“What did you do?” she asked him instantly.
“You saw the flames, then.”
“Of course I did. Ashok. Why?”
“Justice,” he said simply. “You think there shouldn’t be consequences for burning women alive and crushing men’s skulls? Come on now, Priya.”
“Did you kill General Vikram?”
That question stopped him short.
“Do you really care?”
“I care because of what his death would mean,” she bit out.
“I see. You care because of Bhumika.” He drew closer to her. “No. I didn’t kill him. I did consider it,” he confessed, thinking of the regent’s terrified face with no small pleasure. “But some things are not meant to be. I settled for Lord Iskar and his family instead.”
“Ashok.”
“The deaths of our people had to be repaid,” he said calmly. She was still so na?ve. She didn’t understand the way the world worked, or the price power demanded. Not as he did. “And now they have been. Lord Iskar served the regent ably, didn’t he? A great financial mind. Without him, Vikram will never be able to bring the other lords to heel. No one will know how to get anything done. Maybe when they’re all bickering as their revenue streams crumble around them, they will remember that the Ahiranyi spirit isn’t to be trifled with.”
“You’re escalating,” said Priya. “You’re going to make everything so much worse. The general is going to kill so many people to compensate for this, Ashok.”
“He was the one who escalated,” Ashok said. “All those men and women put to death for—what? An ‘attack’ in which no one died but Meena? Your regent is a fool, or his master is a fool. The emperor needs to understand that they can’t take our language, ban our stories, let us starve, and then outright kill us, without consequences. I don’t regret it, Priya. And neither should you.”
“You’ll see Ahiranya bathed in blood, between you.” She sounded so much like Bhumika then—so disapproving and prim—that he could have laughed.
Instead, he kneeled down, mirroring her.
“Have you found the way to the deathless waters, Pri? If you really want things to be less bloody, that’s what you need to do.”
“If you’re going to lie to me, at least do me the service of making it convincing,” Priya scoffed. “If I give you the deathless waters you’ll use them to build an army, to murder, to—”
“—live,” he finished. “I need the deathless waters to live.”
The blow struck, as he knew it would. He could hear it in the weight of her silence.
“It’s like you’re holding a knife to your own throat to make me obey,” she said finally. “Everything you say feels like a threat.”
“The truth isn’t a threat,” he said gently. “Pri, I never wanted this for you. I set Meena on this task for a purpose. But you’re my only hope now. And I’m not lying. It will be less bloody, if my followers and I have the kind of strength we need to make a strike that snaps Parijatdvipa’s control of Ahiranya at the joints.”
In truth, they needed the waters if they wanted to be sure of success. He had plans. He knew exactly who needed to die to bring Parijatdvipa’s imperial power to its knees. He’d spent a long time considering. Every murder he and his followers made was intended to weaken Parijatdvipa’s control and pluck the weeds of imperial power out at their deepest roots. “You know what they say: in killing, a single blow of a scythe is cleaner than a dozen from the mace.”
With the deathless waters they could be the scythe: stronger than their limited numbers and cobbled together, disparate funds would allow. They could kill accurately and swiftly, cleansing Ahiranya in one fell swoop.
Without the waters, there was little chance of success. They would have to be brutal. They would have to burn and gut Ahiranya, killing their own in order to destroy the empire. There would be no clean plucking of weeds: This would be the kind of war that set whole fields of crops alight, leaving nothing but ash and hunger in its wake. And even then—even after paying in Ahiranyi blood—there would be no guarantee of success. No promise that Ahiranya would be free.
Only Priya could find the waters. Only Priya could coax the way from the Hirana, and bring Ashok and his followers the strength they needed to succeed. Only her.
Priya reached for him, then paused. She drew her hand back reluctantly. Lowered it into the confluence of waters.