Ah, soil and sky, she needed to learn how to talk to her temple sister with more authority and less petulance, when they were alone. If this was how it made Bhumika feel when Priya spoke to her, then it was a wonder they ever managed a civilized conversation.
“I didn’t say anything, Rukh,” Priya said evenly. She made herself stay calm. The calm was an armor that she wrapped around herself, as she stood on ground laden with the dead, and listened to the wind, and thought of the decisions Rukh must have made to bring himself here, only a boy but beholden to killers. Only a boy, and she had not seen the signs that the rebels had set their claws into him. She had not known. Her evenness sounded like steel, because it was. “But I think you should try to believe in things that won’t get either of us killed in the future.”
“They won’t hurt you,” said Rukh. “I told you. I promised. They asked me to make sure you wouldn’t climb the Hirana. That you’d be safe.”
“They asked you to do that?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I thought you’d know,” he said.
She couldn’t think of that yet. There would be answers soon enough, probably. So instead she said, “If I had listened to you—if I had remained in the mahal and let the others climb on their own—Meena probably would have tried to kill someone else.” She thought of Sima’s scream, of Gauri’s body crashing against the pillar.
“I didn’t know she would hurt anyone,” he whispered.
She gave him a look. “You don’t protect people,” she said, “you don’t tell them not to go somewhere, unless they’re at risk of getting hurt if they do go. So you knew, Rukh. Don’t lie to yourself. You know what these rebels do.”
He turned his head away.
“They’re trying to do something important,” he insisted. But his voice was thin.
Priya sighed. She could not help it. “Are people you fear so much truly worth your loyalty?”
“They’re worth my loyalty because I’m afraid of them,” he said. “They are here to fight the empire. I’ve seen General Vikram. I’ve seen his soldiers. If they’re not stronger than that…” Rukh’s words trailed away.
“Being able to frighten children isn’t strength, Rukh.”
“They don’t just frighten me,” he scoffed. “You saw the streets. They frighten the regent. He wouldn’t send all of his men out otherwise. That’s what real power is.”
If only she had Bhumika’s eloquence, or her keen, instinctual understanding of Parijatdvipa’s thorny games of power.
“Power doesn’t have to be the way the regent and your rebels make it be,” Priya said eventually, making do with her own artless words, her own simple knowledge of the way the world worked. “Power can be looking after people. Keeping them safe, instead of putting them into danger.”
He gave her a suspicious look. “Are you saying you’re powerful?”
She laughed reflexively. “No, Rukh.”
What power did she have? What had she really done to change anything at all in Ahiranya? She’d been thinking of Bhumika, not herself.
The idea of her having any power…
For a moment on the Hirana, she’d had it. She’d learned the limits of that quickly, in the cell and in Bhumika’s chambers. And in the moment she’d killed Meena, it had felt like weakness too; a quicksand of rage inside her.
“Don’t be stupid,” she added, after a moment. “I’m not strong, Rukh.”
“You tried to protect me and the other kids,” he said. “Tried to make sure we wouldn’t die of rot, at least. You gave me a home. That sounds like what you just said.”
It was a child’s logic, a child’s conviction. Still, Priya turned her face away from him. The way he saw her was far, far from the way she saw herself, and she didn’t know how to respond.
The wind rasped through the bones once more.
“Did you really kill Meena?” Rukh asked hesitantly, lowering his arms.
“I told you I did.”
“Did you… Did you mean to?”
Priya began to speak. Stopped, the words settling upon her tongue. She held her breath, momentarily. Listening.
The silence around them was no longer empty. It was watchful. Priya felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She turned.
A man stood on the graves. The bower threw shadows across him. But his face…
He wore a mask. Not a crown mask, wrought of sacred wood, but one made of normal mahogany, carved with a ferocious curl to the mouth and eye sockets wide enough to reveal thick eyebrows and eyes the deep brown of turned soil.