The vines tightened further. Looking—if anything—slightly irritated, Priya reached for Pramila’s wrist and clenched it tight. Pramila’s fingers spasmed, as she struggled for air and against Priya’s hold. Seconds later, the knife clattered to the ground.
“Sorry,” said Priya, leaning down and picking up the knife. The thorn tendrils slipped away from her, her clothes and skin unmarked. “I didn’t know if I would be able to do that.”
“Have you done anything like it before?” Malini asked, feeling a strange hunger at the base of her skull as she watched Priya turn the knife over in her grip. Tell me what you are, the hunger was saying. Tell me what you are, every layer of you, tell me how I can use you—
“No.” Priya tucked the knife away. “No, I found something that belonged to my people once. And now I have—new gifts. And new weapons.”
It was Malini’s childhood teacher—the sage that her mother told her must be called her nursemaid, should anyone ask—who had taught Malini and Narina and Alori about the Ahiranyi and their old council leadership. Although Malini had learned something of what the Ahiranyi had once been able to do, gleaned through a mix of old history scrolls on the Age of Flowers and common tales alike, it was her sage who had detailed all the gifts they’d supposedly once possessed. Inhuman strength. Power over nature, so strong they could rend the earth and turn it to their will. A fragment of the yaksa’s terrible magic, all of it born from a trial performed within sacred, deathless waters.
Waters that were lost when the temple elders and their children died.
Priya looked at Pramila, who was still gasping for air. The knife was still in Priya’s hand.
“Will you kill her?” Malini asked, leaning forward upon her charpoy, the pain in her cheek and jaw only making her thirst for blood stronger.
But perhaps she sounded too eager, because Priya shot her a look, a frown creasing her brow. “No,” Priya said, as Pramila crumpled to the ground behind them. The woman’s eyes had fluttered closed. “She’s unconscious now. She can’t hurt us. We’re not going to be here much longer, after all.”
“I wish,” said Malini, “that you would kill her.”
Priya was silent for a moment. Then she held the knife, hilt first, out to Malini. Priya’s catlike eyes were hooded, her mouth a thin line. She looked like a carving of one of the mothers, all austere fury.
“If you want her dead, then do what you will,” she said.
For a moment Malini considered it. Truly considered it. The knife was before her. Pramila was still upon the ground. It would be easy.
But she could not forget Narina’s face. Her whisper, before they had walked to the pyre.
I want my mother.
Priya waited a heartbeat longer. Drew her hand—and the knife—back. “I thought not,” she said.
The thorns slithered across the floor, following her as she moved. She looked exactly as she always did: crooked-nosed, dark-skinned, her hair perhaps a bit damper and wilder than usual. And yet there was power like an aura around her, in the stone and green, in the way Pramila lay unmoving behind her.
In the way she’d held the knife, no deference in her at all.
Priya had called them equals before. But she looked at Malini now as if Malini were the servant and supplicant, and Priya the heir to an ancient throne.
“A final deal,” Priya said, voice a hoarse rustle of leaves. She reached up a hand, absently brushing the blood from her throat. “Malini. Make one final deal with me.”
“What would you have of me?” Malini asked, throat dry.
“There isn’t much time. Someone is coming for me.” Priya said the words carefully. Her eyes were unblinking. “Someone wants the waters that gave me this gift. Someone wants new power, greater power, so that they can destroy Parijatdvipa’s hold on Ahiranya.”
“How does a rebel know you’ve found these magical waters?”
“They felt it,” Priya said simply.
“Are so many people gifted with magic in this place?”
“Ahiranya isn’t like Parijat.”
“You know nothing about Parijat.”
“I’m part of Parijatdvipa, aren’t I?” Priya said. “I know a lot about what it means to belong to your country. I probably know more than you do.”
Malini look at Priya’s face. Thought, I do not know this woman at all.
And yet that did not frighten her as it should have. She knew how many faces people possessed, one hidden beneath the other, good and monstrous, brave and cowardly, all of them true. She had learned young that a fine-bred brother could turn into a brute over nothing. Nothing. She had sat with lords and princes and kings, binding them to the vision of Emperor Aditya upon the throne. She had known the size and clout of their personal armies, the names of their wives, their greed and whispered sins—she had met them and learned them as one learns any stranger. She had learned them in person; pried them open and controlled them, and had still been aware that beneath all their carefully cataloged hungers and weaknesses likely lay a multitude of selves she would never see.