PROLOGUE

She dreamed of flying when she slept.

The wind tore through her like a blade — not the polite wind of Pune mornings that lifted the pallu off your shoulder and set it flapping against traffic, but a wild, glacier-born thing that found the gaps in her leather armour and crawled inside, cold as river stones pressed against bare skin.

Mountains. She could feel them more than see them — the weight of the Himalayas pressing against the sky like the ribcage of something ancient and barely breathing. Peaks draped in fog, the tips of deodars jabbing upward through the darkness like blackened fingers reaching for a moon that wasn't there.

No moon. No stars. The only light that touched her face came from below — from the belly of the beast that carried her, a deep amber glow that pulsed with each breath, each massive exhale of heat that turned the mist around them to gold.

She dreamed of flying, cradled in a smooth, scaled coil that wrapped around her body and held her the way a river holds a stone — completely, inevitably, without effort.

Nag-Priya.

When she closed her eyes, she heard the thundering voice in her mind — not in her ears but deeper, in the place behind her sternum where her heartbeat lived — and the fire burned her eyelids like a fever dream.

It was a fever dream.

"Take this." A potion touched her lips, bitter as neem and warm as cardamom milk. "Take it. It will heal..."

The words died away in a rush of pain that twisted her belly and speared into her chest, wrapping iron fingers around her heart as it raced, raced, raced to escape the thread of fire that stitched itself through her veins.

She heard it thundering in her ears.

His voice.

Her heart.

She felt the cold licking down her throat like monsoon water filling a well.

Then everything went silent, and her heartbeat stopped.