“You’re not the only one with loyal eyes and ears.” He tsked. “A messy business. He should have shown mercy.”
“He did what the emperor wanted,” Bhumika murmured, although she agreed with all her heart.
“We should not do what powerful people tell us, simply because they tell us,” he rasped. “You know that.”
He covered her hand with his own. His fingers trembled. “Are we alone?”
She raised her head. The servant who had led her in was gone.
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you remember when they came for you?” he asked.
“I remember,” she said. But he was caught up in the memory, and her response was not enough.
“You were so small,” he murmured. “And so alone. I did not want them to take you. There are plenty of children who can learn to serve on the council, I told them. But my girl is a Sonali. She stays with her family.”
“It wasn’t so terrible,” she lied. “They treated me well.”
He shook his head. But he did not argue.
“You’re a good girl, Bhumika,” he breathed. “You’ve made a good marriage. Ensured that our nobility have standing. You are not what the elders would have made you, and I am glad of that. Glad we saved you, your aunt and I.”
Priya had survived the massacre of the temple children by chance. She wore the scars of that night, still, in her nature and her memory.
Bhumika had not been there.
Her family had never wanted her to be a temple child. She and her male cousin had been the last of their family line, after her parents had perished of a fever. And then her cousin had died too, of a wasting illness, and Bhumika had been the only one left. Her uncle had brought her home for the funeral. After the burial, the sharing of food and song, he had asked her to remain at home. He and her aunt had argued—about heresy, about what the temple council would do if they didn’t return Bhumika, about how they had to return her—but her uncle had prevailed.
When the other children had died, Bhumika had been in this house. Drinking tea. Listening to birds beyond the window lattice. Playing the part of a good Ahiranyi highborn girl, instead of the temple-blessed creature she truly was.
She had tried to use her survival for good. When the regent—older and grim, with the blood of her siblings upon his hands—had courted her, she’d smiled at him. Kissed him. She’d wed him. She carried his child. And in return, she’d gained the power to protect those displaced or orphaned by the rot, and the influence and means to fund her fellow Ahiranyi. Small things. But better than nothing.
And still, she sat in the quiet sickroom, with her uncle’s hand in her own, and thought only of the gore beneath an elephant’s foot, the screams over a pyre. Blood, flesh. Soil.
Fire.
She leaned forward and kissed her uncle’s forehead, beneath the weak wisps of white hair that still haloed his head.
“Everything I am, I have achieved because of you,” she said. “Now sleep. Please. You need your rest.”
She went to the household prayer room.
She had nowhere to pray in her husband’s household. He worshipped the mothers of flame, kept his Parijati ways, and she…
She was his wife.
Uncle Govind did not maintain the prayer room, particularly. For form’s sake, there were candles lit, and the finely wrought statues of yaksa were dusted clean and polished to an oily glow by the careful hands of servants. But there were no new offerings at their feet—no fruit, no shell of coconut, no flowers—just empty platters.
She sat down on the floor mat. Sat as straight and neat as she could, her legs crossed. Closed her eyes. Breathed. And breathed. Winding deeper, and deeper.
The sangam unfolded around her.
She opened her eyes. Waited. She knew it was only a matter of time until he came to her.
The waters moved around the shadow of her, deep and strange.
She had loved the sangam as a girl, when she’d first entered it. Loved its beauty and its strangeness. Loved its power.
Now she refused to look at it. She simply said his name.
“Ashok. Come.”
She moved forward, the water’s weight rippling around her. Stars burst and withered above her. And there was Ashok. He too was shadow. When he moved the shadow of him grew dappled, blurring for a moment, then settling, light breaking through a canopy of leaves.
She wondered how she looked to him.
“Bhumika,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
“I don’t care for this place.”