The Lotus Empire (The Burning Kingdoms #3)

Chapter 14 Bhumika

BHUMIKA

Weeks of travel in blistering heat and bitter night cold, sleeping in the open with a shawl draped over her upper body to ward off mosquitoes. Weeks of shared meals cooked over a fire, and water drunk from a shared flask. Weeks with no one but Jeevan for company; no one but Jeevan guarding her at night, his saber in hand, his voice gentle when he woke her in the predawn light for another day of walking side by side. She had to remind herself that only Jeevan was there, because her watchers returned again and again, water-drenched, their bowls upheld. They vanished as swiftly and strangely as they arrived, and Jeevan did not see them.

Of course he did not. They were tangled with the urgent knowledge inside her, that insistent drumbeat drawing her forward. In every place she and Jeevan walked or rested, she felt her knowledge call to her. Once, the yaksa walked here. Once, an army marched through this village.

The pain in her skull woke her one night. Her back ached. A stone was digging into her hip. She removed the shawl over her body and sat up, her spine creaking ominously.

The moon was full overhead. It shone against the bright metal of Jeevan’s saber. He was sitting cross-legged, back straight, blade on his lap. His eyes were closed. He’d fallen asleep on watch.

She stood up. As the undergrowth snapped beneath her feet, he startled awake. His grip tightened brutally on the saber hilt, then released. He raised his head to meet her eyes. “Bhumika,” he said, his voice hoarse with exhaustion. “Sleep.”

She kneeled by him.

“You sleep,” she said. “I can keep watch.”

He shook his head. He said nothing, but she could see the stubborn refusal in the shape of his jaw, his shadowed eyes. How much had he slept on their journey? Had he been trying to stay awake every night, sleeping only when his body forced him to?

“If the yaksa come, a blade will not stop them,” she said gently. “But they are not coming.”

“They may yet,” he said, his voice low. “And I am afraid a blade is all I have.”

Flashes of knowledge swam behind her eyes—of cosmic waters. Magic winding from waters through skin.

The knowledge in her was stolen from a greater sea, cut off from those cosmic waters. She was cut off from those cosmic waters, and all the magic within them. In that lay the answer for why no yaksa had followed her.

They cannot find me. There is nothing to find.

“I am nothing to them,” she said. “If they could find me—if they were searching for me—they would have me already. But I am as good as dead, in their eyes. A husk.”

“You don’t remember them,” he said, his tired gaze sharpening.

“But I know them. Knowing is all I have.”

He said nothing to that. She shook her head.

“If you will not rest, then I will keep watch with you,” she told him.

She did not move from his side that night. Eventually, she slept once more.

When she woke, dawn’s light was rising and Jeevan was asleep, leaning against her shoulder.

After that, they took turns keeping watch at night, and his exhaustion visibly eased. He focused his efforts instead on ensuring that they kept their distance from other travelers. There were many other people traveling away from Ahiranya—some toward Alor, and others in any direction they could find. Ahiranya’s borders had closed, the trees growing sharp and cruel.

Villages near the border with Ahiranya had become infected with rot, their crops destroyed, their people sickened with flowers rising through their skin. It was hard to avoid those strangers, but Jeevan did so carefully, leading Bhumika away from the main roads and trails. He told Bhumika about their plight with simple words, his eyes distant.

She knew it pained him to see them. But she did not feel for them, as he did, until they crossed paths with a family who had made camp by a river. One of the adults—an Ahiranyi man with green unfurling up his spine—was rocking an infant. The baby was screaming, hands curled into furious fists. Its cries were plaintive.

Jeevan’s hand was on her arm, urging her away from the river to the anonymity of the trees. But Bhumika was frozen. A feeling was welling up in her—one she had no way to comprehend. It felt like grief. She turned and walked away, blood beating in her ears, and eventually found herself kneeling farther downriver, her knees in the water.

She pressed her hands into the river as if she were trying to grasp something within it. Somewhere there was another river, and it held the best of her. It held before .

