“Enough.” He shook her—just a little, as if she were an animal to be bidden quiet, and her teeth rattled, and her insides curdled from it. “Names, Bhumika, or nothing at all.”
She did not bare her teeth at him. She did not set her own hands neatly around his throat. She lowered her eyes. Names or silence? Well, then she would have to give him silence.
Her sudden demureness must have given him pause. She felt his grip loosen a little. Raising her gaze, she saw him glance at the curve of her belly.
“I will call for the physician,” he said, and in that she heard a wealth of things: his fear that he had, perhaps, hurt her and by extension hurt the child within her. The belief that all she’d said was a product of her flesh—her pregnancy, her so-called womanly weakness of heart and body—and not evidence of her intelligence, her political acumen, and all that she was.
“No more of this.” He placed his hand upon her stomach; a warm, proprietary hand. “This is all that matters, Bhumika. Focus upon it.”
A child should not be a chain, used to yoke a woman like cattle to a role, a purpose, a life she would not have chosen for herself. And yet she felt then, with an aching resentment, how Vikram would use their child to reduce and erase her. She hated him for that, for stealing the quiet and strange intimacy of her and her own flesh and blood and making it a weapon.
“I will,” she said placidly. “I’m sorry.”
Her arms ached. She could not rely on Vikram. Could not even use him. She would have to fight Ashok herself. So be it.
PRIYA
She was under the water for minutes, or hours, or centuries. She did not know.
The water coursed through her. It swept through her lungs. Through her blood. It wasn’t cold or sweet. It was like fire, eating through her flesh and her marrow, relentless. I’m dying, she thought, at first wildly, and then calmly, as her fear was carried away along with everything else inside her. She felt as if she had been scoured clean. As if she were one of the coconuts she’d longed to place on a shrine, once. Split, her insides, bruised and flowering, scraped away.
Images slipped from her mind’s eye as swiftly as they arrived: great carved faces of wood turning toward her, eaten by flame that poured from their own mouths. Bodies splitting, three rivers of waters pouring from their insides, which were empty, open to the void. Voices clamored in her ears, but she couldn’t understand them. She kicked her feet and moved her arms, rising up or diving deeper. She couldn’t orient herself. She needed to breathe. She needed to get out.
There was a drumbeat of silence.
In the places inside her soul and her bones that had been hollowed—magic poured in.
She saw the sangam beneath her. Saw the whole world. She felt the forest of Ahiranya—every tree, every crop, every creeping vine, the insects that burrowed through the soil. She felt her kin. Bhumika, there in her rose palace. Ashok, deep in the forest, walking on earth rich with bones. And she felt other souls. Other kin. In the forest, others who were like her moved and breathed and lived.
She wasn’t as alone as she’d believed for so long.
She gasped out—surprised, or laughing, or spasmodically seeking air, she didn’t know—and the water rushed in deeper and vaster, swallowing her as she swallowed it in turn.
There was nothing, after that. Not for a long time.
Later. Later.
Her head broke the surface of the water and she was breathing cold air, gasping, her lungs aching.
She’d survived. She was twice-born.
She couldn’t feel anything beneath her feet, as she kicked to keep herself afloat. There was just water, fathomless underneath her body. Around her the water flickered, as if dappled by sunlight through leaves. But there were no trees and no roots this deep beneath the ground. Above her was only the dark cavern of the Hirana.
She swam to the edge of the water and dragged herself up onto the cold earth. Her clothes were soaking, heavy. Her hair was a weight of water. She wrung it out a little. Her insides still sang and burned but she was cold.
She couldn’t remember exactly what had passed when she’d stepped beneath the waters. Already the memories were beginning to slip away from her like sand. But she knew what she felt now: power, dripping from every inch of her. Power bursting like flowers beneath the closed lids of her eyes, when she squeezed them shut and let out a ragged, joyful laugh. When she opened her eyes once more, she saw that small buds had unfurled from the surface of the soil beneath her knees. She curled her fingers around one. It was warm.
She released a slow breath, feeling magic pour through her with shocking, glorious ease. The ground trembled, a little. Then its surface burst, and there were buds all around her, roots and leaves rising from the maw of chill soil.