She needed to know if Bhumika was safe. If the general’s mahal—if Rukh and Sima and Gauri, if all those people who made up the mahal—if they were all safe.
If she could not go in person, she would take the only way out of the Hirana that she had available to her.
Ragged breaths. One after the other, and the other, winding deeper. Deeper.
She sank back into the sangam. The river water rose to meet her.
ASHOK
He always wore a spare vial of the waters around his throat. He touched it now, as they slipped through the forest, the smell of blood in their nostrils, caked in their clothes and their nails. Kritika turned back to look at him for a brief moment. There was a smear of darkness across her cheek.
“Keep moving,” he said.
The vial was not hot, not burning with power the way sacred trees burned. But something felt—strange. Within the deathless waters in his blood. Within his skull.
Around him were his fellow rebels, winding through the forest with the familiarity of people born to it. A few wielded long-handled scythes and were clearing the way ahead of the rest of them. This was undisturbed land, untainted by the presence of empire, not even populated by Ahiranyi settlements. There were no shrines to the yaksa, hung in the branches or nailed to the vast trunks of the trees around them. It was no one’s territory, and therefore ideal. They needed somewhere to hide. And rest.
They had hit the imperial regime with a strong blow. That was only right, only fair, after what the regent had taken from them. Parijatdvipa wanted to use fear, turning faith into a blade? Then so would Ahiranya.
There was a noise ahead. A thump. The others stopped, and Ashok gritted his teeth and strode forward. Just like the rest of them, he knew the sound of a falling body when he heard it.
Sarita lay still where she’d collapsed, in a heap of bloodstained clothes and red-brown fingers, her scythe fallen at her side. Even standing above her, Ashok could see that her skin was wet.
When the vial waters were first consumed they brought on an intense rise in physical strength, along with some of the waters’ magic. But as the influence of the waters faded, the body would begin to tremble, terribly weakened. After a short time, water and blood together would begin to leave the body, pouring out of the mouth, the ears, the eyes. That was the way a poisoned death began.
This one had taken Sarita fast.
She had drunk two vials, or three, in the time she’d served the rebellion, always struggling to hold at bay the death it brought. She had fought with ferocity in the old lord’s haveli—broken a neck or four with nothing but the sheer force of her own strength holding those men still under her hands. And now she was dying. But a little more water would give her time. A little more—
A hand closed around his wrist. Kritika stood at his side.
“You have barely any left,” she said in a low voice, so as not to be heard by the others around them. “Three or four vials at most, and who knows when you’ll next be able to replenish your supplies? Please, Ashok. Don’t do this.”
He paused, his hand still on the vial in his pocket, ready to pull it free. Then he released it and kneeled down, placing that same palm gently against Sarita’s forehead.
“Sarita,” he said gently. “Brave woman. You’ve done so well.”
Her eyes opened, just a little. All whites, the pupils a pinprick of dark, like two bloodied wounds welling up beneath the point of a needle.
“Sarita. Sarita.” He repeated her name like a lullaby. His heart bled inside him at the sight of her. What a waste. “Does it hurt?”
Her mouth shaped a word, soundless. Yes.
“Kritika,” he said. “Will you…”
“Yes,” she told him, sadly. She gripped his shoulders, urging him up. “It will be done.”
He stood and walked away.
He heard the scythe being lifted. A snap. Then nothing.
In the silence of the moment, with nothing to disturb him but the sounds of mortal breaths around him, the hum of insects and the call of birds among the trees, he finally understood what had disturbed him so. What called in his blood.
There was a voice in the sangam crying out his name.
He walked a little farther, until he found a tree old enough and large enough to lean against. It cradled him.
The follower closest to him saw him sit and nodded gravely. Ashok knew, without further confirmation, that no one would disturb him now, unless the general’s soldiers found them. And that he considered unlikely.
He closed his eyes. Breathed. Breathed.
His sister had howled for him in the sangam, and he had come. She was a shadow kneeling in swift running water. She raised her head the moment he appeared.