“Walk me through how you first met Logan, please, Mr.

Parekh.”

“Oh, well, when Miriam and I arrived, he was already here with Dr. MacTiernan, who introduced the guy as Logan, a former student of his. Hey, should we maybe talk more in the office?”

“No, I’m almost finished. You flew in from the States?”

“Yes. Dr. MacTiernan flew in from a dig he had going in the UK, so he got here first.”

“And this was on October third?”

“Right.”

“You were called in by Dr. MacTiernan?”

“Indirectly, yes. He called Dr. Liu at the university and asked her to send someone who could help with Sanskrit. She tapped us and we packed our bags. We were going to publish together.”

“There was a vessel here, wasn’t there, with Sanskrit markings on it? That’s why he needed you?”

Ray is taken aback by this. “Yes. How did you know?”

“Dr. Liu informed me,” I say. “Where is that vessel now?”

“It disappeared with Logan and Dr. MacTiernan. We think one of them took it.”

“That’s my suspicion also. Was the vessel unearthed here?”

“That’s what Logan claimed. He said he dug it up here and showed us a depression in the earth where he’d excavated it. But we just got lab results back on the soil and material samples Dr. MacTiernan sent off, and it looks like it didn’t come from here at all. The lab says it was buried originally somewhere in the west, probably in Gujarat.”

“Interesting. Thank you for your time, Ray. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

“What? That’s it? Hey, you want some coffee?”

I wave goodbye at him without answering. With Orlaith at my side, I put some distance between us, before he can discover that the office has been invaded and remember that he really isn’t that good with people and probably should have questioned me a bit more. No doubt he’ll get some grief later from Miriam for being so trusting. Poor Ray.

As soon as I’m out of sight, I cast camouflage on the two of us and we jog down to the house south of Thanjavur in which my father—or, rather, the raksoyuj—had been staying. I’d never gone inside to check it out, and if Logan had disappeared with Dad, then maybe he had been there too. Maybe he’s still there—and dead. Or maybe I’ll find a clue to his whereabouts. It seems as good a place as any to begin.

Except it’s no longer a place. When I get down there, I can’t find it anywhere, though I’m sure I recognize the field in which it stood and where everything happened. And then I realize that Durga had probably wiped it from the earth as part of her cleansing ritual. The earth had been scoured clean. No evidence of rakshasas or asuras for humans—or even me—to find.

I don’t know what to do next. If Logan’s body had been in that house, it wasn’t there anymore. There might be an immigration officer who could tell me all the Logans that had entered India in early September or early October, but I couldn’t just smile and lie my way into accessing that information. I might be able to try approaching Dr. Liu back at Dad’s university, posing as an investigator hired by his family, but she’d be far more skeptical than Ray. Besides, even if she could access Dad’s class rosters for the past twenty years or so, privacy laws would prevent her from handing out names of former students without serious legal paperwork signed by a judge.

One thing I do know is that the “Sorcerer’s Urn” didn’t disappear with Dad or Logan. It was somehow found by Laksha, and she was still someone to whom, in theory, I could talk. She’d need a mouth for that, however, since she’s clearly not interested in jumping into my head anymore.

I return to the hotel to consult my laptop again, because it’s easier to mask than cell phones or other wireless gadgets. I grab us some lunch, and Google tells me about the Raja Mirasdar Hospital in Thanjavur and provides me with a map. After I retrieve Laksha’s necklace and stuff it into my pocket, we set out to find Laksha a new body.

We circle the hospital campus a couple of times and pick out a nice tree under which Orlaith can stretch out and take a nap. I camouflage her and then ask Kaveri if she would continue to keep Orlaith hidden while I am inside and cut off from the earth.

Using the binding carved into the length of Scáthmhaide, I melt from sight and enter the hospital in search of a suitable host for Laksha.

She hasn’t spoken to me at all since the disaster in the field, and I’m both hurt and relieved by it. She could have taken up residence in my head again but has chosen not to. I wonder if it’s because she’s too weak or if it’s because she doesn’t want to face the questions I have for her. Either way, I don’t want the responsibility for her life in my pocket anymore, and since she seemed partial to choosing a young woman’s body before, I’m hoping to find one here.

