blood bound them. Perhaps they thought he would destroy her, as he’d almost destroyed Rukh.
He remembered the yaksa who wore Sanjana’s face. Remembered the tilt of her head. I’m curious to see what you’ll do.
Padma was light in his arms.
She was, he thought distantly, small for her age.
Like Priya had been. There was no shared blood between Priya and Padma either, but Padma had the same scrunched forehead, the same way of curling her hands into fists, the same banked fury written into her flesh.
She’d be formidable one day, or dangerous, if she lived long enough to grow into herself.
Bhumika would want her to live.
Did Ashok?
He had not lived long enough to know Padma or love her; to hold her in his arms and want the world for her.
So he held a different scrap of memory—Priya’s small body, Priya’s weight in his arms, the love and fear that had welled up in him as he’d held her close instead. He kept on walking.
The infirmary was nearly empty. Only one body lay curled on a cot, blankets thrown back. Ashok was met with a bowed spine spiked with leaves. Then the body stiffened, and turned, and Rukh looked up at him.
“Sit up,” said Ashok.
Rukh did not try to run or reach for a weapon. He merely sat up in the bed as ordered, hands in tight fists.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” Ashok told him. It did not sound like a lie, or feel like one, but the boy did not calm.
Last time, Ashok remembered vaguely, he’d told the boy he was going to help him. And then he had hurt him. So perhaps this was reasonable. Perhaps the boy was right to be wary.
Ashok stepped forward. Rukh’s gaze flickered—from Ashok’s face, down to Padma in his arms, and back up again. Ashok held Padma forward.
“Take her,” he said.
“Wh-where,” Rukh began. Cleared his throat, and forged on. “Where is Elder Bhumika?”
Ashok shook his head.
“Take her,” he repeated.
“Elder Bhumika,” the boy said again. “She—she wouldn’t. Wouldn’t leave. Her.”
What little you know, Ashok thought savagely.
Hadn’t Bhumika left them all behind in the Hirana when they had been children, choosing to be a highborn girl instead of a temple daughter?
Hadn’t she chosen to wed the regent and carry his child, instead of fighting tooth and nail for a better world, as he had?
Bhumika had looked at him, as she’d kneeled among the trees, and told him she was being selfish. Told him she was setting herself free.
“There is no one left for the infant but you,” Ashok said. “Keep her or the yaksa will keep her. Keep her, or we will keep her.”
Rukh’s hands were trembling in his lap. Ashok stared him down, until finally the boy’s fingers uncurled, and he held up his arms. He took Padma. She looked bigger in his smaller arms. More human. Enough weight to pin the boy—slight and mind-wounded as he was—down.
“She’s mine now,” Rukh said hesitantly, as if testing the words.
“Yes,” Ashok said. “Yours.”
“I…” Another hesitation. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you keep her alive,” said Ashok.
“You protect her. You keep her fed and clothed. You make sure we have no reason to harm her. Or don’t.
But her life is in your hands, now.” A pause.
He watched the words sink in. “The next time I meet you or her, I will not be like this,” Ashok went on. A warning. “I will not be as… as kind.”
The boy’s arms tightened. Padma stirred a little, making a noise of complaint.
You’re not kind now, every inch of Rukh’s body screamed. You frighten me.
Rukh would have to learn to hide those weaknesses, if he wanted to survive. The yaksa—he—would not accept weakness. But the boy would learn, or he would not, and soon it would be no concern of Ashok’s. He could feel himself fading. The waters were carrying him away.
He remembered—Meena, so long ago. The shadow of her, spools of ink in the deathless waters—
He remembered Priya. Priya. He would have liked to say goodbye. But what was there to say between them? Only grief and bad blood bound them, and there was no way to leave her happily. He knew what lay ahead of her.
Priya, in his arms. Priya, with only him to rely on. And here before him now, Rukh, a foolish child clinging to an even smaller child, trying to grapple with the cruelty that had been inflicted on the both of them. Trying to survive.
