The Lotus Empire (The Burning Kingdoms #3)

Chapter 23 Priya

PRIYA

Rukh was waiting with the children at the base of the Hirana, Padma on the ground next to him. There were so many people milling around: servants from the mahal, and soldiers, and pilgrims. But the mask-keepers were closest to the children, surrounding them in a crescent, holding the tide of people back.

“Where are the yaksa?” Priya asked one of them.

“Not here, Elder,” the mask-keeper said. “When the one who… the one…”

“The one who looks like Ashok, I know. He left them here alone?”

The mask-keeper nodded.

“When he left, he told us to stay here. We were ordered to wait for you.”

Priya could have sworn.

He’d always expected Priya to care for them, hadn’t he? She’d begged to protect them for nothing.

Well. Never mind. Whether she’d played into his hands or not, she was where she needed to be.

She slipped between the mask-keepers.

The temple children the yaksa had brought her were all young. Fifteen in number. The oldest was a boy, tall and painfully thin in a way that suggested he’d recently had a growth spurt. Many were dressed in worn-out but cared-for clothing: stitches at the sleeves, patches in their tunics. But others wore fine cloth, dyed in deep blues, reds, greens.

“Bow to your Elder,” a mask-keeper said sharply, and as the children scrambled, Priya said, “Don’t. There’s no need.”

Some froze. The tallest boy was still standing tall. Arms clasped behind him, his blue kurta pristine. She met his eyes, and his jaw tightened a little, trembling with nerves and hate.

“You’re highborn,” she observed.

He gave a jerky nod.

“Yes, Elder.”

“What’s your name?”

“Ashish,” he said.

“Tell me how you ended up here.”

His jaw flexed. He looked away. “The yaksa brought me, of course,” he said. The obviously, you idiot was heavily implied. She was pleased he’d managed to avoid saying it. “My… my parents were given the rot by the yaksa. For not being loyal enough. But the yaksa let them live, and they’re grateful. Faithful. So when the yaksa came for me, I was happy to go.”

He’d need to learn to lie better if he wanted to survive serving the yaksa.

“And you?” Priya asked, bending down to meet the eyes of the small girl next to him.

“I’m not a highborn,” she piped up. “But my mother got spared from dying of the rot, and she promised me to the yaksa for it.”

“And your name?”

“Pallavi.” The boy kicked her, and she said obediently, “Pallavi, Elder .”

Priya worked through the group, learning names and origins. The youngest of them was probably only four and couldn’t answer Priya properly.

It made her sick.

Finally, Priya straightened.

“Do you know what it means to be a temple child?” Priya asked them, gaze sweeping over them.

A long silence followed, where they all stared in different directions.

“It means you serve the yaksa,” Rukh said finally. Priya shot him a look, and he shrugged.

“It means worshipping,” Ashish said, bolder now that someone else had spoken.

“To have magic and powers,” another child said with a worrying amount of enthusiasm.

“Yes,” Priya said after a moment. “All those things. But first, it means you obey me, you understand?”

They nodded.

“This boy Rukh is going to help keep an eye on you,” Priya said, gesturing at Rukh.

“Is he a temple child like us?” a soft-voiced girl asked.

“No,” said Priya. “But he’s my family, just like you’ll be. So you can trust him.”

She refused to meet Rukh’s eyes. Family . She’d never called him that before. But it was true. The only family she’d ever valued had been made by choice and circumstance, and never by blood. It was all she knew, and all that mattered.

These children were hers now.

“I’ll show you somewhere to sleep,” she said to them. She should have taken them up the Hirana to sleep, but the thought filled her with nausea. Smoke, and Nandi’s dead eyes, and bloody terror worming through her heart—no. She wouldn’t send them there to live, and wouldn’t go herself. But she’d keep them close.

Padma was crawling toward her, so Priya leaned down and scooped her up. Padma promptly bit her arm. Priya swore, wincing as Padma kicked her for good measure.

“She wants to walk,” Rukh murmured helpfully.

“Fine—Padma, if you want to walk, you can walk.” She lowered Padma to the ground, holding her by the arm.