Searching the hospital for comatose patients takes me a while. I don’t understand the signs near the doors, which are only occasionally printed in English alongside other scripts. But a few floors and many dead ends later, I find some comatose patients. Two are men, one is a very old lady, but the last is a tall woman in her thirties with sallow skin and lank, stringy hair. Most of her chart is meaningless scribbling to me, but some vitals are also typed in Roman script, such as her name: Mhathini Palanichamy.

Deciding that has a nice musical ring to it and that I don’t have nearly the patience for an extended search that I had years ago when we found Selai, I pull out the ruby necklace and settle it about Mhathini’s neck. Once I remove my hand, it becomes visible and looks so very out of place against a white hospital gown.

Checking again to make sure I’m the only conscious person around, I bend lower and speak to the necklace, feeling somewhat silly even though no one can see me.

“Laksha, it’s Granuaile. You’re resting against a comatose patient who will serve as your new body. I’m going to leave the necklace here, so if you want to make sure you retain control of it, slip into this woman’s body right now and wake her up before I go.”

I wait a full minute and nothing happens, so I lean down again and say, “Right now, Laksha. You have one more minute and I’m leaving. I won’t know what will happen to the necklace then.”

With fifteen seconds left, the eyelids flutter open and the beeping of the heart-rate monitor speeds up. I drop my invisibility so that she can see me.

“Welcome back.”

“Whur … mur? Er. Nur?”

“Pardon me?”

“Cur. Tur!” Her hand rises from her side, IV and all, and points first at her mouth, then twirls around her head. Her expression twists in frustration.

“Ah. This woman must have suffered some serious brain damage to the speech centers, I’m guessing. She probably has aphasia. Can you understand me all right? Thumbs up or down.” I get a thumbs-up. “Good. Looks like your motor skills are fine. Shall I assume that you can fix the speech problem with time?”

Another affirmative. “Excellent.” I’m disappointed that we can’t speak right away, but I can hardly blame Laksha for the problem. “I will give you that time and we’ll speak later. You have ways of finding me, so I trust you will do that as soon as you are able. We need to talk.”

“Whur mur nur?”

“Your name is Mhathini Palanichamy. Is that what you were asking?” Thumbs-up. I hear footsteps approaching in the hall, which heralds the arrival of medical staff responding to a change in her vitals. “You’re still in Thanjavur. I’ll leave you to the business of starting over.” I wink out of sight just as a nurse enters and exclaims at the sight of Mhathini’s open eyes. I slide past her and sigh in relief once I get out into the hall, glad to have that burden off my back. I don’t know if Mhathini is still in there, sharing space with Laksha, or if she has moved on, but I suppose I will find out later.

I pick up Orlaith and spend the remainder of the afternoon trying to find some way to help the city recover from the rakshasa plague. The language barrier hinders me, however, and that, coupled with perhaps a dose or two of paranoia and xenophobia—or else a fear of big dogs—makes us unwelcome.

It’s been a completely frustrating day, and after a desultory dinner I curl up in bed with Orlaith and my father’s diary, working backward through the entries in case they include any mention of Logan. I don’t find anything about him, but I do find something else: an entry on my birthday.

Granuaile would be thirty-three years old today. I wonder what kind of person she would be. I wish … well, it’s far too late for wishes, isn’t it? Far too late to make anything better. There’s only time for regrets now. Lord, I miss her.

I feel as if I’ve fallen from two stories and landed gut-first on a pommel horse, the air completely gone from my lungs, and when I breathe in again, it’s so very painful that the noise wakes up Orlaith.

"Granuaile?"

It’s okay. Go back to sleep.

I trace the words with my finger, trying to contact my dad through the ink he scrawled there months ago. I know exactly how he felt, because I’m feeling it now. There’s so much time for regret ahead of me, days and months and years of it. I put the book down, turn on my side, and drape an arm across Orlaith, hoping to sleep away some of that time.

