“I would if you did anything except defend yourself,” she snapped in frustration. From the time they had started the match, she was reduced to making all the offensive moves while Veer causally did nothing more than defend himself.
“Or you could do something to provoke me?” he returned.
Chandra’s sword drew a line of fire across his stomach. That wiped the supercilious expression off his face. He stared at the wound in incredulity. She felt a little guilty, but the infuriating man just gave a challenging grin. “Now that’s more like it,” he said and changed the pattern of his fight.
Chandra realized very quickly how much he had been holding back. Her strength lay in bow and arrow; she was abetter shot than anyone in Amaravathi, but in stakes of hand-to-hand combat, she was only average. She usually compensated with her quick thinking and being light on her feet. And the advantage of her myriad of hidden weapons.
But fighting Veer, she discovered, was a whole different experience. He followed no rules except his own. And despite his large frame, he was surprisingly flexible and fast. If she hadn’t seen the mocking glint of his midnight eyes as she was driven back under his onslaught, she would have thought he was probably “borrowing” some hapless animal’s abilities.
* * *
“Give it up, Princess,” Veer taunted, pressing his sword closer. Their locked blades slid with a scraping noise.
Her throat moved as she swallowed.
“I yield,” she bit out.
Weirdly disappointed, Veer stepped away, giving her back the weapons he had filched, inclining his head in a mocking bow. But as he walked away, a grin slashed his mouth, hearing the challenge in her parting words, “I’ll defeat you one day.”
He wiped away the smile, catching the smug looks on his friends’ faces, sending them a scowl instead and changing direction. He was in no mood to endure ribbing from them.
The addict sat quietly on a stone, puffing on his reed pipe. He opened bleary eyes as Veer walked by.
“You might want to surrender the next time you fight her, Prince,” he said in a reedy voice.
Veer stopped. “What?”
The addict took a deeper drag and blew out the smoke. It wrapped itself around him like the coils of a serpent. Veer saw his eyes were closed in bliss. He wondered, not for the first time,if it was worth it to pay this man to come with them. Shaking his head, Veer continued on his way.
* * *
Night fell and the forest came alive in a different way. The moon was barely seen traversing the sky through the thick canopy of leaves, except in flashes of white.
The group of seven people lay fast asleep underneath the sheltering branches of a banyan tree. Even the man who was supposed to stay awake keeping watch fell to the ground in an untidy heap, his spear pinned underneath him. Succumbed to the curiously potent call of a dreamless sleep that draped over them like a blanket.
The addict was nodding, his ever-present pipe slipping from his fingers.
A dormouse poked its nose out of his home, a hollow in the base of the hoary old banyan and sniffed the air expectantly. The time for hunting was beginning. It cautiously made its way out but stiffened suddenly.
A transparent barrier of power shifted soundlessly.
The Dandakaranya was changing its dimensions again.
The addict woke up with a start and stared wide-eyed into the night, but then started laughing quietly into his cupped hands. The next instant, he vanished.
The dormouse wasn’t so lucky. It tried to run as fast as it could from the encroaching bank of power but failed to outrun it.
Trees changed, shuddering as if waking from sleep, as the line that marked the dimension of the dark forest passed them, enclosing them in its domain.
The banyan glowed with an eerie blue light that shone from the undersurface of every leaf, creating a reverse negative image.
A bed of night blooming, tube-shaped flowers burst open, spilling forth a cloud of luminescent poisonous pollen.
The broken stone platform underneath the tree glowed with carvings in a weird alphabet.
The unassuming boulders scattered about the place rose to the air and piled on top of one another, fitting precisely along the broken margins, so they formed four sturdy pillars topped with a circular stone around the banyan tree.
The two-note call of impending danger sounded. The dormouse squealed uselessly as an owl-kite swept in from the depths of the forest, claws outstretched. A razor-sharp beak snapped its neck, and the dormouse knew nothing of the claws tearing through its flesh.
