“They are. All over the city,” Priya agreed.
“Did a merchant get his head chopped off again?”
Priya shook her head. “I know as much as you do.”
The girl looked from Priya’s face down to Priya’s muddied sari, her hands empty apart from the sack of kachoris. There was a question in her gaze.
“I couldn’t get any beads today,” Priya confirmed. She watched the girl’s expression crumple, though she valiantly tried to control it. Sympathy would do her no good, so Priya offered the pastries out instead. “You should go now. You don’t want to get caught by the guards.”
The children snatched the kachoris up, a few muttering their thanks, and scattered. The girl rubbed the bead at her throat with her knuckles as she went. Priya knew it would be cold under her hand—empty of magic.
If the girl didn’t get hold of more sacred wood soon, then the next time Priya saw her, the left side of her face would likely be as green-dusted as her eyelid.
You can’t save them all, she reminded herself. You’re no one. This is all you can do. This, and no more.
Priya turned to leave—and saw that one boy had hung back, waiting patiently for her to notice him. He was the kind of small that suggested malnourishment; his bones too sharp, his head too large for a body that hadn’t yet grown to match it. He had his shawl over his hair, but she could still see his dark curls, and the deep green leaves growing between them. He’d wrapped his hands up in cloth.
“Do you really have nothing, ma’am?” he asked hesitantly.
“Really,” Priya said. “If I had any sacred wood, I’d have given it to you.”
“I thought maybe you lied,” he said. “I thought, maybe you haven’t got enough for more than one person, and you didn’t want to make anyone feel bad. But there’s only me now. So you can help me.”
“I really am sorry,” Priya said. She could hear yelling and footsteps echoing from the market, the crash of wood as stalls were closed up.
The boy looked like he was mustering up his courage. And sure enough, after a moment, he squared his shoulders and said, “If you can’t get me any sacred wood, then can you get me a job?”
She blinked at him, surprised.
“I—I’m just a maidservant,” she said. “I’m sorry, little brother, but—”
“You must work in a nice house, if you can help strays like us,” he said quickly. “A big house with money to spare. Maybe your masters need a boy who works hard and doesn’t make much trouble? That could be me.”
“Most households won’t take a boy who has the rot, no matter how hardworking he is,” she pointed out gently, trying to lessen the blow of her words.
“I know,” he said. His jaw was set, stubborn. “But I’m still asking.”
Smart boy. She couldn’t blame him for taking the chance. She was clearly soft enough to spend her own coin on sacred wood to help the rot-riven. Why wouldn’t he push her for more?
“I’ll do anything anyone needs me to do,” he insisted. “Ma’am, I can clean latrines. I can cut wood. I can work land. My family is—they were—farmers. I’m not afraid of hard work.”
“You haven’t got anyone?” she asked. “None of the others look out for you?” She gestured in the vague direction the other children had vanished.
“I’m alone,” he said simply. Then: “Please.”
A few people drifted past them, carefully skirting the boy. His wrapped hands, the shawl over his head—both revealed his rot-riven status just as well as anything they hid would have.
“Call me Priya,” she said. “Not ma’am.”
“Priya,” he repeated obediently.
“You say you can work,” she said. She looked at his hands. “How bad are they?”
“Not that bad.”
“Show me,” she said. “Give me your wrist.”
“You don’t mind touching me?” he asked. There was a slight waver of hesitation in his voice.
“Rot can’t pass between people,” she said. “Unless I pluck one of those leaves from your hair and eat it, I think I’ll be fine.”
That brought a smile to his face. There for a blink, like a flash of sun through parting clouds, then gone. He deftly unwrapped one of his hands. She took hold of his wrist and raised it up to the light.
There was a little bud, growing up under the skin.
It was pressing against the flesh of his fingertip, his finger a too-small shell for the thing trying to unfurl. She looked at the tracery of green visible through the thin skin at the back of his hand, the fine lace of it. The bud had deep roots.
She swallowed. Ah. Deep roots, deep rot. If he already had leaves in his hair, green spidering through his blood, she couldn’t imagine that he had long left.
“Come with me,” she said, and tugged him by the wrist, making him follow her. She walked along the road, eventually joining the flow of the crowd leaving the market behind.
“Where are we going?” he asked. He didn’t try to pull away from her.
“I’m going to get you some sacred wood,” she said determinedly, putting all thoughts of murders and soldiers and the work she needed to do out of her mind. She released him and strode ahead. He ran to keep up with her, dragging his dirty shawl tight around his thin frame. “And after that, we’ll see what to do with you.”
The grandest of the city’s pleasure houses lined the edges of the river. It was early enough in the day that they were utterly quiet, their pink lanterns unlit. But they would be busy later. The brothels were always left well alone by the regent’s men. Even in the height of the last boiling summer, before the monsoon had cracked the heat in two, when the rebel sympathizers had been singing anti-imperialist songs and a noble lord’s chariot had been cornered and burned on the street directly outside his own haveli—the brothels had kept their
