She scrabbled with ugly, clumsy scrapes of her fingernails, worming her fingers between the blazing heat of the wood and the mottled char of Meena’s flesh. She felt something smooth beneath her fingertips, slick and overwarm. She realized with horror that Meena’s skin, around the sockets of her eyes, had burned clean down to tissue and bone. Meena gave a terrible shriek that rose and rose into a howl that echoed across the triveni, its columns and its absences, cutting through the crash of the rain that had begun to fall.
Priya shoved her backward. Climbed to her own feet. Her fingertips were blistered. Meena was still writhing on the floor, but Priya could hear footsteps in the corridor—could see Gauri and Sima in the doorway, suddenly, frozen and openmouthed.
“Get out of here!” Priya yelled. “Go!”
“Tell me,” Meena said raggedly, rising to her feet. “One of you. Please.”
When Sima saw Meena’s face she shrieked and clapped her hands over her mouth. She took a step back.
“Meena,” Priya tried instead. “Stop. They know nothing, Meena. Stop!”
But Meena was not listening. She moved with the frenzied focus of someone on the knife edge of death and desperation, crossing the floor and grabbing Gauri by the shoulder. Gauri screamed as she was jerked into the room and thrown against a pillar by Meena’s desperate hands. The older maidservant’s stick clattered to the ground. She scrabbled uselessly as Meena held her and gasped in, out, in, out, asking nothing, the whites of Meena’s eyes red with blood.
Gauri whimpered. Slumped forward.
With a furious shout, Priya leapt onto Meena’s back. She wrenched Meena’s head to an angle, forcing her fingers back under the edges of the loosened mask. When Meena did not even flinch—soil and sky, had she lost all sense of pain?—Priya shoved her forward hard, crushing Gauri against the pillar as she slammed Meena’s head against stone again, and again, and again. Then she released Meena, who crumpled, just a little.
“Run,” she barked at Gauri, and the older maidservant stumbled, and fell, then rose to her feet again as Sima grabbed her by the arms and dragged her away.
“Guards!” Sima was yelling. “Guards, help! Help!”
Meena gasped again—a long, thin exhalation that stretched into a hollow rasp. She turned, lightning-quick. Grasped Priya by the throat. Lifted.
Priya’s feet were not touching the ground. Her lungs ached and burned and she could not—she could not move her hands, though she tried to raise them. Her control was failing. Her body felt as if it were swathed in cotton.
Her lungs ached. Her vision was going black. But the dark was rich and textured, rippling like a lightless river. As Meena’s hand tightened an increment further, Priya felt the dark cleave open.
She felt water at her feet; three rivers joined around her ankles, swirling over her flesh. In the dizzying dark, she saw her brother’s shadow, kneeling, inked in red by the veins beneath her eyelids. She felt old memories clamor like bells, each one chiming against the next: an older temple sister testing her tolerance for pain, dipping her hand in hotter and hotter water, as the elders watched; little Nandi, her temple brother, helping her lay flowers and fruit in a shrine alcove, and filching one juicy segment of fibrous golden mango; pilgrims falling prone before the masked elders, begging for a memento of Ahiranya’s old glory. All things she’d lost. Pieces of herself.
Around her she could hear the Hirana singing, waiting, breathing for her. All she had to do. All she had to do…
Her eyes snapped open.
She clenched her hands around Meena’s wrist as the lines on the triveni’s surface flowed and shifted, throwing Meena briefly off-balance, allowing Priya to break her choke hold and slam a closed fist into Meena’s stomach. When Meena doubled forward, Priya punched her again, sending her stumbling across the floor.
Priya was once-born, she was, and the small tangle of memory she’d regained was enough to make the Hirana move with her, its stone constantly changing beneath Meena’s feet like receding waves, throwing her back, back, to the triveni’s edge where it lay open to the sky. As Meena stumbled, Priya paused to grab Gauri’s stick up from the ground. Only seconds had passed, but it felt as if ages had slipped away with her breath.
“You don’t know what strength means,” she murmured. Her voice was hoarse, but it was steady. She was glad of that. “You don’t. But I learned. I know what it means to carry the waters.”
She held Gauri’s stick out before her. Touched the tip of it to Meena’s chest. Keeping her eyes on Meena’s, she said, “Keep on moving.”