“You don’t feel it day in and day out, but I do. Every time I drink the waters a new part of me is torn away.” He steeled himself to do what was necessary. To teach her. “You want to know what we are, Priya? Here. Let me show you.”
She realized a moment too late. Once, she would have known far more quickly—would have dodged or run or used her teeth. Life in the mahal had left her slow. But as it was, she could do nothing, before the shadow of his fist forced itself into her chest, the dark smoke of her unspooling.
He tightened his fist, close around where her heart should have been. And tightened, and twisted.
She screamed, the shadow of her a shimmer of agony.
“I know that it hurts,” he said roughly. “I know. This is how I feel all the time. Scoured and twisted and—inhuman, Priya. This is our inheritance.”
Like a hole through the heart, he thought. Like your soul is a decayed structure, crumbling, the light pouring through you.
There was something ugly and sweet about the feeling that ran through him in response to her pain. It was, he reasoned, the satisfaction of watching a lesson being learned.
“My will is stronger than yours, Pri. It always was. I saved your life time and time again, and now I tell you: Save mine. Your debt is due. Or you condemn me to die feeling like this.
“I want to make this ugliness in us worth something, Pri,” he told her. “I want us to use it for something greater. For something good. For Ahiranya as it should be, free of the empire. For our home.”
He wrenched his hand back. Darkness fell into the water from her shadowy form, bursting into black flowers before withering away. Her hands moved, fluttered, as if she wanted to touch her chest but didn’t dare.
“You could have been kinder,” she choked out. “You of all people, who suffered what I suffered—I thought I could trust you to be my brother.”
He shook his head.
“Family don’t have a duty to be kind to you. They have a duty to make you better. Stronger. I am being true to our family. Right now, Pri. And always.”
His voice became more tender.
“Find the deathless waters. Remember who you are and be strong, Priya.” And then, when she refused to look at him, when her head remained lowered, he said, “Priya. You had to know.”
He reached for her but she stumbled back from him—rejected him, with a savage noise that was not words, only feeling. She flung herself back into the water, unspooling into nothing. Running from him, and from the truth.
Distantly, he felt the flicker of Bhumika. Of one of his rebels, the scant few left who’d drunk the waters to fight at his side. He closed his eyes and lowered his own face beneath the rivers.
PRIYA
Flung back into her body. A moment when she felt the waters of flesh and immortality and soul rising in her throat choking her and she grasped her own neck gasping, gasping. Her flesh burned—she did not know where the earth began or the sky ended, she did not know the way up, out. It was drowning, this feeling, or something so close to it that it did not matter if water surrounded her or if part of her lay ensnared in the sangam still, rended by Ashok’s fury.
“Priya.” A voice. “Are you injured? Speak to me. Quietly.”
Priya’s eyes cracked open. Malini kneeled by her. She was not once-born or twice-or thrice-born: She was entirely mortal, gaze focused on Priya, her lips pressed tightly together. Priya was no longer in the sangam, then, and Ashok was not here. He could not harm her.
Ashok had tried to harm her.
Her hand went to her chest. He had harmed her. The place where he had hurt her was like a burning star within her center, and she could not breathe around it.
“Priya,” Malini said again. Her voice was calm, utterly calm, but it was a serenity that Malini wore like armor. Her eyes held Priya’s steadily. “You need to stop this.”
Stop…？
It was only then that Priya realized they were surrounded by moss and flowers, vines twisting across the stone of the walls, unfurling through the cracks. In fact, the stone almost seemed to have moved, reshaping itself to let the greenery twine around it.
“Pramila,” she gasped. “If she sees—”
“I don’t know where she is,” said Malini, “or when she will return, and that is why you must be quiet.”
“I’m sorry,” Priya gasped out, even though she had nothing to be sorry for, and Malini had everything. She tried to concentrate, to lift her head, but she could feel Ashok’s fury as though his fist were still in her chest. She breathed—and faded into blackness.