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The earth shriveled away.Bind, it said.Bind her, child, or run.
Sirsha swallowed, throat suddenly dry. “That must be unpleasant for a being such as yourself. Used to roaming the countryside, murdering whatever poor sap you happen across.”
As Sirsha spoke, she reached for the binding magic she’d ignored for eight years.Emotion exerted on an element.In this case, the element was magic itself. She drew on it, casting it out like a lasso until it was a snug, glowing chain around Div’s neck. Then, with a surge of satisfaction, Sirsha yanked. She allowed herself to smile, for she knew the strength ofher own magic. It was firm and unyielding—a yoke Div couldn’t break. Sirsha wouldn’t need J’yan and R’zwana after all.
Div looked down, bemused.
“Tell me, child. Did you truly believe you could chain me?”
An odd sound, a popping in Sirsha’s mind, as if she’d fallen from a great height. Sirsha’s power stretched taut before streaming away from her. Something was yanking it free, devouring it.
Sirsha found her power linked to Div’s for one brief, terrifying moment. It felt like staring into a void, into some empty grasping where the only emotion was hunger. A ravening need formore.
There should have been something else in that space. Something to balance it. But it was yawning and mindless and it gnawed at Div’s insides, not because it was malevolent, but because it simply knew no other way to exist.
Div smiled and seemed to swell like a tick engorged on blood. She met Sirsha’s gaze, and the Jaduna girl found that she was in the tent and not in the tent. Her feet were planted, but her mind was being drawn forward, into the now-white eyes of this creature that looked like her mother. Sirsha stared into the abyss, tipping down, called to the maw by a void within herself.
Some part of you broke that day your family cast you out, a voice crooned in Sirsha’s mind.The humanity drained out of you and left you a shell. You are tainted. You shall never love. Come, child. Come to one who will understand, for I, too, am empty.
The voice was the Raani’s and it sounded so reasonable, like Ma when she tried to persuade Sirsha to cooperate, to help the Kin track the Karjad when she didn’t wish to.
But now, instead of digging in her heels, Sirsha listened. For she was older and wiser. She understood the loneliness of leaving her Kin, of trading one moment of weakness for years of forced solitude.
Sirsha stepped forward, reaching out to the Raani, when a hand grabbed her by her neck and yanked her back.
R’zwana. “Traitor!” she screamed. “You were to give us the signal. I knew we couldn’t trust—”
J’yan pulled them both away from Div, lashing out at her with his battle magic. Div’s simulacrum dissolved and she collapsed into a seething, snarling mass of tortured gray shadows. She created her own weather, an ill wind that whirled around the small tent like a tiny, vicious cyclone.
“Bind her!” R’zwana screamed over the wind.“Bind her!”
Sirsha threw her binding magic around Div again, but it disintegrated as if being gobbled up. “I—I can’t—”
J’yan strained to hold Div in place, but Sirsha had felt the creature’s power. She knew Div was toying with him.
“J’yan, stop! She’s too strong. Shewantsyou to use your magic! She feeds off it!”
“Go then, coward!” R’zwana shoved her. “Run, like you always do!”
R’zwana drew on her own limited ability to bind, but it wasn’t enough. Her power had always been a droplet beside Sirsha’s ocean.
Div took slow steps toward J’yan, a stalking animal. Sirsha grabbed his hand and pulled, but it was as if his feet were rooted to the earth.
“Let go, J’yan!” Sirsha screamed. “We need to run!”
“Hold it while I bind it, J’yan!” R’zwana gritted her teeth, her own magic like a tattered string of yarn around Div’s swelling, writhing form. “Or we’re all dead!”
“We can’t, R’z!” J’yan dropped to his knees, magic fading. “Sirsha’s right.”
But by now, they were all pulled into the creature’s strange, pulsating gravity, unable to back away.
Div’s voice transformed into a menacing, earthy growl, and though she had no face, Sirsha could feel her smile. “Who first?”
R’zwana grabbed Sirsha and shoved her at Div. “Take her! She’s more powerful!”
Sirsha had grown used to R’zwana’s rejections. Her insults. But seeing her sister trying to feed her to a soul-devouring spirit fiend was a different sort of violence.
She had no time to grieve. Because Div ignored R’zwana and Sirsha, instead lunging for J’yan.
