Chapter 66 Jaya
JAYA
In the long history of Ravence, very few rulers have lived to old age, or seen the coronation of their grandchildren. Historians point out family ailments, while locals call it Alabore’s Curse.
The burden of death.
Jaya hugged the orb close as she hurried through the palace, moonlight razoring the hall into strips of black and white. Even the fish in the glass stream below her nipped at her heels. She checked her pod. Twenty minutes. She had only twenty until—
Jaya halted abruptly as a lotus, the one she had placed in the courtyard, suddenly blinked off. It couldn’t be. She refired the commands, but the lotus remained eerily unlit.
Shit.
She could go back. It was possible the lotus had become unlinked from her pod, and she could reconnect them.
But then she would have only ten minutes to escape.
Barely enough time to jump into the awaiting canal boat.
Better to leave it. Jaya began to walk when her pod chimed again.
She watched in horror and disbelief as another lotus blinked off, then another.
Three of the five were now offline. A startled cry escaped her lips, like a sparrow caught in the shadow of an eagle.
The realization cut into her quickly, drying her throat.
Someone was taking out her lotuses.
Someone knew of her plot.
Jaya swiveled sharply, but no one lurked in the passage. She could faintly hear laughter and song in the distance, the bright swell of a cheer, but there was a strange, stilted silence in the air, like a forest fallen quiet at the approach of a predator.
She started forward, her pace brisk and controlled, then long and hurried, then broken, until she was half running, half jogging.
She looked over her shoulder. The shadows seemed to surge closer, pricking her with vicious delight.
She ran faster. Down the hall, ducking around a corner.
She just needed to get to her rooms. There was a garden outside her window, the canal flowing beyond its walls.
She could almost hear the quiet lapping of the water against the boat’s hull, the low rumble of its engine vibrating beneath her fingers. Just a little farther—
A wet hand grasped her wrist, at once cold and piercing, and her imagination ran amok as she imagined long nails biting into her skin, a demon’s face appearing out of the darkness, but then she saw the familiar tilt of that sardonic smile, the amber of her eyes, and Jaya bit down a cry as Rhumia yanked her back.
“Always running in the shadows, aren’t you, little bird?” she said.
“H-how?” Jaya said as she took in Rhumia’s dark ripped clothing, her unrestrained hair curling like a thousand snakes. And then in Rhumia’s other hand, she saw her bent, crumpled lotuses. “It was you.”
Rhumia twisted her arm, and Jaya yelped as pain seared up her wrist. She kicked Rhumia’s shin, but the Yumi only yanked her around, slamming her into the wall. Jaya gasped. The orb slipped from her broken fingers, bouncing once, twice.
“What have we here?” Rhumia said as she picked up the orb with her hair.
Jaya twisted viciously, suddenly. Her teeth closed around the Yumi’s ear.
Rhumia jerked away on instinct, Jaya pulling.
There was a sickening crunch, then a tearing, then hot, metallic blood flooded her mouth, her tongue.
Rhumia howled. She staggered back, clutching her torn ear as Jaya spit out her flesh, gagging.
The orb came loose. She tried to grab it when shouts sounded down the hall.
Two guards sprinted toward them. With a sinking sensation, Jaya recognized them as the guards she had encountered before.
“Call for reinforcements! We have two assailants—”
Rhumia dragged her back, and Jaya screamed as she felt a strand cut into her shoulder.
“I am of the Kingdom of Moksh,” Rhumia called out, “and I have caught this assailant under the command of my general. Stay your guns—”
A pulse ripped through the air, missing them. Rhumia snarled. Her hair lengthened, sharpened, and as it did so, she relinquished her pressure on Jaya. Jaya twisted immediately, ducking under her reaching hair and vaulting forward.
Pulses fired behind her. Jaya covered her head with her arms, her heart a flightless thing, pumping wildly in her chest. She saw the orb. Ten paces, five, three—but then a pulse slammed and shattered the glass.
“No!”
The flame roared forward, sensing the pulse shot’s heat, swallowing it, growing. Jaya shrieked.
This couldn’t be happening. She was so close. She was so fucking close! Panic, desperation, fear swallowed her alarm, her pain, as she tried to scoop up the flame, tried to save it. This can’t be happening. This isn’t—
A pulse flared past her ear, singeing her skin.
Jaya fell back with a cry. More pulses shredded the air, and she crawled forward, glass biting into her hands and knees as the flame cackled, leeching heat from the pulse fire.
Dimly, a part of her noted how strange this was.
An Agni flame usually could not live without a host, or a sustained environment like the orb, but then Jaya heard Rhumia’s curses and the wet, startled cry of a guard.
She did not turn back.
She ran.
Down the hall, into her room, slamming open the window, and tumbling into the garden. Her hand swelled with pain. But she did not stop. She rushed to the wall and shimmied up with her good hand. She was halfway up when she felt a hand on her ankle.
“You little bitch,” Rhumia snarled.
Jaya kicked wildly, and her ankle connected with the stub of Rhumia’s ear. The Yumi screamed, falling back, and Jaya used the last of her strength to pull herself up and over the wall. She fell into the canal, water surging up her nostrils, into her ears. She broke the surface, retching.
“JAYA!”
Rhumia’s voice thundered above her, and Jaya saw a black shape reflecting off the water.
For all her worth, all her training, Jaya failed to find a clever strategy now.
She swam desperately, messily, her limbs screaming with effort, with pain, fueled only by her wretched instinct to survive above all else.
Her broken hand smashed against the hull of the boat, and Jaya inhaled sharply to scream. A mistake. Water flooded her mouth, and she coughed, her nose stinging with pain, when another splash sounded down the canal. She turned to find Rhumia, swimming toward her with the awful elegance of a shark.
Fear swept up her pain, and she hauled herself onto the boat. A bridge curved above them, empty for now, but Jaya knew the guards would come racing down in minutes. Blearily, she fired up the panel.
“Come on, come on, please.”
With a groan, the boat rumbled to life. Her heart soared, beating with a wild, senseless hope, when a wet thud came from the back.
She whipped around to see Rhumia slowly clambering onto the boat.
“Jaya,” she said.
Her voice echoed underneath the bridge, seeming to come from everywhere all at once.
“Jaya, stand down. Now.”
Maybe it was her fear, or her grief, or the sudden, vicious desperation to salvage what had been lost, that moved Jaya as she opened her holopod. Holos sprouted to life. In the blue light, she saw Rhumia’s eyes widen.
“Jaya, don’t—”
“You should have left me in peace.”
A sudden, terrible roar reverberated through the air. Rhumia dove into the canal, turning back to the palace, toward her general, and Jaya zipped forward into the canal without waiting to see her lotuses bloom.