The Lotus Empire (The Burning Kingdoms #3)

Chapter 40 Priya

PRIYA

As a group, they moved deeper into Srugna. Like Ahiranya, it was thick with trees, but as they moved farther from the border the trees began to open into dipping valleys, cut through with shallow streams and low hilltops.

They avoided villages and paths and walked through silence broken only by their own voices and soft footsteps.

Once, they crossed paths with two hunters searching for deer. They were young—no older than the warrior Ganam had spared, perhaps. When they saw the mask-keepers their eyes went wide, faces ashen. She thought, for a moment, they would freeze like prey—but then one darted off, swiftly followed by the other.

She could feel fallen twigs and branches snap under their feet. The pressure of their racing footsteps in the soil.

It was easy to snare their feet and make them crumple to the ground.

She turned to who’d drunk the waters—Ruchi—and said, “Go and find them. Tie them up.” She swallowed, battling with herself. “Somewhere they’ll be found eventually.”

Ruchi nodded sharply, then raced after them, light on her feet. Next to Priya, Ganam murmured, “Good.”

“Sometimes,” Priya said, “I like to pretend I’m still a good person.” Then she started striding forward again.

Obediently, her people followed her.

She was following a thread. A fine root, wending its way through Srugna’s soil. She could feel the yaksa waking, a restless thing.

It was dreaming, somewhere. Waiting to be reborn. It was Priya’s job to find them.

The trees around them grew larger. Thicker and taller, with roots that snarled the ground in knots of latticework. Priya stepped over them lightly; the roots moved around her, an awakening, a shudder of motion that greeted her like an old beast rising from sleep.

“These are ancient trees,” Ganam observed. “Older even than the Age of Flowers. That’s my bet.”

“We’d have to cut one open to know for sure,” Priya replied. “Count the rings inside them.” Then she stopped and raised a hand to her lips. The mask-keepers went quiet.

She could hear the wind. A high, keening whistle.

It sounded like the wind upon the Hirana.

“Ganam, with me,” she said. “The rest of you—create a perimeter. If anyone comes, yell for us.”

Murmurs of understanding. Her people fanned out. And she and Ganam walked through the cover of trees out into an open clearing.

It was vast. A stretch of land baked brown by the sun. But it was far from empty. On its surface stood vast pillars, so high that she had to crane her neck to view the full length of them. The noise she’d heard was the wind moving between them. On the ground, it was oddly cold, and Priya felt small and insignificant, overawed.

“This was a special place once,” she said to Ganam as he came to stand beside her. “I’m sure of it.”

She walked forward and kneeled at the base of one pillar. She pressed a hand to it.

She’d thought from a distance that they were stone. But the pillar before her was fossilized wood. Inside it would be too many rings to count, preserved in amber, but she did not need to see inside them to know that once yaksa had walked here, and in the time since the Age of Flowers, the Srugani had deliberately chosen to forget.

“They’ve allowed nothing to grow here,” said Ganam, when she told him so. “You can see signs.” He pointed at the ground—at a place scarred and tilled. “They’ve burned the soil. Over and over.”

“Then they remember,” Priya said. She pressed a hand deep into the soil. Beneath it, she felt that familiar thrum. An awakening thing.

“There’s something I must do,” she said. “To make this new yaksa welcome. Ganam, will you check on the others?”

“They’ll be fine.”

“I’m not convinced. The Srugani have to know about this place. Would they really leave it unprotected?”

He frowned. Then he said, “Maybe you shouldn’t do this now, then.”

A laugh cracked out of her. “What do you think the yaksa will do if I don’t? I do this now, or it doesn’t get done.”

“Then I’ll stay and protect you.”

She shook her head impatiently.

“Do I look like I need coddling? Go.”

He rolled his eyes and walked away.

And Priya closed her eyes. Breathed. Reached for her power.

