Jaya carefully picked up the lotus. “I don’t know if I can pretend in front of her.”
Akaros gripped her shoulder. “You will.You must.”
Jaya threaded through a throng of people crowding the street. Taller than most, she spotted the ruined spire of the temple in the distance, and the retinue of guards standing outside its walls.
She stopped on the corner of the street, observing the guards. There were seven Black Scales in total, three posted by the entrance, the others along the wall. She noticed how some passersby cast quick glances in their direction and hurried past the temple. Others knelt or lay prostrate, kissing the ground and showering it with rose petals. There were Ravani and Sesharian devotees, all of them marked with a black serpent on their cheeks.
“Why are there guards by the temple?” she asked a Sesharian woman carrying a thali of offerings.
The woman gave her an odd look. “Have you not heard? The Prophetnearly killed the queen here. He enacted his deliverance, and this is now a holy site.”
Jaya frowned. She saw no sign of battle, no evidence of a scuffle. “When?”
“Weeks ago. Are you daft, girl? Were you living out in the rocks?”
In a tunnel in the desert, so about the same.Jaya watched as one unmarked Ravani man knelt with hands clasped around a rosary. Trinkets of the Phoenix and the Serpent dangled on its end. “Look, he’s praying to both. I thought the Prophet ended the worship of the Phoenix goddess.”
The woman spat and made a quick sign. “Blasphemous. He’s afraid to let go of his old god.”
“Why isn’t anyone stopping him?”
“And risk a riot? Not everyone is willing to give up their Phoenix icons, even if our Blue Star burns Her down in front of them.” The woman snorted. “Some are just too stuck in their old ways.”
As the woman hurried to the temple gates, Jaya sat down on the ruined steps of what had once been an old sari shop. She noted how the guard on the far right favored his left leg, how the one in the middle kept tapping her finger against the butt of her pulse gun. The ones by the temple doors looked bored. Odd. This square had been the sight of a bloody, sacred battle, and the guards looked indifferent. Jaya chewed on a nail, thinking, when she caught a whiff of a conversation in Ambari.
“—buried, every last one of them.”
She stood, tracking the speaker. It was a Sesharian talking to another, and though they spoke in the old Sesharian tongue, Jaya had spent suns learning it under Maya’s tutelage. She followed the pair as they carefully avoided the prayer circle.
“—he could destroy the mines, but he couldn’t save his own.”
“Hush, Bemon,” his companion said, a small woman with narrow shoulders. She glanced around them, and Jaya quickly hid behind the side of a building. “His followers are everywhere.”
“And? They will do nothing. Ours are too weak to call him out, the Ravani too stupid. How can he free us if he is killing us in turn?”
“This is war, Bemon. We are lucky to even live. Let’s go back to the temple, pray for the dead.” She tugged on his arm, but the man shook himself free.
“I’m not setting foot in that temple,” he snarled. “Prophet or not, he’sstill a rustblood. His father bent the knee to the Jantari. And now he sold our brothers and sisters for a little piece of their cursed metal.”
Jaya followed them at a distance as they traveled deeper into the Sesharian quarters. Here, the buildings cramped in, as if to shield themselves and others. Mothers sat on the thresholds, peeling vegetables, while their children dashed through the alleys, laughing. Neighbors called to one another in Ambari. Conversation flowed loosely, addled by drink, by song. There was an ease here, a slow breath released. No doubt, a Sesharian Prophet added a sense of security. They all bore his mark. They all lit a diya in his name before their doorsteps.
But as Jaya slipped through the shops, the children, the gossiping fathers and tired mothers, she sensed something else too. A quiet turmoil. She heard it in the quick way conversations dropped into whispers when discussing a delicate subject. She saw it in the stiff, mechanical movements of a mother relighting her diya, as if the task was a burden she must bear, rather than a prayer to a savior.
Jaya stopped, uncertain. Were the Sesharians losing faith in Samson? The couple slipped down an alleyway, and Jaya followed when the wall on her right caught her attention.
On the side of a building, she saw it. A simple number.
400.
Four hundred Sesharians lost in the mines. Four hundred of their own, buried by their Prophet. A sick sense of satisfaction settled in her stomach then, and Jaya turned back. She needed to tell Akaros. If the Sesharians were losing faith in their leader, then the Arohassin could use that to their advantage. And if Samson could be removed, then Elena—
She stopped short of the temple courtyard as the guards snapped to a salute. People suddenly shoved one another, craning their necks, whispering. Even the pilgrims had abandoned their supplications to raise their thalis. Jaya elbowed past one, earning her a glare, but once he saw her eyes, her hair, he fell back.
“Yumi,” he gasped.
Others began to turn to her.
Their curiosity sent an ugly pang of disgust and jealousy through Jaya. She remembered others touching her hair as a child.But look, her hair is soft! She is not one.Their frowns, the confusion in their eyes, the simpleWhat are you?closing her throat in a panic. She had to get out. Jaya pushed past them, ignoring the curses, the questions, when suddenly the crowd opened, and she was spit in front of the temple gates.
