“I’m not sure I can give you what you need,” she said finally. There was something vulnerable—almost a question—in her voice. “I’m not sure I can give you the waters. And I’m not sure I can give them to myself either.”
“You agree with Bhumika now, then? You want to bow and scrape before the Parijati for what little they deign to give us? You no longer want us to have what is ours by right?”
“What will you do with that right, Ashok? What are you doing?” she demanded. “What are we meant to be?”
“We could do so much good, Priya,” he told her sincerely. “The thrice-born could manipulate the rot, you know. It was so new then—as were we—but they could control it. You may not like my methods. You don’t have to. But once we rule Ahiranya, we can make our country better. We can see our people put first, fed and cared for as a priority, for once. We can save our culture, our history. Perhaps even end the rot entirely.”
“By becoming monsters?” Priya whispered. “By turning into weapons?”
Yes.
“You’ve killed too,” he said. “There’s no shame in being strong enough to take what is rightfully yours.”
“Maybe there should be,” she said. Another hesitation. Then the words unfurled out of her. “I remember more. The Hirana is beginning to respond to me. Sometimes I smell smoke and it’s as if it’s choking me. I hear screams. I…”
She looked at him, this shadow of her, who was only beginning to remember what he could never forget. “Ashok, can you promise me you won’t… that you’ll only do as much as you need to do, to see Ahiranya free? That you won’t kill every Parijati on our land? I know your anger,” she told him. “I feel it. And your grief. And your—hunger for something better. But can you promise me you won’t drown Ahiranya in blood?”
“I promise to do what is best for Ahiranya.”
“That isn’t an answer,” she said.
“I promise to make us what we once were.”
“That still isn’t an answer,” Priya whispered. “Ashok. Brother. You cannot be trusted with the kind of power we once had.”
Her words were like a slow knife, paring the skin from his ribs.
“I raised you,” he managed to say around the pain of her condemnation.
“I know.”
“When we were hungry, when we had nothing, I gave you what little food we had. I stayed up with a dagger in my hand when you slept on the street so you wouldn’t be harmed. In the Hirana I saved your life.”
“I know,” she choked out. “Ashok. I know.”
But she said nothing more.
He thought of waking in the husk of the tree, knowing that Meena was dead. Knowing that his own weakness had left the rebellion without a spy, without a valuable weapon in its hands.
He had not cultivated Priya into a weapon. He had let her go to Bhumika. And this was how she thanked him?
“There is so much you don’t remember of our childhood, Priya. But do you remember how we were trained when we were children?”
Silence. Then she said, “I remember pain.”
“It was how we were taught to be strong. How we were all taught to be strong enough to survive, and to rule. Pain can be a loving teacher. Spirits know I’ve had my fill of it.”
But you, he thought. Have you?
She was too weak, his sister. Too unaware of what she should have been.
“Do you know why we are nothing but shadows in the sangam?” he asked her then. “Have you ever questioned it?”
“No,” she said.
“Some of us who were older—we spoke of it. All our gifts are a reflection of the powers the yaksa possessed. Even this. It was the yaksa who traveled the cosmic rivers, once, and came to our world. When we come here, I believe it’s only the yaksa part of us that moves.” He curled his hand to a fist, placing it against her collarbone, above her heart. “When you taste the deathless waters, they carve out a place for the gifts of the yaksa inside you. The power of the yaksa is a cuckoo in the nest of your body. But worse still, you convince yourself it is you. It’s only when the power fades that you realize a part of you has been erased.”
“You’re not making any sense,” she told him. But she was listening.
“The part of you that stands here is the part of you that isn’t human,” he told her. “The part of you that stands here is the part the deathless waters carved out, gutted and hollowed to make a space for power.