Before was forbidden to her. She knew that, just as she knew hunger or tiredness or pain. It was a knowledge that lived in her flesh. Before was one memory alone. A rending. And after the rending—a knowledge that lived inside her. That ached in her skull and her teeth and her heart. The knowledge was what she carried, and it was what she was, and she could not rest until it was shared with a person fit to wield it.

Her reflection in the water was rippling, fractured. In its dark gloss she saw veiled faces—dripping water like tears.

She’d recoiled from them and felt Jeevan’s fingertips settle against her shoulder.

“Drink,” he urged, bending to offer her a water flask. She took it. “It’s clean. Safer. You’ll feel better for it.”

She took it from him and noticed his hands: those strong, scarred, callused fingers, so much larger than her own; the paler strip of skin just beneath the sleeve of his tunic, untouched by the sun. She noted each small detail, grounding herself into her own body.

She lifted the water to her mouth and looked up at him.

His face was still lowered to her, which allowed her to look at her leisure. His face. The hard angles of it, the bristle of hair at his jaw, not quite a full beard, but something more unkempt and unshaven, as if he were used to a neatness that he had set aside. Had he been clean-shaven when their journey began? She could not remember.

“We will not travel any farther today,” he said. “Let me prepare some food. You must rest.”

He walked a little away from her. Then he crouched down and lowered his pack, and began to prepare a fire.

She rose from the water—her skirt uncomfortably soaked—and settled herself in the shade of a nearby tree. She was glad he had not cajoled her out of the water. He had allowed her the space to feel the great and awful thing she had felt.

She did not know how to cook, or at least, her hands did not know it. She and Jeevan had figured that out early, with only minimal disaster. But it occurred to her, as she crouched and watched, that perhaps she could teach her hands if she wanted to.

They ate. Potted achaar, roti. Then he began to pack everything away, blotting out the fire with dust and his boot.

“Wait,” she said. He stopped.

“Is something wrong?” His forehead furrowed; his eyes fixed on her. She stood and walked toward him.

“Would you be honest with me?” she asked.

“I have always been honest with you,” he replied.

“Tell me why I matter to you,” Bhumika said. “Tell me why you travel with me.”

He was silent for a long moment. He tilted his face away from her own, concealing his expression.

“I should not have asked,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She turned, preparing to continue their journey.

Another pause, and then his footsteps began to echo her own.

“Once,” he said, his voice low behind her, “you won my loyalty. You saved my life. You gave it purpose.”

“Is that why you protect me?” she asked.

A pause. A heartbeat of silence, as his footsteps stilled. Then began again. “Yes,” he said.

At least now she knew what it sounded like when he lied.

“There is a wound in me,” she said. “You know this, I expect. But I find I am constantly reaching, in my nature, for something…” Her hands twitched at her sides. Her chest was aching. Grief. That was what she had been feeling. “Something I left behind,” she finished.

He was abruptly by her side. She realized, as he hovered beside her, not quite touching her and deliberately not looking at her, that there were tears in her eyes.

She wiped them away with her knuckles. He offered her cloth—clean bandaging fished from that bottomless pack of his. “Thank you,” she murmured, a little stiffly. Daubed her eyes again.

“You do not have to feel pain,” he said gruffly. She looked at him; through the blur of her tears, his stern face was softened. “I promised long ago that I would carry your grief for you. So lay it in my hands.”

So I do have something to grieve for, then , she thought.

“Thank you,” she said to him. She crumpled the bandage small in her hands. Such a small thing, a phrase of thanks. It did not encompass the tender thing in her chest—this grateful, wounded beat of her heart that knew him, relied upon him, as the parched soil relied on the balm of rain. “Thank you, Jeevan,” she said again.

Alor lay ahead of them. With determination, she forced herself to stop crying and began moving again. Her knowledge thrummed with every footstep. Around her, between the trees, her ghostly watchers moved with her, and Jeevan’s footsteps matched her own, solid and trustworthy.