CHAPTER SEVEN: ANARYA

They left before dawn.

She told no one except Priya, who had the particular gift of accepting outrageous information with the same expression she used for accepting breakfast orders. I'm going to Patala with my human servant to meet the Naga King. I'll be back in five days. Priya had blinked once. Asked if she needed her wings oiled for the journey. Packed a bag.

Anarya loved Priya with a ferocity she couldn't express.

The journey to Patala was two days by wing — Gandharvas could fly, but not indefinitely, and the volcanic territories of the Nagas were in the far south, past the Vanamala forest, past the human settlements that clung to the forest's edge like barnacles on a rock. She couldn't fly the whole way. She needed to stop. She needed to sleep. The pre-dawn air smelled of dew and cold stone and the distant sulfur that drifted north from the Naga territories.

She needed to figure out what to do about the fact that her human servant could not fly at all.

"I'll carry you," she said, standing at the edge of the palace terrace in the grey pre-dawn, her wings already spread, the cool air sliding over her feathers like a hand.

He looked at her.

"You'll carry me."

"I'm stronger than I look."

"You weigh less than I do."

"Gandharva wings generate lift through praana, not muscle. Physics doesn't apply to me the way it applies to you." She held out her arms. "Unless you'd prefer to walk. I'd see you in two weeks."

Something moved across his face. Not quite amusement. The shape of amusement, the way her coronation smile had been the shape of a smile. She was beginning to learn his shapes — the things he showed instead of the things he felt.

He stepped forward.

She caught him under the arms. Felt the weight of him settle against her — solid, warm, denser than she expected, the kind of weight that came from bones that had been broken and healed and broken again. Her wings adjusted, the praana flowing through them in a hot rush, compensating, balancing, finding the lift.

"Hold on," she said.

"To what?"

"To me."

His arms went around her waist. His face was very close to hers — close enough that she could feel the heat of his breath on her jaw, close enough that she could see the faint scar that ran from his left eyebrow into his hairline, close enough that she could smell him: iron, sweat, and underneath, something warmer, something that made her wings beat faster in a way that had nothing to do with lift.

She launched.

The ground fell away and the world inverted — solid became distant, sky became close, and the particular vertigo of first flight hit her chest the way it always did, the stomach-drop of gravity releasing its claim, the body's ancient mammalian panic at leaving the earth overridden by the wing-rush of praana finding its channel. She had been flying since she was four years old and the sensation still made her heart stutter.

She could not imagine what it felt like for someone who had never left the ground.

The wind hit them — cold, immediate, carrying the smell of pine resin and altitude and the clean emptiness of air that had never been breathed. The kind of cold that stripped thought and left only sensation. She felt his arms tighten. Felt the involuntary clench of his hands against her back, fingers digging into the fabric of her traveling cloak so hard she could feel each individual fingertip through the wool. Heard, above the wind, the sharp intake of his breath — not a gasp, not a scream, but the sound of someone swallowing a scream and replacing it with something more controlled.

His body was rigid against hers. Every muscle locked. She could feel his heartbeat through his chest where it pressed against her — fast, hammering, the heartbeat of a man whose body was screaming danger while his mind refused to listen. His breath was hot against her neck in the cold air, and each exhale fogged in the altitude and was torn away by the wind before it could settle.

"Don't look down," she said.

"I'm looking down."

"Stop."

"Everything is very small." His voice was remarkably steady for someone whose heartbeat was trying to escape his ribcage. "The trees look like moss. The river looks like a thread. Your palace looks like a toy someone left on a shelf."

"I know. That's why I said don't look." She adjusted her wings, banking east toward the mountain range that marked the edge of Gandharva territory. The adjustment shifted his weight against her, and she felt him compensate — instinctive, immediate, the reflexes of someone whose body knew how to adapt to shifting conditions even when those conditions were a thousand feet of empty air. Below them, Devagiri shrank — the white stone terraces, the market squares, the palace at the summit like a crown on a head — until it was a pale mark against the dark green of the forest.

She was aware of him. Intensely, uncomfortably aware. The weight of his body against hers. The heat of his hands through her cloak. The rhythm of his breathing, which had steadied now — he was not panicking, which impressed her. Most humans panicked when they left the ground. Most humans screamed.

He was quiet.

"You're not afraid," she said.

"I'm terrified."

"You don't look terrified."

"I've had practice."

She thought about that. About four years in the pit. About what kind of practice that was.

"When we land," she said, "we need to talk about what you are."

