The Oleander Sword, page 16
Padma slammed a hand into the water and drenched Bhumika’s lowered face. For half a second, Bhumika could only blink and splutter. And then quite suddenly she was laughing, and Padma was laughing back—her little joyful mirror, always marveling at her own chaos.
It was only once Padma was dry and drowsing on Bhumika’s bed that Bhumika realized her headache had returned. Bathing, pouring warm water over her limbs, had eased the pain briefly. Not long enough. She rubbed her fingers against her temples, sighing. Before she could even consider whether she wanted to try tulsi again—or something rather more effective—Khalida entered.
“My lady,” Khalida said. “You need to dress.” She offered Bhumika a pale salwar kameez, waiting until Bhumika was dressed before continuing. “I’ve arranged your meal. I…” Khalida stopped, mouth still open. She was looking at the window.
Bhumika had a sudden sense of… shifting. As if her headache had tightened like a noose and twisted the world with it. Dizzying, as if she had passed through deep waters and risen to sunlight, but the water had gathered in her lungs. Her ears were ringing.
With some effort, she followed Khalida’s frozen gaze.
The flowers at the window had curled. Moved. The edges of the vines had sharpened, knife-like. The blooms had deepened to a riotous, bloody red.
It took her a moment longer to realize that the conch of warning had been sounded.
She snatched Padma up and strode from her chambers with Khalida at her side. Down, down the corridors. Out into the courtyard, by the watchtower on the walls.
“My la—elder!” The soldier was one of Jeevan’s old recruits, and he stumbled between one form of address and the other. “There are—dozens, maybe hundreds of people, calling themselves pilgrims. Outside.”
“There are always pilgrims,” Bhumika said, firm but calm. “Explain.”
“Not for you,” he bit out. “They are—they’re following something—someone. They are—”
The gates flew open.
No hands had forced them. No hands should have been capable of such an act. And Bhumika felt the strangeness again. Something new, choking her from within. Something coming.
Leaves. Leaves, everywhere. They were not growing through the walls—they were roiling, rising and tumbling as if caught in a great wind, pouring through the open gates, filling the air. She raised a hand to protect Padma’s face but did not allow herself the same kindness. She looked through the tumult.
There were pilgrims indeed. A whole swathe of them, standing beyond the mahal’s walls, visible only in glimpses between the green swirling before them and around them: an eye here, a length of hair there. A shoulder, an arm, a faceless torso. One figure stepped in front of the rest, walking slowly, steadily, toward the mahal.
Bhumika should, perhaps, have told her soldiers to prepare for a fight. Told them to gather their weapons, to form a perimeter. But those were not enemies in front of her. Not warriors. And whatever this was, it was a thing driven by magic and not men. Magic that she felt in her bones.
The figure was before her. The leaves parted and fell gently.
A familiar face stared back at her.
For a moment his mouth moved, soundless. As if he was trying to understand the shape, the shift of his own facial muscles. His face. The wholeness of it: the shape of his jaw, the cut of his hair. He looked as he had on the day he had entered the deathless waters. Entered and not come back.
“Ashok,” she said. Her voice sounded distant, even as she felt her own mouth move. Her own heart hammering, faint with a nausea that threatened to swallow her.
“Bhumika,” he said. He too sounded dazed. “I’ve found my way home.”
The tension in her skull fell away.
“You died.” Bhumika’s voice wavered. Her whole body threatened to waver. “Priya and I. And your rebels. We waited for you. By the deathless waters. We waited.” She’d stood by the water for a full night. Leaving Padma in Khalida’s care. Watching the gleaming, shining blue of it and hoping, hoping even as some terrible part of her had been glad she would not have to fight him in the days and months and years of Ahiranyi rule to come. “You were gone.”
“Priya isn’t here,” he said in reply. She wasn’t sure if he intended it to be a question or a statement.
