She ran a fingertip over the royal seal. The paper seemed innocent enough, the paisley pattern in blue, green, and purple as pretty as any of the other things Asha had left here. Pretty like the rest of the palace. Asha had probably never owned an ordinary thing in her life.

But, Tanvi asked herself, head pounding again, how had Asha gotten a note through when the borders were closed? Didn’t she know how dangerous that was?

The greedy patrols were bad enough, but Madhu, with that hard-eyed, calculating stare and her secret garuda allies? It made Tanvi want to retreat under her bed.

Madhu, who had promised to hurt her sister if Tanvi dared open her mouth, had stood here. In her room. Brashly ordering a lock for her door. Venkat might believe Madhu had only been bringing Bharat back, but Tanvi knew the truth. It had been a warning: she was being watched, and she would never get around the palace unnoticed. For all she knew, Madhu was monitoring her right now. Expecting her to unfold the note.

What if, by reading it, Tanvi ended up hurting Nitya even more?

The poisonous fog pulsed, pulsed, pulsed behind her temples. Tanvi wished, just a little, that she hadn’t told Venkat to leave. That they were still together at the lake, watching the waves.

A memory bubbled up: Nitya’s voice, drowning out everything else. Let’s be dragons. We can burn anything that tries to hurt us.

Nagas were kind of like dragons, right?

Asha always hissed at anything she didn’t like. It wasn’t hard to imagine flames whooshing past that forked tongue.

Okay. Let’s be dragons. Half delirious with pain, Tanvi tore the royal seal off the paper.

It wasn’t a note. It was a packet.

A few small brown-green ovals fell out and rolled all over. Tanvi lowered herself to the floor and started hunting.

It took some frenetic groping, but she found all five. She held one up between her thumb and index finger. A bead. It looked like lichen-wreathed mud.

Where was the message from Nitya?

Tanvi glanced back at the paper. Two sentences had been scrawled there. Water and feed. Single use only.

No, she corrected herself. Not a bead. A seed. She had to water it.

She scoped out the room and seized on the pitcher. Empty—she’d drunk it all down. But maybe Asha’s gold vase of flowers on the shelf, the one that had seemed so pointless before, had a purpose, after all. Tanvi dipped a finger in the liquid and sniffed. It hadn’t been replaced even once that she knew of, but it still smelled fresh, like the pink blossoms blooming out of it.

She flashed back to the stagnant, oil-slicked puddles in Philadelphia, a total contrast to the sterile monotony of this room, before dumping out the flowers. After a deep breath, she dropped the seed in the pitcher.