“What will you do?” Priya asked, thinking of the general, the children housed in the mahal. The future.
“I don’t know. I don’t have the power to fix everything, no matter how capable I may seem.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
Bhumika clicked her tongue, as if to say, It doesn’t matter. “I should be asking you how you fare. Ashok harmed you.”
Priya resisted the urge to touch a fist to her chest, to the place where Ashok had shoved his hand into her soul and twisted.
“I know Ashok is strong. That he can be dangerous when he needs to be. I just thought…” Priya stopped.
“You thought he was still a good man, beneath it all.”
“He is a good man,” snapped Priya. Then she forced herself to stop again, and looked away from Bhumika, at the winding cosmos around them, liquid and strange. If he was not good, how could Priya be good? How could any of them?
“You remember the boy he was,” said Bhumika. “You don’t—see—the man he is now.”
“I remember that he saved my life. That he cared for me. Sometimes I feel like I can almost remember that night and I cannot hate him because…” Her voice cracked. “I don’t like to talk about my feelings. I don’t like any of this, Bhumika, and I swear if I could rip this anger out of me, if I could not feel what I feel, if I could erase that night entirely—”
“I know,” Bhumika said. “I know. Do you remember how I would bring you up to my rooms and speak with you alone, from time to time, when you first came to the mahal?”
“You always had sweets,” Priya said immediately. It was her strongest memory of that time. After years of starvation, she’d had a strange preoccupation with hunger. “Once you even had rasmalai. Covered in rose petals.”
“I convinced Vikram I was brooding for a child,” Bhumika said. “He liked that idea. So I had sweets for you, yes. And time for you, Priya. For a little while.” A hesitation. “Pri. I did try to be family to you. I really did.”
There was something aching in Priya’s chest.
“I know,” she said, with difficulty. “I do know that. You shouldn’t listen to me when I’m angry. Or at all. I’m never particularly fair to you, Bhumika.”
“Is that an apology?”
“No,” said Priya. “This is an apology: I’m sorry. Savor it, because I’m not going to do it again.”
The apology dropped between them heavily, awkward as a stone.
“Please don’t,” Bhumika said finally. There was something softer in her voice, as she shifted in the water, as it rippled soundlessly around the shadow of her. “You—and you won’t remember this, I expect, Priya—you were so quiet when you first came to the mahal. Not… shy. But unwilling to speak. I would try to talk to you about our childhood. About the Hirana. About how you and Ashok had escaped. You refused to tell me anything.
“I thought at the time that it was trauma. You were a child. You were frightened and hurt and abandoned. But now, I think not. You made a choice, Priya. There was something you wanted to discard.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know how stubborn you are. You’ve never obeyed me,” Bhumika said. “Not really. There is something in you that is… elemental. As there is in Ashok.”
“Are you saying I’m like him?”
“I’m saying that you’ve sought the deathless waters. Allied and broke with Ashok. Made a pact with a princess of Parijatdvipa—all without me, of your own volition. You follow a path I can’t walk, Priya, and you never look back at what you leave behind.” She spoke gently. It only made the words cut more deeply. “You’re driven by a moral code I can’t fathom. In your own way, Priya, you’re as dangerous as Ashok. Yes. I should have recognized that about you long ago.”
Bhumika’s sense of who Priya was—the fact that she saw Priya as some kind of staggering, strange, fierce, and elemental creature—made Priya want to laugh incredulously.
“I have never done anything—anything,” said Priya. “I’ve been… nothing but a maidservant. Parts of me are broken and I stand in the middle of all those pieces and don’t go anywhere. I’m stuck, Bhumika. In all this time, I’ve just been quiet. I’ve just survived.”
“A biding quiet, I think. And now you’re exactly where you were intended to be all along: on the Hirana, with the deathless waters almost in reach.” Bhumika’s voice was knowing. “I can tell that you’re growing stronger.”