The Lotus Empire (The Burning Kingdoms #3)

Chapter 25 Priya

PRIYA

The night when Arahli Ara visited her—when she heard Mani Ara’s voice whisper again in her skull—Priya’s fever began.

She hid herself in the only private place she could find—a storeroom in a particularly damaged corridor. But Rukh found her anyway.

“I’ve got some water and some kichadi, and some wet cloths too,” he announced as he came in, balancing a truly alarming number of items in his arms. “Do you need anything else?”

“To be left alone,” she groaned, but she took the cloth from him anyway and pressed it to her hot face. “Where is Padma?”

“I left her with the temple children. I… I know I shouldn’t leave her alone, but…”

“With Ashish?”

“Yes.”

She relaxed.

“That’s fine, then.” The oldest temple child was uncannily good with the younger children. “Go.”

“I don’t care about getting sick,” Rukh insisted.

“Well, I care if you get sick,” said Priya, but she didn’t truly have the heart to send him away. Besides, she was almost sure the fever was part of her magic—a symptom of that broken dam of power inside her, that rush of strength that had made her eyes swim.

“You don’t need to look after me,” Priya said, in a last attempt to get rid of him.

“You’ve looked after me,” he said quietly, after a moment. “You still do. It’s only fair. Now sit up, Pri, and eat.”

She dreamt of Malini again.

The fever burned in her. The fever was her power growing and growing, blooming to life inside her. Changing her.

In the dream, she felt her power crack wider. A cosmic egg, a golden yolk. She exhaled and watched the dream splinter around her. The imperial court’s walls cracked. A fissure formed ahead of her—ahead of Malini, too. The fracture was a lightning burst through stone. It grew, and it grew.

Malini was not looking at the break in front of them. Her head was turned. She was looking at Priya.

Malini was watching her cannily, hungrily. Priya felt a tug in her chest, painful and strong.

“I can feel it,” Malini said. Her rich voice was a hand at Priya’s throat, drawing her another step forward. “Power. What are you doing, Priya?”

The walls of the court of the imperial mahal had splintered entirely. They should have fallen, but they stood, all their shards like cracked shell, light oozing through their frayed edges. And between the shards, between the light—

Priya took an unsteady step toward the path that lay before them both.

The path was green. It smelled of salt-rain, of somewhere distant where the sea pressed its strange hands to soil. Priya had never seen the sea. Only imagined it. Only heard it described in Malini’s words. Vast, vast like a mirror of the sky.

She took another step forward. Heard a whisper of skirts beside her, and watched as Malini’s shadow melded with her own. Malini came to stand close to her, brow furrowed, blood dripping from her chest, marking a path beneath her feet.

Priya turned her head. Their eyes met again.

“Tell me what you’ve done,” said Malini.

“Paths,” Priya said. “Malini, I think. I think somehow I’ve made new paths—”

Priya woke up.

She walked into the depths of the forest with her hair still wild, her feet bare, clothes rumpled. She went to the bower of bones.

The seeker’s path lay before her: that ancient path through the forest where time moved strangely and a person could become lost for weeks or reach Srugna in the blink of an eye.

There were new paths visible between the trees. She could feel them—as if she were a tree and the paths were her own roots. Above her the bones bound by ribbons to the trees were utterly still. There was no wind here. No noise at all.

Her fever was fading. She could finally think.

She hadn’t chosen to make these paths. But Mani Ara’s magic had made them through her. She was Mani Ara’s way into the world—her hands, her beloved. And so Mani Ara had used her.

Thudding footsteps behind her. There were mask-keepers there—one once-born, another twice-born. They must have felt the paths appear too.

“You took a while,” she said.

“We—we went to find you. But the boy Rukh said you were sick, and when we went to your sickbed—”

“I’m not sick anymore,” Priya said. “Don’t worry. You don’t need to explain. You’re here now.”