Padma did a smug, determined waddle forward. She looked up at Priya’s eyes, and Priya drew on her reserves of patience and nudged her in the right direction.

“We’ll go slowly,” she said, and saw one of the temple children smile, from the corner of her eye. That was good. A step in the right direction.

She took the children to her own rooms.

She roped Khalida and Rukh into helping her arrange new bedding and makeshift curtains to divide up the room. By the time night fell, the children had been fed and given a few more clothes, and bidden to sleep.

The room was hot with so many bodies inside it. In the silences between the noise of insects and plants moving in the breeze, she could hear muffled sobs.

Priya hated this. There was nothing more she could do, or so she told herself. But it felt like a lie. It was a lie. She could have refused to allow the children to remain. Could have summoned Mani Ara’s strength. Could have…

Could have let Arahli Ara hurt or kill the people she loved. And that was no choice at all.

She sat cross-legged on the floor by the bed where Padma and Rukh slept. Her skin itched with anger—at herself, at the yaksa—and there was no chance she’d sleep tonight. Instead she did the only thing she was good for, and placed the crown mask on her face, and tried to reach for Mani Ara.

It would have been better to go to the deathless waters. But tonight she didn’t want to leave the children alone.

Deep, coiling breaths. Breaths winding her further and further into her body and through her body. The sangam waters rising in her.

Her shadowy body within three twining rivers. Her body of flowers. She remained there in the waters as the hours lengthened and melted around her.

She didn’t know what else she could do to seek out Mani Ara.

Her mind sank into darkness.

Arahli Ara’s hands on her wrists, his face like her brother’s. Malini’s hands on her face, her scalp. The fury and salt of her tears. Bhumika gone—nothing left of her but a scrap of words, a child. She’d lost them all and still had more to lose.

Sapling.

Mani Ara’s voice rushed through her like water breaking a dam. She fell hard back into her skin; sucked in a deep, gasping breath before pressing her mouth shut to hold the noise in. Power had followed her from the sangam, dizzying her. Her vision was swimming.

Roses had bloomed profusely around her.

She clumsily tried to brush them away—and felt them wither around her, turning to decay and then dust. Hands brushed them away. But they were not her hands.

Her head snapped up. The yaksa with Ashok’s face—Arahli Ara—was crouched over her.

She hadn’t sensed him. Her blood was burning hot inside her and her mind was an overfull cup, spilling magic. It made her vision dance. She took off the crown mask with trembling hands.

“Yaksa,” she breathed out. “Why are you here?”

“The children,” he said simply. “They should be on the Hirana. Close to the deathless waters and the stars alike.”

“I wanted to keep them with me,” Priya said, catching her breath. “And this…” She looked around her room. Bhumika’s old room. “This is where I want to be. Will you make me take them there now?”

“No. They are yours.”

“You were always going to give them to me, yaksa. Respectfully, you tricked me.”

“Saying ‘respectfully’ does not make your words respectful,” he murmured. But there was nothing sharp or monstrous in his voice. He’d pitched it low enough not to wake the children around her.

He watched her with deep, strange eyes—mirrors to the faint moonlight seeping in through the windows. But the darkness made the rest of him more human, concealing the leaves of his hair, the whorls of his skin.

“When I reared the first temple children, I began with their strength,” he said finally. “I taught them to trust their limbs. To resist pain. To persevere. To run and to fight. Then I led them to the edge of the Hirana and bade them to climb down.”

A difficult journey for any child.

“And then? What did you do with the ones who didn’t fall? Take them to the waters?”

“It is a long path to the waters,” he said. “Many years. As it was for you.”

He wanted her to make the temple children strong. She swallowed back anger. Nodded. She thought of Ashok, and their shared childhood, and her grief threatened to overwhelm.

“After strength, what comes next? What did you teach those temple children?”

“Then,” he said in Ashok’s voice, “I taught you to use a knife and the power of your rage.”

A flash of memory scythed through her. Ashok’s hands on her own. A knife between them. Showing her how to move. How to fight. How to cut .

“They are yours, Elder Priya,” he said. “But they continue to be mine, also.”

And so do you.

“Ashok,” she said.

A whisper of leaves. Then he was gone.