Chapter 62 Jaya
JAYA
We cannot save the dead, but we can free them.
—from the introduction of The Great History of Sayon
Jaya crept through the darkened wings of the palace as the sun, sinking from its zenith, transformed into a cold silver light that bisected the hall with the vehemence of a sword.
When she passed through it, Jaya felt it cut into her flesh.
Her hand sweated around the metal lotus.
She forced herself to steady her breathing, to recall Akaros’s training, but her heart, that devious little creature, bounded ahead.
Jaya turned the corner and almost jumped at the sight of the two Tsuani guards down the hall. She dashed back, then faltered forward. Don’t look suspicious, she thought as she straightened herself.
She forced herself to look ahead, to measure her steps. She wore the emblem of the Ravani Phoenix on her breast to indicate herself as a servant of the queen, and when she neared the guards, she gave them a slight smile. Instead of returning it, a guard frowned.
“What are you doing down here?” he asked.
“I’m on my way to the courtyard,” Jaya said, trying to push confidence into her voice. Behind her back, she gripped the lotus.
“What for?”
“I need—I must—check the grounds before tonight’s celebration for—” She thought quickly.
Why would a servant of the queen be sent to investigate a courtyard?
To see if the lilies were to her liking?
That the musicians played her favorite song?
It all sounded so vain. But wasn’t that in keeping with the royals?
“Hello?” The guard peered down at her. “Did you understand what I said?”
“Of course I did,” Jaya snapped, then paused, recognizing her mistake. She plastered on her most appeasing smile. “Your Hind is accented, that’s all.”
“First we’re forced to host you lot, then speak your tongue,” the other guard grumbled. “Better if we all spoke Tsun. Better if Tsun was the language of the continent.”
“Yes, well, can’t change history in a day,” Jaya said lightly, but the guard’s frown only deepened.
“Your queen just showed us that you can,” he said as his eyes fell to the emblem on her chest. “Why did she send you here?”
“Uh, her—her entrance!” Jaya exclaimed as the idea popped into her head.
The guard arched a brow, and the other did not look convinced.
“She wants to make a grand entrance. Very official. Songs and flowers and all. She did just change history in a day, like you said. Needs all the pomp. So, I—I’ll just be on my way… ”
She tried to sidle past the guards, but they did not move from her path.
“I hear all the liberated Sesharians on the killdoms were invited to join the celebration tonight. They’re under your queen’s charge.
But if I see one of them trying to steal even a plant…
” The guard trailed off, patting the charged wincer at his waist. If Jaya listened closely, she could hear its low, dangerous hum.
She had only seen one in action once, when Maya had flung the projectile cuffs at an unlucky initiate during training.
It had clamped down on his bicep, the other on his neck, and he had screamed like a shobu with its tail shorn off.
Jaya met the guard’s gaze, her smile cooling into something bitter and edged.
“I wouldn’t pick the Sesharians for thieves.
King Bormani would stage a heist for the jelly-filled mooncakes in your kitchen, and King Farin would take your ships, if he had the chance.
The real thieves are at the top, boys. We’re just here struggling for the scraps. ”
“Hmph.” The guard considered this, while the other scowled.
“If I see anyone stealing so much as a napkin, I’m taking my wincer and shoving it down their—”
“Yes, okay, ka, we get it.” The guard rolled his eyes. He nodded at Jaya. “On your way, then.”
She moved past them before he could reconsider, the other guard arguing that he wasn’t trigger-happy, he was attentive, that they needed to be, with all these foreigners in their home…
Their voices faded as Jaya entered the courtyard.
Palace workers dashed around her, setting tables, as the musicians plucked their strings and tuned their instruments and groaned that no, they didn’t know the folk dance of the Karvenese, no one did, their set list was long enough with all the other nations requesting their national songs.
Foreign attendants flitted about, worrying over the dinner menu.
She heard one complaining to a flustered Tsuani kitchen staffer that they needed to warm the Verani garlic soup exactly twenty-three minutes before serving, or else Tsuana would disrespect Verani cuisine and their king.
Complaints, demands, even sobs choked the air.
Her head throbbed. Were they all like this?
The rulers vain and selfish, their attendants hysterical and stressed?
She had never seen Elena act in such a way, but then again, she had never seen the queen within the soft, luxurious abode of her palace.
Power made everyone into a glutton. Ravenous, beseeching, always craving more.
In the center of the courtyard, the bronze seal of the council floated serenely. The emblems of the seven nations corded together, but Jaya was struck by how, even on the eve of victory, there was no sign of Seshar.
“You see it missing too, don’t you?”
Jaya stiffened as she heard Maya’s cool voice. The Arohassin strategist sidled up to her, dressed in Tsuani creams, the blue streak in her hair dyed black.
“I thought you and Akaros were going to wait outside the city,” she hissed.
“I was, but then Taran asked me to keep an eye on you,” Maya said, and Jaya’s skin prickled.
Did Taran not believe she could do the job? Would he cut off Div’s life support? Why did he send Maya over Akaros?
Maya, as if reading her mind, laughed. “Don’t stress, gamemaster. I come as your exit strategy.”
“What about Akaros?”
“He’s moving our assets,” she said, and Jaya knew she meant Div as one, but she winced at hearing her brother be considered so coldly. “Have you finished?”
“I just have one left,” Jaya said, flashing the metal lotus tucked in her waistband.
“I’ll give it to you, Jaya. They are a masterful creation. Better than anything I’ve created. You should have come under my wing, not Akaros’s. I could have taught you more than just Ambari.”
Jaya tried not to roll her eyes. She was tired of Maya’s and Akaros’s long-running rivalry. She had kept to the edges, avoiding being subsumed unlike other poor initiates.