She took a step closer to one path, feeling it out with her bare feet and in the taste on her tongue. Salt-rain. Strange winds. She’d dreamt this, and it was real, and Malini had dreamt it too.

Somehow Malini was part of this.

There was a cough behind her. An uneasy rustle of bodies. She turned and saw the patrol of mask-keepers waiting expectantly, their anxiety palpable.

“Elder?” one prompted.

“Ignore it for now,” Priya said. “It’s the work of the yaksa. Nothing to trouble over.”

They didn’t relax at her words. Their eyes were wide, black and frightened in the flicker of their lanterns and the night-dark.

“Keep on patrolling,” she said.

“We should walk you back, Elder.”

Priya snorted and shook her head.

“No, I’ll be fine.” She wasn’t going anywhere they could follow anyway. She needed to go to the deathless waters. “Keep away from the bower tonight,” she said.

“Of course.” They bobbed their heads, eyes wide.

She walked away from the new path—the salt of it, and its mouth, all thorn-toothed trees, silver-striped, waiting to swallow bodies whole.

A voice in the forest called her name. The green around her shivered. Turned as if called.

Yaksa , she thought. And turned with it.

She found Chandni in a lake within a clearing. The green led her, and there Chandni was: silver-skinned, bark-whorled. Deep in the water.

“It’s almost the dark of the moon,” Chandni said. Her voice was a silvery ripple. “Priya. Little elder. When it comes, tell your mask-keepers that my kin and I have decided it is time for them to enter the deathless waters again, where they will become true elders. Tell them we’ll await them.”

“I will, yaksa,” Priya said. A thud in her chest. So there would be more deaths, soon. And maybe—finally—other thrice-born. True elders.

“You’ve opened paths,” the yaksa said. “Where do you wish to go, little one?”

“They’re Mani Ara’s paths,” Priya said. “I’ll go where she wishes me to go, of course.”

A musical hum. “Then you must speak to her.”

“I will, yaksa.”

Priya looked at the yaksa’s reflection in the water. Her mirror-self was even less human: silvery, liquid, and changing. She thought, not for the first time, of the real Chandni, who’d maybe been her mother. Who had killed her siblings, and given her the chance to live.

There were things stirring beneath the surface of the water, things growing, blooming in shadows, breaking her reflection into nothing but ink.

“Come into the water,” the yaksa called. The water rippled again, a beckoning hand.

Priya didn’t bother to argue. She’d expected this from the moment she’d been drawn into the clearing, under the hushed arch of those trees. She knotted her sari so it wouldn’t billow, then lowered herself in.

The water was blood-warm. She tried to ignore the feeling of the silt under her feet, uneven like teeth, silken-rough like tangled hair. The yaksa held out her hand, and Priya took it.

“Look,” Chandni ordered gently again. And Priya looked—down at Chandni’s palm, and the flower held within it.

A lotus. But not a lotus. A thing that had bloomed in shadows under the water, summoned by her presence, her magic, her call. Its petals were perfect, its roots long and coiling. It was rot-riven, there was no denying that; she could see it in the puckered sheen of it. In the way its roots pulsed, like something with a heartbeat…

“It took us so long to return,” Chandni said. “So long to sacrifice pieces of ourselves so that we could change the world to fit us. But look what we’ve made. You think the rot is a curse. An ugliness. You recoil from it, all of your kin and kind. But it is beautiful, little one. Can’t you see it?”

The yaksa pressed the lotus into Priya’s hand. Priya felt the weight of it. Blood ran between her fingers. She stared down with a detached kind of horror, very far from her own body, outwardly calm.

“You don’t understand the beauty and fragility of your own bodies,” the yaksa was saying, with singsong softness. “You see the beauty in an ancient tree, a flower, and fail to see it in yourself: in the architecture of your lungs, the veins and bones that make a thing of you. Can’t you see how beautiful it is, for us to be one?”

Priya should have lied. But she could not make her mouth move into a yes, could not force herself to nod. The yaksa closed Priya’s own fingers over the lotus. An inexorable pressure.

