The Lotus Empire (The Burning Kingdoms #3)

Chapter 7 Priya

PRIYA

Reshaping the mahal was a good place to begin.

She could break the earth with a casual breath, but carefully bowing trees to carry the weight of a domed ceiling, or closing the fractures in the columns that held up the roof with thick sap and root, was work that required absolute focus. When she wasn’t working, her brain was full of Bhumika, and the hungers of the yaksa, and the heartache in her own chest, and all those feelings like rot-riddled roots knotted her up until she couldn’t breathe through them. Focusing on the mahal pushed it all away.

Sometimes, after a day spent at work, she felt nothing at all. Just calm so vast it was like the deathless waters, shaping her into something hollow and new. It was bliss.

She soon moved on to the task of shoring up Hiranaprastha’s defenses. New traps in the forest. New walls of thorn and root, and new pits of spear-sharp wood to keep enemies at bay. The defenses they would need against Parijatdvipa—against Malini —were vast. She knew Malini’s stubbornness and cunning.

Her chest ached. She buried the thought of Malini.

She considered asking Ganam or one of the other mask-keepers to help her but soon decided against it. She’d known what once- and twice-born strength was like. It was nothing to her thrice-born power, and even less than nothing, somehow, to the strength Mani Ara had given her.

That strength still wasn’t enough.

Mani Ara , she prayed, as she walked barefoot on sun-touched marble, as the leaves and flowers that rose and withered on her skin turned to the light. Eldest yaksa, if I am your priestess, then speak to me. If I am your priestess, then give me the strength you offered me when I raised a river and murdered an army.

Give me the strength to destroy my enemies once more. Let me keep Ahiranya safe.

But still, when she reached for Mani Ara, when she prayed, she found nothing. No matter what she did, the results were the same: Her hands and her magic reaching and reaching, straining for a power they couldn’t touch.

Kritika wouldn’t stop trailing after her.

Through corridors bursting with vines, down a narrow walkway with a living carpet of blue-green flowers that rippled like water, across a hall with columns of ancient trees. The older woman followed Priya through them all with all the bullish determination of a general going to battle against enemy forces.

“There are people who need to speak to you,” she was saying. Again. “The harvest and grain supplies are things you must care about. You need to take up the burdens of leadership.”

Priya wiped a hand across her forehead. It was midday, and the heat was relentless. She couldn’t sink into her magic with Kritika prattling at her, and now Priya was sweaty and annoyed, and very ready to be left alone.

“Then help me deal with the harvest. Help me lead. How many times do I have to say it, Kritika? I’m not Bhumika. I need you to do what’s needful.”

“The yaksa have made you strong enough for the burdens of your position,” Kritika said. There was a plaintive edge to her fervent voice, as if she wanted reassurance that Priya had, in fact, been shaped into a perfect leader.

Well. Tough.

That isn’t what they’ve made me for. The thought was a voice flowering up inside Priya’s skull. It was barely her own.

“Maybe they made me smart enough to delegate,” Priya said dryly.

Kritika muttered something unsavory under her breath in response.

“What did you say?” Priya asked, because she clearly yearned for death.

Instead of replying, Kritika said slowly and firmly, “We mask-keepers can only act and serve Ahiranya if we know the will of the yaksa.”

“Then ask the yaksa.”

“You are the High Elder!” Kritika snapped. “Only you can speak for them. They are great spirits, Elder Priya—they only ask for worship, they only look through us, as if we are nothing. But you…” Her voice trailed off, choked with feeling.

“I what?” Priya asked.

“They look at you,” Kritika said after a moment. “They speak to you. So you must lead us. Do you understand?” Her voice shook. “What if we anger them?”

Priya swallowed.

“Tell me what you think must be done, and how it must be done, and I’ll… I’ll make sure it’s the will of the yaksa,” she said finally. “And get the highborn here. I know they’re hiding scared, but we can use them. They have gold, and food supplies. And soldiers. We’ll need those soon enough.”

Kritika sucked in a sharp breath. “The highborn are not,” she said, “in any position to help Ahiranya.”

Priya’s own footsteps faltered, her stomach going cold, some instinctual part of her recognizing what that breath—and those words—meant.

“Are they all dead? Or just most of them?”

