It was easier to think of the stains on her hem than it was to think of anything else.
“Priya,” whispered a voice.
She turned.
Rukh stood under the shade thrown by one vast carved column, his hands in fists at his sides. He looked slight and out of place, and even from here, she could see that his wrists were painted in the shadows of underskin leaves.
Rukh, who had warned her not to climb the Hirana. She gazed at him steadily—his guilty, familiar face, his skin flushed with green—and touched a single fingertip to the bead of sacred wood at her wrist.
“What have you done, Rukh?”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I really am. But I… I didn’t talk to you, ask for your help, for work, just because I needed it. Even though I did—I did need it. I was told to talk to you and try to get into the mahal. I was ordered.” He swallowed. “And now I need you to come with me. Out of the mahal. Please?”
Told. Ordered. Who had ordered him?
A chill ran through her. She could guess.
Slowly, she shook her head. Before she could speak, Rukh darted forward. He grabbed her hand.
“I told them you wouldn’t come,” he said earnestly. “That you wouldn’t forgive me. That you’re not as weak as they think. And maybe… maybe you shouldn’t come. But they promised me they won’t hurt you, Priya, and I believe them. They asked me to make sure you weren’t hurt, so you’ll be safe. Or I wouldn’t—I couldn’t—” There were tears of frustration in his eyes.
“Rukh.” Her free hand hovered over his head before she lightly smoothed his hair. “Calm down. Speak slowly. You’re not making any sense.”
He furled and unfurled his fingers around her wrist. He said nothing for a long moment, and Priya sighed.
“I’m hungry,” Priya said. “And tired, and I’ve been told reliably that I smell awful. I just want to sleep, Rukh. I don’t have any desire to play these games.”
“If you don’t come,” he whispered, “I don’t know what they’ll do to me.”
“Who?”
“You know.”
“I’d like you to tell me,” she said.
He held her wrist, still. His fingers were light enough on her that she could have broken free with no trouble at all. She didn’t.
“The rebels,” he sniffed, his head hanging before he looked up at her. “The rebels in the forest.”
She looked into his eyes for a long moment.
She’d thought she knew exactly what he was. She’d thought he was a little like she’d once been—starving, hurt, alone. She’d pitied him.
The pity hadn’t changed. But as she looked at him, she let her assumptions about him fall away. He was more than a little like the child she’d once been. He had his own secrets. His own obligations. She knew exactly how that felt.
It worried her. Worry for him.
He’s in danger, she thought. He still needs me.
“Steal me something from the kitchens,” said Priya finally. “And then I’ll come with you.”
PRIYA
The Parijati placed many names for Ahiranya’s great forest upon their maps. They segmented it, delineating it with fine lines, affixing labels on all the parts where humans were able to survive, where time did not move strangely and the rot hadn’t infiltrated: the burnt fields of the east; the thick tranches of ancient mangrove, where marsh villages on their water-stilts flourished, to the west. Name after name, each painstakingly transliterated between Parijati and all the disparate scripts and tongues of Parijatdvipa. Only the Ahiranyi language was not included.
The Ahiranyi tongue had been erased, of course—reduced to a scattering of phrases and words that the people of Ahiranya sprinkled through common-tongue Zaban. But Priya, who’d once been taught traditional Ahiranyi as a temple daughter, knew that the Ahiranyi had never had names for the forest. Ahiranya was the forest. The woodland was as unnamable as each breath of air, as indivisible as water. It was the cities and villages they named, the mountains they charted. The woods, they left alone.
But that did not mean Priya did not recognize the place Rukh had led her to. They had snuck from the mahal out into the surrounding city of Hiranaprastha. They had made their way through a city shuttered and gutter-lanterned, to the place where the trees melded with the houses, and small alcove temples to the yaksa hung above them in branches, affixed high among the leaves by flat boards hammered between the trunks. They had walked along narrow paths delineated by ribbon and flag, carefully carved though the forest by travelers between Hiranaprastha and smaller villages.