Calling the rot was a rush of strangeness through her. The green in her blood and skin coiled and withered and flourished in recognition, cycling through its lifespan as the smell of iron and blood seeped from her hand, as the ground softened and changed, thickening like flesh. As rot worked its way through the soil.

“Wake,” she whispered. “Your family are waiting, yaksa. They sent me to seek you. Wake soon.”

She felt the sun sink above her. She felt—

Pain.

Her body staggered. Fell backward. An arrow through her. She clutched her side but found nothing there.

Something had happened in the sangam.

Priya felt the shadow of it, a cold dart, like an arrow through her ribs. She gasped. The cold stretched through her chest for one brief strange moment—then vanished.

She found herself in her skin again. Mostly in her skin. But it was like the sangam was nestled close, pressed to her ear, a song inside a shell.

Somewhere in the sangam—somewhere inside her—the yaksa were howling. It was a high, mournful chorus that reverberated through her skull, and with it came fragments of images: soil, vast leaves, bodies, strangers, shifting through the shadows. Blood, and a gleaming silver whip, and a stranger’s bared teeth, and Ganam drawing up the earth with his hands.

Ganam, and a dagger at the chest.

Ganam and then—nothing.

Ganam is dead , she thought, and the realization was a punch that went through her more harshly than the first arrow-dart of cold. It was more awful, by far, than the song of the yaksa. Ever since she’d returned to Ahiranya he’d been her only ally. She’d guided him through the deathless waters. Dragged him out with her own hands, and cried over him, laughed with him. Look , he’d said, teeth chattering, water in his hair. You’re not the only one who gets to survive.

She was already moving. She hadn’t consciously taken a step, but she was striding forward regardless, the ground shifting under her, roiling in response to her emotions. The green was her, and she was the green, and the soil splintered as the moisture leached from it; the trees bent to her, and the flowers withered, and she strode on, until the great leaves she’d seen in the sangam loomed around her. She had made a seeker’s path from nothing, nothing but her own will, and she had brought herself to him in a heartbeat, and she knew she was where he had died.

Except.

There he was.

Kneeling. Head bowed forward. Tunic torn. The earth around him, a crater, jagged with stone. And his slumped shoulders rising and falling, rising and falling, as he struggled to breathe around the sharpness of the dagger through his chest, the hilt visible to her, ringed by a spreading stain of rose-black blood. She couldn’t feel him in the sangam—couldn’t feel that strand of strength that ran through cosmic waters, that bound them both—but that didn’t matter. She could see him.

He wasn’t dead. He was very much alive.

She swore, a helpless noise, and saw him jerk. He raised his head.

“Priya,” he said hoarsely. “Go.”

She took a step forward, and he shook his head wildly.

“Parijatdvipans,” he gasped out. “Danger— you .”

Behind him there was a noise. The crunch of soil. And then she felt them. How had she not? Panic, perhaps. Or the cry of the yaksa—still ringing painfully through her head—had masked the delicate chime of their mortal hearts and lungs. Ever since her power had grown, human flesh had grown less significant. Less noticeable. If she survived this, she would have to put that oversight right.

Perhaps the soldiers had come here hoping to set a blade through an Ahiranyi’s ribs. Perhaps they had come here specifically for her. She could imagine them deciding it over bottles of wine, eyes wild and lips wet with drink. The Ahiranyi witch tried to stab our empress through the heart. It’s only justice to stab her heart in return.

Perhaps it was Malini who had decided it.

A wound for a wound, a heart for a heart. Maybe if the blade were in her chest she would accept it as her due. But the dagger was in Ganam’s chest, and he was staring at her with wide eyes, the pupils tiny pinpricks of black against the whites.

Get up , she thought—urging him with her own eyes as she took one steady step forward. Two. Three. There was nothing chaining him to the ground. And she knew he could fight with a dagger through the torso. She’d seen him fight through worse. But he was wavering on his knees. He wasn’t standing.

Did he have a head wound? Was he injured in other ways that she couldn’t see? Something had caused the echo through the sangam. Something was stopping her from feeling him in the sangam now.