“No,” Bhumika said. Lips numb. She wondered if she would swoon like some kind of soft maiden—if he had brought her to this. “You. We waited. By the waters. You died.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t die.” He didn’t try to move closer to her. His face was strangely blank. His hands were flexing at his sides. Opening, closing. Fingers moving. “I… I do not think I died.”
You did, she thought, with absolute certainty. It was not the new strangeness writhing inside her that told her. It was her own familiar gut instinct. It was the way his skin had not changed from sunlight or the lack of it. It was the leaves that surrounded him and clouded the air.
It was the absence of him in the sangam. She was breathing unsteadily, her body unable to resist the brunt of the shock roiling through it. Only Padma’s weight against her skin kept her steady.
He was far too uncannily himself, a picture painted a shade too perfectly.
“I didn’t come alone,” he said.
Behind him, she saw pilgrims fall to their knees. Murmurs of prayers, and cries. An ecstasy of weeping.
“It was inevitable,” said Ashok. “Like we were inevitable. Like—the tide.”
When you have lost people, they haunt you in ways large and small. Bhumika had always known this. She dreamt often of her brother, her uncle, even of her husband—strange dreams that verged on nightmares, that woke her with salt in her eyes.
She did not dream of the temple council often. But she had not forgotten their faces.
She recognized them the moment she saw them. Four figures, standing behind Ashok.
Elder Chandni, with her familiar, gentle eyes. Elder Sendhil, his face carved in forbidding lines. And there, next to them—oh. No.
Two of her siblings. Sanjana, with bright eyes and laughter on her lips.
Nandi, small and wide-eyed. Still a child, and forever a child.
They walked toward her. As they walked, green things rose from the earth: buds, soft ferns, life forcing its way out of the ground. Flowers blooming like a mantle from their shoulders and hair. Arms flecked with swirls of wood.
Bhumika could only kneel. It was not awe that took her to her knees, but a lesson carefully written into her when she was so young that it had become a part of her blood, her bones, and could not be later undone.
You show the yaksa veneration, her elders had taught her. Even an image, even an echo of them—
“Bhumika,” said the yaksa with Chandni’s face, smiling. Speaking in her dead elder’s voice. “Our temple daughter. We have finally come home.”
PRIYA
At first, Yogesh had struck Priya as a nervous man. But it didn’t take her long to realize he was simply nervous of her. As they rode their horses along the winding dirt tracks and roads that led to Saketa, she saw him touching the prayer stones he wore around his neck. Each stone grasped, one by one, between his fingers as he mouthed the names of the mothers of flame to himself. As if that had the strength to ward away Priya’s monstrousness.
She would have been irritated by it, normally. But she was too worried to think long on Yogesh.
“I can’t reach Bhumika,” she confided to Sima on the first evening.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t—you know.” She made a vague gesture, trying to encompass everything the sangam was without talking about it in front of Parijatdvipan strangers. “I don’t know why.”
Sima gave her a wide-eyed look. She understood, just as Priya did, how serious it was that Priya could not reach Ahiranya.
“We can send one of our men back,” Sima said. They didn’t have many to begin with. “Karan, maybe. Or Nitin?”
They couldn’t afford to make their retinue even smaller. They were already a sorry group: a mere handful of Ahiranyi soldiers, Sima in her plain sari with her bow, and Priya dressed in temple elder whites that had already seen a few too many encounters with dust.
She hadn’t thought she would need another way to contact Bhumika. She’d felt a pang when she’d left everyone behind, but she had thought it would be, in a way, just like any time she had traveled through Ahiranya to deal with the rot. Difficult, certainly, and lonely. But Bhumika would be there, waiting for her in the sangam. Waiting to advise and scold and stop Priya from doing anything impulsive that would land everyone who mattered to her in a pile of shit.
Now Priya was on her own.
“Karan,” Priya said reluctantly. “We’ll send him.”
“I’m sure everything’s fine, Pri,” Sima said. “Your sister will send someone after us, too. The second she realizes she can’t speak to you.”
What if she doesn’t send anyone? Priya thought. What if something has happened?