There was a vicious satisfaction in knowing that nothing ended, that all griefs in the world came back over and over again, spinning like a terrible wheel. He’d thought he would be able to forge a better world once. He’d thought he could bring back all of the goodness and joy Ahiranya had lost.
That he had only managed to bring back this—his own childhood made strange, as if seen through water—seemed… fitting. It seemed fitting.
He left the boy without another word. Now that Padma was no longer in his arms, he let them hang heavily at his sides. The strength was leaching out of them. These were no longer his arms, after all, and this skin no longer fit his bones.
Sanjana was waiting for him. She was sitting under a shaft of sunlight coming in through the broken ceiling, half in shadow, half in light.
“You have betrayed yourself,” she said. She sounded oddly delighted.
In the light, her visible face was shaped into a smile.
Elegant striations of wood shaped her mouth, her jaw, the rise of her cheek, moving liquidly as she spoke.
“Turned upon yourself. Turned on us. Poured our secrets into the hollow gourd of a temple daughter and cut her from her roots. She’ll decay and die and go to waste, and it’s all your doing. Will you beg mercy?”
“You know everything,” Ashok said heavily. His legs felt like dead wood beneath him. He could barely move them. “What use is begging for pity from the pitiless?”
“What does she know?”
Ashok said nothing.
“A mortal can only remember so much, I suppose,” said Sanjana. “Never mind. Whatever she knows, the war ahead of us has only one outcome. What did you do with her baby?”
“It’s not her child any longer.”
“We took that child from our temple elder,” Sanjana agreed. “But we told our temple elder she had to obey or the child would die, and she has not. By rights, we should kill it.”
“As Bhumika is now—the death would cause her no sorrow. So what does it accomplish?”
“Balance.”
“The child will grow,” Ashok said, with a calm that wasn’t his own. “The child will become stronger. She will learn to hollow out her weaknesses. And she will survive the deathless waters, thrice, and she will serve us as her mother should have. That’s balance enough.”
“You do not remember yourself,” Sanjana said, rising. “But—curious, curious, dear heart—all the same instincts guide you, as they always have.”
He could not respond. He was breathless. Fraying, fraying. He’d misplaced his lungs. She crossed the distance between them.
“You always adored them,” she said, with great fondness.
She touched a thumb to his chin, and beneath her touch he felt his skin writhe and change—flesh to bone, bone to wood, and then upon the wood, the pulpy softness of lichen began to grow, licking the whorls of her finger.
Her smile gentled. “You raised the first temple children. You hollowed them out so tenderly. And when they died for us you mourned. Bound the echoes of them in your roots, as if you could keep them—”
“Stop,” he begged. “Stop, yaksa, please.”
“Shh,” she hushed. Petted his face, as if he were an animal or a child to be gentled. In the wake of her touch his skin tore and remade itself, a pain that erased him.
He could not pull away from her, only make wounded noises, as the inevitable overcame him. Memories unspooling. The shape of Ashok falling away like the dust it was. Dead, dead, dead.
“I told you then: There’s too much mortal weakness in you. Too much mortal, and not enough of what you truly are.”
“Sacrifice,” he managed to say. He felt as if his teeth did not fit his mouth. “It was—inevitable. To be—mortal.”
“This has gone on long enough, I think,” said Sanjana. “Before Mani Ara returns—ah, dear heart. You must remember yourself now. I think you must.”
“I am,” he told her—even though he did not want to. He was forgetting and remembering all at once. And then he could speak no more, as the waves came over him, and the tide drowned him.
And he was—
He was.
He was. Kneeling on the floor. Taller now—new, elongated bones, a longer body and graceful fingers, a drapery of leaves trailing from his skull as he raised his head to meet her hands, which reached for him. He knew her hands. Beneath the veil of flesh she wore, he knew her hands.
“Arahli,” she said. Framed his face. A half name for a half him. “Arahli Ara. Do you know yourself?”
Arahli opened his eyes.
“I do,” he replied.