“No closer,” someone said, the voice a hoarse bark of Zaban. It took her a moment to place the Saketan accent—and a moment longer still to see the figure in Saketan green stride forward and place a saber to Ganam’s throat, their own arm trembling. Behind them, a dozen Saketan liegemen emerged, uncoiling their sword whips, their weapons spools of liquid silver against the shadows.

Knowing they were there didn’t soften the blow of the sight of them. Priya’s stomach still swooped. Her body still felt hot with fear as she forced herself to stand entirely still and said, “Give him back.”

“He stays where he is,” the soldier said, his voice clipped. His mouth was a grim line. He didn’t look as afraid as he should have. “And you—you stay where you are. If your feet move—if your hands move—I promise you he’s dead.”

She stayed still. Her feet were squared against the ground, her body as steady and rooted as an ancient tree. The earth held her. Waited with something like bated breath for what she’d do next.

Slowly, the Saketan soldiers were edging farther out—a semicircle of sword whips and wary eyes. The other Saketan soldiers did not look as grimly, forcedly calm as the man with the saber to Ganam’s throat. Their fear was so palpable she could almost taste it. It would be so easy to destroy them. The earth could collapse around them, dragging them under. Thorns could spear up from the sod and pierce them through. That kind of work was easy for her.

As if the soldier holding the saber had sensed the tone of her thoughts, he spoke up.

“We know how quick you are, Elder,” he said. “I fought at the Veri river, so I know exactly what you can do when you set your mind to it. But my hand and this sword are still faster than you can be. You try to use your witchery and he’ll die in a blink under my blade. There won’t be a thing that’ll save him.”

Priya watched—and felt—the men around her keep moving. Slow, so slow, as if she were a tiger and they were hunters.

“You’re not planning to kill him,” she forced herself to say. Forced her voice calm. “If you wanted to kill him, he’d already be dead.”

“But we will,” the man stressed, “if you don’t behave.”

“You don’t have any reason to think I give a shit about him.”

She saw one of the soldiers swallow, his throat bobbing visibly. The one with the saber said, with a calm that matched her own, “If you didn’t give a shit, temple witch, then we would all be dead already. I told you. I know what you can do.”

“Then what do you want from me?” Priya demanded. “Negotiate.”

“Come with us quietly,” he said, “and we won’t end his life.”

Why would they want her alive? Why did they want Ganam alive? And what had they done to make him so quiet—so biddable, despite the knife through his chest?

It was hard to think through the yaksa’s howling.

“Give him back to me,” she said slowly, “and I let you leave here alive.”

“No.”

“If you know me, you know I’m not a political creature,” Priya said bluntly. “So I’ll be clear. There won’t be a negotiation. You give him to me, or you all die.”

An ugly laugh from one. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“Leave her be,” came a voice. Steady. “Let me talk to her.”

A figure stepped forward. An older man. A hint of rot at his hairline.

She knew him.

“Elder Priya,” Romesh said. Low Prince Ashutosh’s liegemarks were emblazoned on his tunic. His familiar, steady eyes were fixed on her. “It’s been a long time.”

“Romesh,” she said. “Are all of you Low Prince Ashutosh’s men?”

“You won’t know the newer faces,” he said. “But you know mine.”

He moved around the curved line of men. His footsteps were steady. His sword whip was coiled at his waist. In reach, but not yet in his hands.

“You saved my life, and my lord’s life, in the war for the empress’s throne,” said Romesh. “What you did to the empress is a crime you must answer for. But I don’t want to hurt you.”

He took a slow step closer.

“Your advisor,” he said. “Sima. She’s safe.”

Sima. Her heart was pounding. “She’s really safe? Well?”

“Prince Rao took responsibility for her,” Romesh said. Another step. “Come with us,” he said, low. “You’ll get to see her yourself. I’ll make sure you’re not harmed. The empress doesn’t want you dead.”