“No,” Kritika said. “They’re not dead, Elder. They await your guidance. As the yaksa bade them to.”

Still, dread gnawed at her heart, like a canker of larvae in a ripe fruit.

She was silent—for too long, maybe, because Kritika huffed a sigh.

“There is so much you’re ignorant of,” Kritika said.

How could she grow less ignorant if no one would tell her what she didn’t know? How could she fix anything if Kritika spent all her time haranguing Priya, rather than helping? Rage swelled in her. It would be easy to make Kritika grovel and beg for forgiveness. She acted like she knew what Priya was, but she didn’t, not at all. Priya was Mani Ara’s chosen. There was more sap in her than blood, more cruelty than kindness.

It would take nothing to wrap a vine around Kritika’s throat and snap her neck clean.

Saliva filled her mouth. The strength of rage left her all at once. She felt sickened by her own thoughts.

“I’m trying,” Priya said tiredly. “Believe me, I am.”

She couldn’t look at Kritika now, but she heard the older woman’s low sigh.

“You must rule, girl,” said Kritika slowly, her voice finally softening into something real—something that recognized the Priya in front of her, all shattered and stitched-together parts, all bared teeth and grief. There was tiredness in her voice, too. “Whatever you once believed of yourself—there is no one else.”

Priya found Ganam. He was leaning over a balcony’s edge, staring down at the training grounds, where a handful of soldiers were practicing with hand sickles.

“I hear you’re in charge of the guards now that Jeevan is gone,” she said, leaning on the edge next to him.

“Hear?” Ganam repeated. “Who did you ask, the trees?”

“People still talk to me,” Priya said defensively. “Some of them definitely think I’m a yaksa—”

“I did see Khalida run away from you yesterday,” Ganam said agreeably.

“—but others are more sensible,” Priya finished. She scowled at him and his mouth quirked up into a smile. “Are you more sensible?”

“You’re still Priya,” he said. “You’re nothing like Elder Bhumika, but you’ll do.”

A laugh leapt out of her, ragged at the edges.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll have to do, won’t I? I need to talk to you about the Parijatdvipan army. Their soldiers are coming for Ahiranya, and we need to be prepared.”

He patiently answered her questions about their weaponry and their numbers of guards, the people who’d run from the mahal when Jeevan vanished, and the ones who’d stayed. But there was a faint tension around his mouth that didn’t fade when she gave him suggestions on how to defend the city.

“Are my thoughts really that foolish?” Priya asked. “Come on. Be honest.”

He shook his head.

“You’re no expert, but you do well enough,” he said. A pause. “Kritika trusts the yaksa. And most mask-keepers feel the same. But I… when I think of war…” He trailed off. Then, in a flat voice, he said, “I do what’s needful. But it strikes me that the yaksa can defend Ahiranya without us. They’ve already turned our trees into a cage. What are we needed for? They’re gods. We’re just flesh.”

“No,” Priya said, shaking her head. “They need us.”

They would not have tended to and tortured Priya beneath the Hirana if she weren’t vital to them. But it was more than just her. They needed Ahiranya. They needed the rot-riven, the once-born, they needed …

She was on the edge of some kind of vast knowledge, a heavy thing she couldn’t quite face or touch. Every time she reached for it, that truth eluded her.

She wished Bhumika were here. Bhumika would have been able to grasp it.

“It’s the will of the yaksa that we be ready to fight,” Priya said instead. “Will you help me?”

“Of course I will,” he said. “You’re the High Elder.”

Below them, the guards were putting away their weapons. She could hear their voices rising and falling, though she couldn’t make out the words. They vanished into one of the entrances to the mahal.

Ganam leaned back and cleared his throat.

“I have something for you,” he said. “From Elder Bhumika. She left it for you.”

He reached into his tunic and drew out a folded paper. Priya took it from him and unfolded it.

She recognized Bhumika’s handwriting immediately.

The letter trembled in Priya’s hand. It took her a moment to realize that it was her hand that was shaking, not the paper.

“Where did you find this?” Priya asked in a whisper.

“In her study,” Ganam said. “I broke the door. I made a guess that if you came back, you’d want it. And if you didn’t…” His hand flexed at his side; a spasm of feeling. “Maybe one day Padma would,” he added, voice low. “That’s what I thought.”