“Can’t you see what a beautiful thing we have made of you, Priya?” the yaksa asked, with great and terrible tenderness.

A shuddering breath left Priya.

“What do you want from me, yaksa?”

“Reach for her here,” the yaksa said. “Mani Ara has created a miracle through you. New paths. The world altered a step further. Let her in again. Yield.”

The yaksa’s hands pressed onto Priya’s shoulders. There was no option to refuse their pressure or the yaksa’s commands. Priya closed her eyes and let herself be submerged.

The sangam greeted her like an old friend. Joy rippled through her. It wasn’t her own joy, she knew that. It was vaster, like the sweep of wind over grass, the sun on bare earth. Was this how immortals felt happiness?

“Sapling.” Mani Ara’s rich, laughing voice. “Can you feel it, as I do? The paths, the sangam, the cosmos?”

She could not see Mani Ara, but she could hear her—and feel as she felt too. Once she’d felt her siblings in the sangam. Now she could feel the mask-keepers, and the wound where Bhumika should have been, and worlds bursting and withering… and something great and terrible stalking her kin through a thousand eons.

“Yes,” Priya whispered. “I can.”

“Good. Feel what lies at the end of my paths, sapling. Feel what I want you to seek.”

The yaksa, in the sangam, like clusters of bright stars. And beyond them, further, sleeping in the earth…

Images flashed through her mind. A ring of vast stone-like trees. A lake of blue lotus flowers. Two yaksa.

“Other yaksa,” Priya breathed out. “Sleeping. In the soil. Awakening in the places where they died.”

“ Yes. ” Exultant.

“One in—Alor,” Priya said. The words poured from her. “One in Srugna. She’s waking. I feel her.”

“She will be awake very soon,” Mani Ara agreed, and her voice was in Priya’s ear, her lips soft, her hands at Priya’s throat. “Go to her. Be there to usher her into the world, so she arrives without fear, with her kin watching over her. Be where I cannot be. My heart, my hands.”

“Your kin,” Priya said, dazed. “They’re returning.”

“Our kin,” Mani Ara said. Her laugh was rippling, delighted. The very stars shuddered with it. She turned Priya by the shoulders, the throat, and pressed her mouth to Priya’s own.

“You are exactly what you are meant to be,” Mani Ara whispered to Priya’s lips, like breathing a secret between them. “A herald, a storm, my hands, my feet, my sword.”

Abruptly, Priya was back in her skin, standing in murky water, swaying. Clutching a beating flower-heart, sluggishly pulsing in her hand.

Tentative fingers touched her cheek. There was a question in the yaksa’s eyes.

Bhisa Ara , Priya thought.

She wanted to say I know you now .

Wanted to say Mani Ara loves you all so much. She loves you in a fathomless way my brain can’t comprehend. She loves you like… rivers and mountains and oceans love one another. It’s impossible and ancient, and I don’t know how such cruel beings can love so much.

“Yaksa,” she said instead, and saw the question wither in the yaksa’s lifelike face. “I saw her. I know what to do.”

She sought out Ganam. He was waiting for her at the mahal. Maybe he’d felt her coming. Her magic was a thrum now, pulsing through Ahiranya. Impossible to ignore.

Hair still dripping, a bloody lotus clutched in her fist, she went to him at the mahal’s entrance. He barked orders, sending the mask-keepers around him away. The words slid from her ears like water. He met her eyes.

“The yaksa,” she said thinly. “They have orders.”

“Priya,” he said. “Tell me what the yaksa need.”

“You need to tell the mask-keepers the time’s come,” she said. “You’ll be passing through the deathless waters again. All of you. And…” The lotus was still pulsing in her hand. Still gasping for life. “And when this is done—those who survive are coming with me to Srugna. You’re coming with me to Srugna.”

His gaze was steady. “Are we finally going to fight a proper war? Soldiers and swords?”

“No,” said Priya. “We’re going to watch a yaksa being reborn.”