G6

The morning after the Sapta-Nakshatra Sangam, the marks were impossible to ignore. Arjun discovered this when he woke on the floor of his hut — he had no memory of coming back inside after the stars blazed — and found his right palm lit like a coal, amber and warm, visible even in the early morning light that came through the smoke-hole in the roof. He pressed it against the mud wall. The mark did not transfer. He pressed it against the water pot. The water did not heat. He held his palm over a clay lamp that had burned out overnight and the lamp relit, just for a second, and then went dark again as he pulled his hand back. He sat on his mat and looked at it for a long time. His mother was awake in the next room — he could hear her breathing, the familiar rhythm of her rest. He did not want to wake her. He did not want to explain what was on his hand because he did not have an explanation. Instead, he went outside into the pre-dawn quiet and did what he always did when he needed to think: he moved. The Kalaripayattu forms his father had taught him before the sickness — passed down through their family despite their caste, because his father had been secretly trained by an old warrior who saw something worth teaching — were not sanctioned by the Kshatriya Guild. Practitioners of their station were not supposed to engage in martial cultivation. The empire had rules about this: cultivation resources were distributed by caste and income bracket, and a potter's son from Mritika village was entitled to no cultivation resources whatsoever. His father had taught him anyway. In the dark, quietly, between the kilns. Arjun moved through the forms in the grey pre-dawn, his feet bare on the cold earth, the amber mark on his palm casting a faint glow that moved with his hands. He noticed, as he moved, that the mark brightened when he focused — when he tried to channel the body's internal energy the way his father had taught him — and dimmed when he let his concentration slip. By the time the sun fully rose, he had been through the complete first sequence four times and had come to a tentative conclusion. The mark was responding to intent. It was not decoration. It was not a wound. It was a key of some kind — and whatever lock it fit, he was apparently carrying it inside himself. He returned home and found his mother awake, sitting in the morning light, her face soft and composed in the way it always was first thing in the morning, before the day's weight settled back onto her. She looked at his hand without surprise. 'Show me,' she said. He sat beside her and opened his palm. The amber symbol glowed between them — the flame-knot, complex and ancient, burning without heat. His mother touched it with one careful fingertip. Her eyes closed briefly. 'Your grandmother had a mark,' she said quietly. 'She never showed it to anyone. But I saw it once, when she was sleeping.' She opened her eyes. 'On her palm. In the same place. A different shape.' Arjun stared at her. 'You never told me this.' 'She told me not to speak of it.' She folded her hands in her lap. 'She said: if the line holds, it will skip a generation. She said: if the mark comes, go toward it. Don't fight it.' 'What does that mean?' 'I don't know, beta. She died when you were three.' His mother was quiet for a moment. 'But I think your grandmother was more than she let anyone know she was. And I think you are too.' Arjun closed his fist. Opened it. The mark pulsed steadily — warmer, he thought, in the direction south-east. He had been noticing this since the night before. The warmth had direction. 'The tournament notice,' he said. 'It mentioned the Agni Marga.' 'Yes.' 'You knew about it. Before I told you.' His mother looked at him with those clear amber eyes. 'Your grandmother told me a name. One name, in case it ever became necessary. She said: if the mark comes, and there is a path, the path has a name.' 'Agni Marga.' She nodded. A single, slow nod. The silence between them was the kind that holds very large things. 'I can't leave you,' Arjun said. 'Not now. Not with the winter coming and your—' 'Arjun.' Her voice was gentle but absolute, the voice she used when the decision was already made and argument was a courtesy she was offering him, not a genuine opening. 'Mrs. Deshpande next door has been asking to look in on me for two seasons. She's a good woman. She'll make sure I eat.' She paused. 'And you will send money when you can. Which you cannot do from here.' He looked at her. He did not say: what if you get worse while I'm gone. He did not say: what if you die before I come back. They were both aware of these possibilities, had been living alongside them for more than a year, and naming them would not make them smaller. Instead he said: 'I'll come back.' 'I know you will.' He spent the rest of the day preparing. He had very little to prepare — a change of clothing, a knife for eating and utility, the remains of their food stores, which he split in half and left the larger portion for his mother. He repaired the roof-patch that had been leaking. He filled every water vessel in the house. He sat with his mother through the evening meal and told her about the tournament notice, about the seven stars, about the mark on his hand lighting the lamp. She listened to all of it without visible alarm. When the lamp burned low, she reached out and took his marked hand in both of hers. 'Your father would have gone,' she said. 'He was a brave man, in his way. Not careful enough — never careful enough — but brave.' She pressed his palm gently. 'Be braver. And also be careful. Both, if you can manage it.' He left before dawn, walking south-east. The mark on his palm pulsed with steady warmth, a compass that needed no needle, pointing toward something he didn't yet understand. Behind him, in the small hut at the edge of the potters' quarter, his mother sat in the dark for a long while after he left. Then she lit the lamp herself, with hands that had once thrown beautiful pots, and she began to wait.