Priya quietly slipped away as they continued talking, filching one paratha from the basket by the ovens as she went and stuffing it wholesale into her mouth. Sima would have called her a mannerless beast if she were here, but she wasn’t, so Priya was free to be as uncouth as she liked.
She’d been wrong to assume someone had been murdered. There had been no throats cut or bodies laid outside temples. No rebel killings.
Just a princess, arriving early for her imprisonment.
After her work was done, Priya plucked Rukh from Khalida’s care and guided him to the dormitory where the children slept. Once she’d found him a spare sleeping mat, she took him with her to her own dormitory, shared by eight other maids. Beneath the cover of the plain canopied veranda that surrounded it, ringed by fresh falling rain, she kneeled down, wrapped her hands in her pallu, and started carving the sacred wood down into a bead.
The burn of the wood through cloth was strong enough to make her swear. She bit down on her tongue for a moment, one pain to distract her from another, and kept on whittling, hands steady and sure. She could handle a lot more pain than this.
“Come and sit next to me,” she said to Rukh, who was still standing in the rainfall, visibly overwhelmed by the direction his day had taken. He stepped onto the veranda. Kneeled down beside her. “Hand me one of those,” she added, pointing to the small pile of ribbon and thread spooled on the ground next to her. He picked one up. She lowered the knife and took it from him.
“Is there anything else I can do?” he asked timidly, as she threaded the bead neatly onto the string.
“You could tell me how you’re finding your new life so far,” she said. “What work has Khalida set for you?”
“Cleaning latrines,” he said. “It’s fine. No, it’s—really, really good. A bed and food is… is…” He trailed off with a helpless shake of his head.
“I know,” she said. She really did. “Go on.”
“I said I’d do anything and I will,” Rukh said, all in a rush. “I’m very grateful, ma’am.”
“I told you to call me Priya.”
“Priya,” he said obediently. “Thank you.”
She didn’t know what to do with his gratitude except ignore it, so she simply nodded and pressed the bead of wood against her own skin. The bead was small enough that instead of burning her, it merely warmed her wrist, its magic seeping through her flesh and into her nerves, her blood. She held the bead there for a moment, ensuring that it wouldn’t be strong enough to harm Rukh but would still be strong enough to help him, and watched his face. He’d lowered his chin, gaze fixed on the raindrops splashing against soil. He still looked overwhelmed.
She remembered how she’d felt when she’d first come to the regent’s mahal. She’d cried every night that first week, folding her sleeping mat over her face to muffle the sound of her own tears so she wouldn’t wake the other girls.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” she said to him lightly. He lifted his head and looked at her, curious. “Have you heard the one about the cunning yaksa who tricked a Srugani prince into marrying an Ahiranyi washerwoman?”
He shook his head.
“Well, give me your hand and I’ll tell it to you.”
She wound the thread around his wrist and began her tale.
“It was near the start of the Age of Flowers, before the Srugani and others like them understood how strong and clever the yaksa were…”
By the time Priya had rambled out what she could remember of that tale of masks and mistaken identities, a duel of honor and a washerwoman draped in a veil of white lilies and saffron, Rukh had started to relax, leaning back on the veranda and smiling a little as he fidgeted with the new bead of sacred wood on his wrist.
“Be careful with that,” Priya told him. “It’s not going to be easy to get more sacred wood. You know where it comes from?”
“The forest?”
“From the trees that grew when the yaksa all died,” Priya said. “Sacred wood has some of their magic in it.” She tapped the bead with her own fingertip. “No more yaksa means no new trees, which makes sacred wood costly. So treat it nicely, okay?”
“There you are,” a woman’s voice said. Priya and Rukh both turned their heads. The rain was fading again, but the woman standing at the edge of the veranda with her pallu drawn over her hair had been caught in the last dredges of the downpour, the cloth glimmering faintly with water. “Priya,” she said. “Come with me. You’re needed.”