“Have you read it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s—fine.”

Priya couldn’t read it. The words were swimming before her eyes.

“Maybe you should go somewhere quiet,” he said, looking carefully away from her. Letting her rub a furious hand against her own cheeks, wiping unwanted tears away.

“Right,” she said thinly. “Maybe I should.”

She went to the only place she could think of going.

Bhumika’s old chambers had once been called the rose palace. Now they looked more like a ruin than any other part of the mahal. An impressive feat. Cracks in the ceiling let the light pour through. She could hear birds trilling, rustling where they were nested in the hollows left by fallen and fissured stone.

There, in the song and hush and decay of Bhumika’s chambers, Priya finally read the letter.

Priya—

—perhaps you’re dead and gone—

—I know that if you are alive—

The stone beneath Priya’s feet began to splinter. Hairline fractures. Her vision was wet, wavering again.

I hope you can forgive me for leaving you behind.

The sister she’d known would never have run from Ahiranya. Never would have left her own child behind. And Priya wanted to believe Bhumika had done it with good reason. But all the faith in her had been twisted out of shape. Priya wasn’t the same woman she’d once been—the woman who believed she could cure the rot, and help Ahiranya have a future, and maybe even have one herself.

Priya had set aside hope. Or thought she had.

But she must have kept hope alive somewhere deep within, because her body felt heavy and her heart ached. And she was swaying, leaning into the wall face-first, and pressing her face into the crook of her arm, and her own teeth into her skin, and she was screaming, screaming, muffling the sound as best she could.

She didn’t know how long she cried. But the sun moved, the shadows shifting across the floor until she was in a pure spill of hot sunshine. She breathed in and out, and wiped her face again with her hand, for what good it would do. She was sore-headed from weeping, and tired, and angry with herself and the foolish softness of her own heart.

No more , she thought. And resolution settled, cold and steady in her bones. She had told herself she had to protect her people. Protect whatever Ahiranya was now, for the sake of those who lived inside it. That hadn’t changed. She had to be pragmatic.

Had to think of Padma and Rukh, and hold that like a shining thread—a golden thing, stronger and braver than mere hope.

Maybe breaking and weeping should have felled her like a great tree. Stopped her from going on. But that was not the way Priya was. She’d never been able to stop. She straightened up instead, the vines haloing the walls of Bhumika’s chambers uncoiling and knotting around her, like tangles of grief-rended hair. She sucked in a breath through gritted teeth, then turned on her heel and walked away from the chambers.

She went in search of a yaksa.

She went to the closest yaksa. She could feel them—deep in the orchard, a presence like a pulse, like a call.

The orchard was utterly changed. The old fruit trees were rich with rot. But there were new trees, too—glowing with life, blood running through their roots. And seated between the trees, legs folded, ankles buried in soil—

“Yaksa,” she said. Bowed her head, and raised it. “I need to speak with you.”

The yaksa who wore Sanjana’s face looked up from where she’d been contemplating the ground—sleeping, or dreaming, or communing. Priya didn’t know.

“I thought you would go to your brother,” the yaksa said, and her voice was a lush thing, all susurrating leaves, damp from a storm.

Not my brother , Priya thought. And that was exactly why she had not gone to him. If she had to choose a wound to pick at, an old one was preferable. Her grief for Sanjana was as far off as her childhood. The loss of Ashok was still fresh and bloody, too painful to touch. She didn’t want to face the yaksa wearing his skin. Not now.

“Yaksa,” she said. “To face Parijatdvipa, I’m going to need to be stronger. You… beneath the Hirana. You all asked me to yield. You meant to Mani Ara. That is how I’ll get power, isn’t it? Power to fight Parijatdvipa. To save it.”

The yaksa slowly inclined her head.

“But I can’t reach Mani Ara,” Priya said. “Yaksa, please. Help me.”

“You’re not really trying.”

“I am.”

“I have seen into your soul,” the yaksa said, as dappled light reshaped the contours of her face—shifting it into softer and harsher edges as she rose and walked toward Priya, as she looked at Priya, her eyes all shadow. If she’d been human, Priya would have called the look on her face disdain . “I have seen your nature flayed open. I know all that you are.” Her mouth widened. Not quite a smile. Something with too many teeth. “And still I don’t know why Mani Ara chose you,” she went on, viperously soft. “I do not know why I have to teach you this lesson, and why you ask me foolish questions when the answer is clear: Try harder .”