She felt him go still against her. Not tense — still. The stillness she had learned to recognize as his version of paying attention.

"What I am," he said.

"The lake responds to you. It glows when you touch the water. Amrita doesn't respond to humans." She paused. "And in the pit. The things that happen when someone goes down near you."

"Lila told you."

"Lila didn't tell me anything. I have eyes, Kael. I've been watching you for three weeks."

The wind carried his silence. She felt his heartbeat against her back — fast, steady, the beat of something alive and frightened and determined.

"I can raise the dead," he said.

She almost dropped him.

Not physically — her wings held, her praana held, the lift didn't waver. But something inside her lurched, a vertigo that had nothing to do with altitude.

"You can—"

"The dead. People who have died. Animals. If I'm close enough, if they're fresh enough, I can—" He stopped. "I can make them move. I can control them. Their bodies respond to my mind."

The wind screamed past them. Below, the forest stretched in every direction, dark and ancient and indifferent.

"How long?" she said.

"Six months. It started in the pit. A man died — really died, not just unconscious — and I felt something reach out from me to him. Like a hand. Like a thread. I didn't mean to do it. He sat up and the crowd cheered because they thought he'd recovered. He hadn't recovered. He was dead. I was moving him."

She flew in silence for a long time.

"This is why the amrita responds to you," she said finally. "You have praana. Real praana — the kind that Gandharvas have. The kind that shouldn't exist in a human." She paused. "Except that according to Mira's journal, it DOES exist in humans. The Yantra just siphons it before it can develop."

"And the Yantra is breaking," he said.

"And the Yantra is breaking. Which means human praana is building up. Which means—"

"Which means more humans will develop shakti."

"Which means everything changes."

They flew south. The mountains rose beneath them, jagged and dark, the tree line breaking into bare rock and then snow. The air grew thin. She pushed higher, her wings burning with the effort, the praana flowing through her like liquid fire.

His arms stayed around her waist. She did not ask him to let go.

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They landed in a clearing on the southern slope of the mountains, where the rock was warm from volcanic heat seeping up through the earth and the air smelled like sulfur and old stone. It was evening. The sky was the color of a bruise — purple and yellow and dark blue, the sun gone behind the mountains.

She set him down carefully. He staggered slightly — the return of gravity after hours of flight — and caught himself. She folded her wings and felt the ache in them, the deep muscular exhaustion of carrying a second body for a full day.

They made camp. Not much of a camp — a fire, her travel blanket, the dried food that Priya had packed. He gathered wood while she coaxed the fire to life with a thread of praana, and they sat on opposite sides of the flames and ate in silence.

The fire cracked and popped. The volcano — they could see it from here, a dark mass against the darker sky, its peak glowing faintly red — breathed.

"You're not afraid of me," he said.

She looked up from her food.

"I told you I can raise the dead," he said. "You didn't flinch. You didn't have me arrested. You didn't even put distance between us." He paused. "Most people would be afraid."

"I'm not most people."

"No. You're not." He was looking at the fire, not at her. The light caught the angles of his face and made them sharper. "Why aren't you afraid?"

She thought about it. Really thought, because the question deserved a real answer.

"Because I've been afraid of the wrong things my whole life," she said. "I've been afraid of Rudra. Afraid of losing the throne. Afraid of the lake dimming. Afraid of what happens when the hierarchy falls." She put down her food. "I read that journal and I realized: the thing I should have been afraid of this whole time was the hierarchy itself. The fact that my people — my family — have been stealing life force from yours for ten thousand years. That's the horror. Not you. Not whatever you can do with dead things." She paused. "You're a symptom, Kael. The disease is older than both of us."

He was very quiet.

Then he said, "You're the first Gandharva who has ever called it what it is."

"I'm probably the first Gandharva who's read Mira's journal."

"Maybe." He looked at her across the fire. "Maybe not. Maybe others have read it and decided it was easier to look away."

The fire between them was small and hot and bright. The volcano breathed in the distance. The sky was full of stars she didn't know the names of — down here, below the Gandharva territories, the constellations were different.

She wanted to cross the fire. She wanted to sit beside him on his side. She wanted to close the distance that had been between them since the first moment he stood in front of her with his eyes on the floor and his face carefully still.

She stayed where she was.

"We should sleep," she said. "The Naga territories start at dawn."

He nodded. Lay down on the bare ground with his arms crossed over his chest. Closed his eyes.

She lay on her blanket and stared at the stars and did not sleep.

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