Priya thought of her siblings. Little Nandi. Sanjana. Her voice shook when she spoke. “We were just children.”
“The thrice-born were young elders, ready to join our circle. Not children anymore. And the rest…” An exhalation. Priya was not sure if it was a sigh or a pained breath as Chandni stopped and steadied herself. “Children who can change the shape of mountains and compel root and leaf—they are not children anymore. They are something that only looks like a child. We had a duty, Priya.”
“Then why did you save my life?” Priya asked. “If we were monsters that needed destroying, for the sake of your duty, why did you try to spare me?”
“Sometimes we do foolish things,” Chandni said, sorrow in her voice. “It doesn’t matter any longer. That time is long gone. You need only understand this, even if you do not forgive it: We sought to stop the rot from growing and spreading. We were afraid of what would become of the world. And we came here to seek a way to protect our Ahiranya. To destroy the rot that remained. And to—mourn.” Her voice cracked a little. “Now. For your own sake—step carefully. Follow my lead.”
Behind the hut where Sendhil and Chandni lived lay an empty glade. Perhaps it had once been used to grow vegetables or keep animals, but now its ground was untouched by human hands, covered in a whirling knot of grasses with the slithering thickness of hair. At the center of the glade was one single tree. In the ground around it were stakes, pieces of wood, hammered deep into the soil.
“You may look at the tree,” said Chandni. “Inspect it as is needful, but don’t cross the perimeter of sacred wood.”
It was a great mangrove-like thing, that tree, with a wizened trunk and drooping branches laden with small leaves, as pale as pearls. Priya walked toward it, the heat of sacred wood a pulsing heartbeat before her.
“What is this?” Priya said. “What…？”
She’d been wrong to think the trunk was simply wizened. Here, close now, she could see the rot of it: the pink of wounded flesh between the striations of wood, the breathy pulse of the roots, loose-limbed against the soil.
The faces.
Saroj. Bojal. Not all the elders. But enough of them.
Priya felt the bile rise in her throat.
“It began soon after we arrived here. The first began to sicken and die. As he died, the tree changed. Stole his soul, I think. Then the second. The third. Now only Sendhil and I remain. Waiting.” Her voice was terribly calm. “Whatever curse lay in you and your fellow children… well, it lay in us too, it seems. Although it manifests as you see.”
“Their bodies?”
“Burned. But it doesn’t matter. The rot has us. A curse beyond death, I think.” Priya heard Chandni step closer and thought for the first time that there was an almost wooden creak to her movements; that her skin had not simply looked pinched but fissured like bark, in the light.
Priya stared not at Chandni but at the tree before her. The rot of it. The justice of it.
“You’re wrong, to think we were a symptom of the rot. We’re the cure. I’m sure of it.” She tilted her head until she was staring at canopy-slashed sky, blinking back unwanted tears. “I’ve been told the thrice-born could control it. Maybe banish it.”
“Who told you?”
“Was it true? Could they control it?”
“They could,” Chandni said, after a pause. “Yes.”
“You were fools,” Priya said, choking on her grief, her anger. All of the children had deserved better than the death they’d had. She thought of Sanjana’s smile, Nandi’s gentle eyes, and was crushed with the weight of how hollow they hadn’t been—how hollow the world was without them. “We were the answer all along, and you discarded us. Destroyed us.”
“Perhaps,” Chandni said heavily.
“There’s no ‘perhaps,’” Priya said thickly. “Was it worth it, then, murdering my brothers and sisters? For a belief?”
Priya turned. Chandni was looking at the tree. Perhaps she was thinking of the other lost elders, who had been like kin to her. Perhaps she thought of the children they had murdered.
“It was the choice we made,” Chandni said finally. “We believed you were monsters. You believe you are not. We did what we thought was right, and you may now condemn us for it. But it changes nothing.”
“Why am I still alive?”
“You were born on the Hirana,” Chandni said, resigned. “Not simply temple raised but temple born. You know that.”