Sanjana began to glide past her.

“Mani Ara won’t answer me,” Priya said quietly. “I think… I think she’s choosing not to.”

The yaksa stopped, and with her the trees seemed to still; their leaves were frozen, alien to the breeze trying to draw them into movement. So Priya pressed on.

“I called to her when I walked across Parijatdvipa. When I walked—here. Home. And she didn’t answer. I looked for her in the sangam, when you all tested me and asked me for my loyalty, and she wasn’t there.”

The yaksa’s head turned with a click. Facing her.

If Priya hadn’t known better, she would have thought that was fear flitting across the yaksa’s face. But there was nothing fearful or animal in it, a heartbeat later. Only a smile, curving that mouth. Amused.

“Do you think the greatest of us obeys your whims?”

“No,” Priya said. “I don’t.”

“Give her prayer. Give her offerings. Give her yourself, wholeheartedly. And then perhaps she will answer you. But for now…” A rustling sigh. “You can feel all of Ahiranya, can’t you?”

Priya nodded silently.

“You are Mani Ara’s creature,” the yaksa continued. “More than a mere mortal. More even than a temple daughter. Wherever the rot spreads, our magic spreads. Where it goes, the soil and the trees change to welcome us. Where Mani Ara can go, you can go. Because you are more than any elder before you—not because you are deserving, but because you are chosen.” The yaksa’s breath, the fragrance of rainfall and loam, touched her cheek. Then the yaksa released her. “Reach. Look.”

Priya squeezed her eyes shut. She stretched her senses, feeling all of Ahiranya laid out around her. Feeling beyond it. Reaching, reaching—

She winced. Pain shot through her skull.

The yaksa tutted.

“Perhaps this will help,” she said. “Turn your head. Open your eyes.”

Like an obedient puppet, Priya did.

Behind her, in a newly raised bed of vines, lay an offering.

She walked toward it and kneeled down, green crunching beneath her knees.

It was a mask. Beautifully wrought, its wood polished and dark, emanating heat.

The crown mask.

She touched her fingertips to it and felt a small shiver of power rush through her. Before she’d become thrice-born—before she’d traveled three times through the deathless waters and risked death with each immersion—touching the mask would have peeled the flesh from her bones.

She placed all her fingertips to it. Five points. Then she clasped it and raised it up. Beneath it, the vines that had held it were withered and strange.

This mask had belonged to Bhumika. Because Bhumika had been the High Elder.

But Bhumika was gone. And there was no one left but Priya. Kritika had been right about that.

“Keep your spirit open,” the yaksa said. “Be watchful. And see what Mani Ara’s strength can do.”

“Thank you, yaksa,” Priya said. “I’m grateful.”

“It’s meant for a High Elder,” Sanjana said lightly. “You should have asked for it long ago.”

As Priya looked at the mask—as she felt its power—she thought of what Ganam had said. That the yaksa should have been powerful enough to fight alone.

She thought of fire, and the fury in Malini’s eyes, when Priya had stabbed her through.

“Yaksa,” Priya said carefully. “I—”

“Speak.”

“Even with Mani Ara’s power…” She turned the mask over in her hands again. “The Parijatdvipans will have fire. Mothers’ fire, or something akin to it.”

She believed—hoped—Malini would not willingly burn. She was less sure Malini would not burn others as her brother had.

A laugh left Sanjana. A high, thin reed of noise.

“They have the promise of fire. But we already have the rot. We have already seeded ourselves in the worlds: in their flesh, their fields. Do you understand? Of course you do not.” The trees seemed to laugh with her, seemed to creak and shudder. “To destroy us they must burn everything they need to live. They must burn their own kind. The world is almost ours. They simply do not know it yet.”

Almost. The word rattled through her.

“I understand,” Priya said. “Thank you, yaksa.”

Another of those strange, sharp laughs. And Sanjana was gone.

Almost.

Somehow it rested on Priya. Well. There was no point waiting any longer.

Priya pressed the mask to her face and felt the power of it fill her to the brim.