“The left door,” Chandni murmured.
The elder’s fingers felt cold and trembled a little.
She said nothing else to Priya, and that—ah.
“Stay here,” Priya hissed at Nandi, and he sat down without complaint.
Sanjana and Ashok were seated next to one another, and when Priya sidled up next to them, Sanjana said, “Finally. What are you going to have? Not wine, I hope, though it would be funny to watch you be sick, I suppose.”
“I need to tell you something,” Priya said in a quiet voice. She must have sounded upset, because they both looked at her—Ashok clutching a tepid glass of water and looking faintly ill—and listened intently. As Priya continued, Sanjana’s face went pinched with fear or fury, Priya couldn’t tell. Sanjana took her by the wrist and said, “We’ll talk to them. Now.”
She stood up and… stumbled. Raised a hand to her head, fingertips to her temple, and swallowed.
Fell.
Priya would never be able to remember what followed with any clarity. She remembered only shouting, and her siblings trying to use their water-given gifts. They managed, somewhat. The ground splintered. The stone churned, moved by vine and root, by their magic-flecked fury. But there was something wrong with all of them, and little by little they all slumped, sickened.
“The food,” Ashok murmured suddenly, his face twisting as he looked around them. He stood rapidly and took Priya’s arm. “We’re going.”
He dragged her forward, between fallen bodies.
She heard a noise—a puncturing noise, and a cry—and Ashok dragged her forward farther, farther, aiming for the left door as she’d told him to. She turned her head back. Nandi, she needed to get Nandi—
“Come on, Priya,” Ashok said sharply. “Come on. Ah.”
There were soldiers, Parijati soldiers, blocking the doors. It made Priya’s stomach jolt to see them here, these outsiders in a place reserved for Ahiranyi pilgrims and servants and her own temple family.
Ashok shoved Priya behind him.
He had always been a good fighter. They all were. But the other temple children were drugged and barely conscious, unable to fight as they normally would have. Ashok wasn’t similarly stricken. He raised a hand before him, and vines shot through the walls and floor. One soldier made a noise of horror—there was a clang of falling steel.
Ashok took the soldier’s weapon and made a slash, his arm jerking.
Priya felt something wet and hot against her face and forced herself not to squeeze her eyes shut. Instead she grabbed a little carving knife from the table, from beside where one of her siblings had fallen unconscious, their forehead pressed to an upturned plate of food, and clutched it in a sweat-slippery hand.
She and Ashok rushed forward, and there was no grace to it: just an ugly press of bodies and blood, and Ashok dragging her, and Ashok slamming the door with his hands, and Priya turning back, meeting Nandi’s eyes across the room, his head at an awful angle, nothing living in the wrongness of it.
The last thing she saw before Ashok grabbed her in his arms was Elder Saroj touching a lantern flame to one of the hanging cloths. The room began to burn. Saroj dragged the cloth from the wall, and Priya saw it fall on one of her siblings.
“Don’t look.” Ashok dragged her out.
He attacked the soldiers brutally, economically, slicing through one artery, breaking another neck, losing his knife in an eye socket. He lowered Priya so he could fight, but when a dagger hit the ground at her feet, he swept her up into his arms and ran.
“Priya,” he bit out, against her hair, his voice breaking through the pounding clamor of her own blood. “Priya, where is the way to the deathless waters?”
“I don’t know!”
“You do. You do. Don’t fail us now.”
Like all other parts of the Hirana, the entrance to the deathless waters moved. Sometimes the Elders made a ritual of seeking it out. But Priya had never struggled to find it. She was not the best fighter—not the cleverest or strongest—but even with her eyes closed she could find the way unerringly.
It had astonished Elder Chandni when she’d realized. The elders had all tested her. Blindfolded her. Spun her about until she was dizzy with it. Asked her at night, at dawn, in the heart of the day. She always knew the path.
No one could explain her gift. She’d heard the elders discuss it once, in Chandni’s room, when she’d been curled up asleep on the floor beside Chandni’s pallet.
“It’s a strange affinity,” Saroj had murmured. “Oh, the longer we’re here, the more we feel connected to the Hirana, to be sure. But the girl is… different.”