She looked at the path behind them. The dust of the road and the wizened trees, and Ahiranya already so far behind them that she could not see the Hirana at all.
“We could go back,” Sima said after a moment.
Priya swallowed, conflicted.
“Let’s give it a day,” Priya said. “Either someone will come from Bhumika, or someone won’t. And then…” She couldn’t continue. Worry was pooling coldly in her belly.
“Someone will come,” Sima said.
Ah, spirits, how long would it take for a fast rider to reach them from Ahiranya, when they were still on the move? Could a rider catch up with them? How long should Priya wait before she turned back? “A few more days,” she amended, settling on vagueness. When the worry became too much to stand, well—that would make her decision for her.
Her soreness and exhaustion soon distracted her. Priya wasn’t a natural rider. Jeevan had insisted on giving her a handful of lessons, alongside some guidance on handling scythe and saber. But her body ached that night when they lay down to rest, and despite her worries her sleep was deep and dreamless.
It wasn’t until the morning that she realized the reason for her easy sleep.
She could not hear the green.
No sangam, and no green. The disquiet grew in her, setting roots right through her, tightening her lungs. She couldn’t pretend any longer that everything was well.
Perhaps everyone in Ahiranya was safe. Perhaps Priya was the problem: her magic fading out of her as swiftly as water through a cracked pot. Perhaps she had no strength beyond Ahiranya’s borders, far from the gleaming blue of the deathless waters that had given her gifts to begin with.
But that hadn’t been the way of it in the Birch Bark Mantras. The elders of old had possessed power no matter where they went; had conquered the subcontinent alongside the yaksa in the Age of Flowers with that magic.
I am not an elder of old, Priya reminded herself, her stomach in knots. She held her face in her hands. I am something new. And maybe this was a terrible mistake.
She was ready to shake Sima awake and tell her they needed to turn back when she suddenly felt something lance through her. Something sharp and green, a dart arrowing through her blood, its hum settling in the back of her skull. She stood up sharply and scrambled out of her tent. Around her, the sleeping camp fumbled awake, the men on guard reaching instinctually for their weapons. “There’s something,” she said to the others. “Beyond the trees.”
Immediately, her own men reached for their weapons, and the soldiers attending Yogesh drew their sabers. Priya swiftly shook her head. “Not like that,” she said. “No—no enemies or bandits. Look there’s no need for your swords. Give me a moment—”
“Priya,” Sima said. “What—”
“I can feel something,” Priya said quickly, crossing the dusty ground.
Ignoring Sima’s protests and Yogesh’s murmured cautions, she walked through the trees. They grew close together here, slender branches twining into arches and webs around her. The scent of leaf sap and wet earth filled her nose at first, deep and lustrous and damp, then gave way quickly to something more pungent: decay.
Rot.
She stopped. A few of the men had followed her, and now they gazed silently at the village that lay hidden between the trees, in a modest clearing.
It was clearly abandoned. The buildings were overgrown, small wood and stone houses caving in beneath the pressure of strangling roots, flowering bushes. All of the trees looked slightly wrong, in a way that Priya had grown very familiar with. Their trunks appeared almost—soft. The wood too forgiving. Where the bark had stripped or the surface splintered, the trees were the deep color of exposed flesh, marbled with the white fat.
She swallowed back nausea.
“None of you should touch it,” she said to the men.
“Elder Priya,” Yogesh said, clearing his throat. He sounded fairly nauseated himself. “We should not—the empress would not want anyone to be risked. The business of burning the trees can be left to the local villagers.”
“What villagers?” Priya asked. “There’s no one here. They’re all long gone.”
Yogesh’s soldiers made uneasy noises. But they soon melted back, returning to the path, leaving her alone with the trees.
“I’m staying,” said Sima quietly.
“Sima. It’s not… it won’t be interesting.”
“Someone has to keep an eye on you.” She crossed her arms.
There was no point arguing, and Priya didn’t want to remain here, smelling the stink of rotting meat, any longer than she had to. As she stepped closer, the call of green and life inside her grew stronger. Her limbs felt steadier, some weakness she hadn’t even been aware of seeping out of them.