I resolve to track down a possible site north of town for the Lost Arrows of Vayu. If this Logan person is still alive, he might be attacking the earth with a shovel somewhere.

When I wake up, a gray Saturday in India, I shoot off a text to Atticus before I hop into the shower, to let him know he shouldn’t worry about me. To my surprise when I emerge, he’s answered, asking if my father is okay.

His death isn’t something I wish to consign to a text message, so I say, You don’t need to worry about him either, and then he does his Shakespeare thing, sweet man, kissing me with a line from Troilus and Cressida: The strong base and building of my love / Is as the very centre of the earth.

It is a game we play, sometimes, to answer one poet’s words with another’s, so that both the bards and we converse. The reply has to make sense in context, of course, but you score bonus points if you use a quote that contains one or more words from the previous one. I send him two lines from Whitman: Far-swooping elbow’d earth—rich apple-blossom’d earth! / Smile, for your lover comes. And then I amend that with, As soon as I can, anyway. Don’t wait up.

Chapter 19

The estates of the Tuatha Dé Danann are proper castles, but they rise straight out of the turf like gray mountains, no walls around them like the few human-built ones I’ve seen on earth. They’re never besieged, so that makes walls unnecessary, I suppose, but I know the true reason the Tuatha Dé Danann don’t build walls around them: They want people to lose their shite and fill their pants when they gaze upon the glory of their architecture, and it makes me laugh. Binding stone together into a seamless tower doesn’t impress me. Show me what ye can do when there’s no wall between us, and maybe then I’ll offer my respect.

When I shift to the trees ringing the pastures of Manannan Mac Lir’s estate, I see that he’s worked some blue stones in with the gray here and there, swirling patterns of it, and mixed in are some shiny reflective bits of shell, which Siodhachan says is called mother-of-pearl. There’s plenty of that around the entrance to his castle, and it’s worked into the tiles of his floor and his interior walls as well, which I think is a terrible idea. It keeps flashing and winking at me, and I can’t tell half the time if that’s a piece of shell or a pixie wing in the corner of my eye—which I guess must be the point. It’s a kind of camouflage for them.

His place is fecking lousy with faeries. Flying about the grounds and hovering near the ceiling and hiding under furniture, walking around in livery of two different kinds because some of them serve Fand and some of them serve Manannan. Manannan’s are in blue and gray and tend to be water Fae of some kind or other. Selkies and sea horsemen with big eyes looking around for their ocean but seeing only stone and the small dead bits of other creatures that swam in it once upon a time. Fand’s lot favors maroon and gold and a soft fabric called velvet, and they’re the ones that make me nervous, because she has the fliers. Pixies and assorted airborne irritants, and plenty of the large, man-sized Fae who look as if they have bones made of willow sticks. If I breathe heavily in their general direction, they’ll fall over. But I see that some of them have weapons, oversize bronze needles they use instead of swords.

I notice that their eyes fall to my throat when they first see me and then relax only after they confirm that there’s nothing there. They’re looking for iron. Two of them greet me at the gate and lead me inside to an inner courtyard that has both a tethered tree and a deep pool of salt water.

“What’s that for?” I ask, pointing at the pool. It can’t be for fishing.

“The Lord Manannan sometimes comes and goes that way. He opens a portal underwater and swims directly into the earthly oceans.”

That was handy. If the pool was deep enough, he could shift away—or not—and no one here would know whether he had truly left, without diving in to make sure. And he could also return but not surface until he chose.

There are white benches distributed around the pool, along with sculpted hedgerows and flowering plants. Two figures rise from one and approach. I think I might know who one of them is, but not the other. Best to wait for an introduction. One is a red-haired woman in a white tunic edged in green bindings around the collar and sleeves, and the other is a giant man with coppery curly hair and a thick beard. He has a leaf stuck in his hair on the left side of his head, but I don’t think it’s my duty to point it out to him. I had seen them both at the Fae Court yesterday, but they had slipped away after my audience and I never got to speak with them.