“What does she want me for, then?”

“What you know, maybe,” Romesh said gently. “Or to take you off the battlefield. But what does a soldier like me know about what an empress thinks?”

A shuddering breath left her. She could feel the eyes of those men on her.

“I don’t care about my safety,” she said. “But you can’t keep him.”

Romesh shook his head.

“That’s not for me to decide, Priya,” he said.

“I’m not for the empress to take,” she said, just as soft. “Let my friend go. We’ll leave.”

His jaw tightened. “I’m sorry, girl,” he said.

He drew a dagger from his sleeve. Black stone.

Before she could move, it slashed her arm—the barest brush of stone on flesh—and she felt a strange, awful jolt run through her. She stumbled back.

For a second, when the blade had touched her, she’d been cut off from the sangam. For a second—perhaps not even a whole second, maybe only the thinnest, cleaved strand of time—she’d felt no more than human.

She turned vines onto him. Cracked his wrist. She dragged him in front of herself as he made a noiseless sound of pain, using him as a shield.

“Give my friend to me,” she said sharply. “Or I take his life. I don’t need a blade. I just need my magic.”

A breath of utter silence. Then one man said, teeth bared, “We can take your magic from you.”

He shot an arrow. Priya moved, shifted.

Heard a sickening thud, and a gasp.

“Romesh,” she said raggedly.

The arrow had gone through his chest.

She felt it with her hand. Touched trembling fingers to his throat, where his pulse should have been, and felt—nothing.

He fell dead from her arms.

The saber was still against Ganam’s throat. One of the men was shouting. Another was drawing his bow again. Her ears were full of the sound of her own blood, which roared like a fast-moving river, like deep water with deeper currents.

A strange reverberation filled her voice. Something ancient, powerful.

Sapling.

Mani Ara’s voice, a whisper and a dream in her ears.

For so long, she had only been able to grasp at Mani Ara in dreams. She had recoiled from her: from her thorn mouth, the flowers of her eyes, the viciousness of her love. Beloved , Mani Ara had called her, but Priya had never wanted to be her beloved. She wanted her heart to lie in different hands, or at least safely in her own chest.

But this time, as Romesh bled on the ground and Ganam stared at her with blank eyes, she did not care for her own revulsion anymore.

Yes , Priya said in response, and welcomed her. Her ribs were an open door.

It was not like in the war, in the fire and the Veri river, at the borders of Harsinghar when her chariot had overturned and Mani Ara had come for her in her moment of darkness and despair. It was like the water rushing in where it belonged. Priya was hollow. It was meant to fill her to the brim.

She moved, but it was not just her. She was bigger than her own skin. Memories that weren’t her own skittered at the edges of her conscious mind. She remembered running, crawling. Desperation, and the blue light of a distant shore, the curving edge of a world, knowing she would do anything to make sure her kin survived—

The men before her were so small. Kneeling between them, the temple son was a glowing thing, shot through with the deathless waters.

Kin.

A negligent raise of her left hand. The soil moved with her, throwing them from their feet. Arrows, mid-flight, flowered and collapsed, withering against the earth. She had sacrificed to be part of the green, sacrificed and bled starlight like water, like blood. It followed her bidding.

She buried the men. The ones on the topsoil she choked with roots. An easy thing. All mortal flesh was meant to die eventually.

When it was done, the only one left was the temple son.

She breathed, and breathed, and—was not all that she’d been, for a moment.

She was Priya again.

She doubled forward. Shaking. Forced herself to straighten, and stumble over to kneel in front of Ganam, as the wave of otherness washed over her again. Between it, she breathed, and remembered to care about the wound in him, the knife, his survival.

“Ganam,” she called. “Ganam, answer me.”

His mouth moved. One noiseless motion.

“Hold still,” she said. She wrapped her hand in cloth. She drew the dagger slowly free, terrified she would kill him in the process. It dropped to the ground. Blood followed, ruby dark.