Priya closed her eyes. Reached—and finally, blessedly, felt the green reaching back. She pushed herself through the green, through the sangam, through cosmic rivers and the deathless waters that ran through her blood—and grasped the rot. Froze it to stillness. It would grow no further, now.
When she returned to herself, she was gasping, lungs heaving, and Sima was holding her up. They were both leaning back against a healthy tree, still alone. It couldn’t have been long, then.
“I told you that you needed someone to keep an eye on you,” Sima said, voice a little shaky.
Priya managed a laugh.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Come on. We’d better head back.”
They straightened up and returned to the soldiers. Behind them, the trees had settled. Nearly alive again, the ground around them resting easy, the sweet scent of fresh grass now the only smell in the air.
“Did you know there was rot this far from home?” Sima asked, voice a whisper.
“No,” Priya whispered in return. Her blood still hummed and sang distractingly, warm with relief. She wasn’t broken after all.
But she didn’t know why her magic had faded to begin with. And that… that worried her.
That night, lying on a mat on the ground with Sima beside her, she tried to reach for Bhumika again.
It felt like she was learning how to walk a familiar path with her eyes closed. It could be done: Her feet knew this particular soil, the way this path curved and dipped. But she’d always had her eyes to rely on before, and now she had only her skin.
She closed her—real, not metaphorical—eyes and breathed deep, slow. Deep, slow. She sank under her skin, an old and practiced motion, seeking the sangam. If she could reach Bhumika, she could at least reassure her sister that Priya was safe and sound. And she could reassure herself that everyone in Ahiranya was safe, too. Maybe then she could continue on this journey without fear for what lay behind her.
The waters opened up to her. Radiant darkness. Waves lapping around her, as stars slipped their perches to whirl at her feet.
“Priya.” Bhumika was kneeling in the waters. Three rivers swirled around her. She was smiling—a fixed, even smile that looked strange on her shadow of a face. “You’re finally here.”
“Did I worry you? Of course I did. I’m sorry. I couldn’t get here. I…” She shrugged helplessly, relief pouring through her. “Honestly, Bhumika, I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get here again, so let me tell you everything I can.”
She spoke of the journey—the rot—the fear in Yogesh’s wary eyes, his prayer stones, his watchful men. The strangeness of feeling distant and disconnected from the power she’d possessed in Ahiranya. And Bhumika listened to all of it wordlessly, fixed and still.
“Why are you still smiling?” Priya asked, eventually. “Are you really that happy to have me gone? Weren’t you worried at all? I’m going to start feeling insulted.”
“I’m just pleased to see you,” Bhumika said. “It’s been too long. I was worried.”
“Is everything alright in Hiranaprastha?” Priya asked. “Padma’s fine, and—Rukh?”
Bhumika inclined her head.
“Everyone is well,” she said. “Just as they should be.” Bhumika reached out and touched a hand to Priya’s face—the shadow of it shaping Priya’s cheek. “Go back to yourself,” she said. “We’ll see each other again soon enough.”
“We may not,” Priya said urgently. “Bhumika, don’t you understand? I… I’m not sure if I’ll always be able to reach out. If you send a messenger it’ll take weeks, but if something’s important you will, won’t you? If you can’t reach me here, like this?”
The shadow of Bhumika’s mouth—the shape of her teeth—
“Of course,” Bhumika said. “I’ll find you when you’re needed. I promise you that. Don’t worry about using your strength to call me in the sangam. Focus on what lies ahead.”
“But—”
“Just do as I say, Priya,” Bhumika said. Her words were gentle, but they were also an order. “Now go.”
Priya returned to her body. Stared out at the dark, breathing unevenly now, feeling odd and unsteady, some sense of wrongness grappling at the edges of her consciousness.
Eventually, she slept.
By the time she woke in the morning, and broke her fast, and heaved herself once again onto her horse, the strangeness of it all had dissipated like nothing more than a bad dream.