“You’re hovering. We’ll attract attention,” she said quickly, hoping to rid herself of Maya. “Go. I’ll recon with you—”
“What do you plan to do after all of this?”
Jaya stopped, stunned by the question. “What do you mean?”
Maya’s eyes slid to hers with a slyness that Jaya disliked. “After you have Div, what will you do?”
A cold, singular bell clanged through her as she met Maya’s calculative gaze. Did she suspect? Did she know? Jaya studied her, but the strategist revealed nothing other than a cutting curiosity.
“I—we—will continue fighting with the Arohassin,” Jaya said, her voice dry.
“Yes, Akaros said the same,” Maya mused.
“And you?”
Maya looked up at the floating seal. “I think you’ll go wherever Div does, should he survive.”
Jaya swallowed. Her fingers fluttered at her sides, as if grasping an invisible weapon.
She had no killer instinct—Akaros had complained about this before—but in the moment, Jaya wished she had a pulse gun.
Or a sword. She wanted to drive it into Maya’s back because it was that last part, the thinly veiled threat, that sent a surge of vicious fear and dark anger through her.
Div was no chess piece. He was not someone to be manipulated like the kings in their obtuse political games.
He was her brother. Of flesh and blood, or whatever remained of it.
Jaya calmed herself, and when she spoke, her voice was steeled. “We go with the Arohassin. We are indebted to Taran, after all.”
Maya turned to her, eyes cutting down like a blade. “You’d do well to remember your debt, then.”
She owed the Arohassin more than her dreams of revenge. She owed them her brother’s life.
He had told her that his body did not feel right. That for suns, it had never felt right. And on that fateful day, when he had told their parents, she had stood, gripped with a delayed shock, as Div screamed his name, and her mother had responded with Divya.
“I don’t understand,” her mother had wailed. “You are my beautiful Divya, my darling girl. My radiance. I—I don’t see why you would want to be something else.”
“Have we done something wrong?” her father beseeched. “Did we treat you cruelly?”
“No,” Div said, his voice thick with frustration. “This is me! ME! Mama, do you remember the stories you told about the warriors who created the Unsung? How they were Yumi? How they passed their teachings on to warriors that were neither men nor women, but a divine third that—”
“Those are legends,” her mother growled. Her hair lashed and swung, agitated. “This is my fault. I should have returned to Moksh. Made you a temple attendant so you could see the beautiful lineage of what you are, Divya. You are a Yumi. Why would you clip your own hair?”
Jaya understood then that it was not Div himself that bothered her parents, or the idea of what he was, but the implication that in becoming his true self, he would relinquish the one gift their Great Mother had bestowed upon him.
Hair of power. Hair of legend, of ancestry. The gift she had never been given.
“I am not less,” Div said, his voice shaking. He jabbed a finger toward Jaya. “Look at Jaya. She is clipped, but you’ve told us all our lives that she’s no less than you.”
“You know that’s not what I meant,” her mother snapped, and it was this admission, this small, errant remark, that had stung Jaya the deepest. She was less.
She was born Yumi but was not truly one, could not serve and protect like her ancestors, could not swear allegiance to their Great Mother because she had been born bereft of Her blessing.
Jaya’s eyes stung. Div turned to her, and maybe it was jealousy toward her sibling, who had been born whole and did not want it, or maybe it was her anger toward her mother, but Jaya looked at him and said, quietly, “You will become less.”
Silence rang through their small home.
Tears welled in his eyes, and Jaya immediately regretted it, but he was already moving, leaving.
Her parents called too, but Div had rushed up to his room, and then she was alone with them and their confusion, their ire.
She had not heard the gold caps over their shouting.
Did not hear the strike of a match, the flare of a flame.
By the time they noticed, it was too late.
Smoke clogged their home, trapping them inside.
Her mother had roared with fury, but her voice was drowned out by the gold caps, and then they were all choking from the lack of air as the flames grew higher.
The gold caps were going to burn them alive.
Small mercy, then, that her family had been buried when the house caved in.
A gold cap had dragged her out by her hair, and Jaya had thrown herself on him. She had screamed until her lungs were hoarse. But nothing compared to the screech that ripped from her throat when she saw Div.
He had been burned terribly, his face marred, his body an incomprehensible mash of flesh and bone. It was a miracle he was still alive. A miracle Akaros made sure she did not forget.
“We can keep him alive, Jaya,” he had told her after Div had slipped into his coma. “He is special, and in time, you will see how.”
Every mission, every game, she thought of Div. Asleep in a bed, then trapped in a tube, then floating in a tank as his blood fed the third, and the third fed him.
She thought of him now as she placed the last lotus in the shadow of a pillar in the courtyard.
In her pocket, the holopod sat heavy, cold.
Maya nodded, then disappeared into the bustling mass of attendants.
Jaya stepped back as an attendant rushed past, shouting at another to place the flower display over there, not in the corner.
She had no qualms about what was to befall the kings and queens.
She did, however, feel a strange twisting in her chest as she watched the attendants, the musicians, and the guards.
This was not their fight. The strange feeling increased as she thought of Elena and Samson.
They, like the gold caps, held vicious prejudices.
So what if they did not draw the sword now? They would eventually.
Right?
Jaya stepped farther into the shadows, gripping the pod tightly. They will, she affirmed to herself. They’re all the same.
She pushed back her guilt and thought of Div.
When he awoke, she would give him a new body.
And they would go into the mountains beyond Magar, deep within the glens.
She had already arranged the barrels of sand needed to sustain him.
They would live undetected, in peace. War or no war, once she had Div, she had no intention of staying.
She gripped the pod tighter, her chappals slapping purposefully as she strode out of the courtyard. Here is my courage, Div, she said silently. I give it all for you.