“I am optimistic,” said Vikram, waving around a plate of food, “about not starving.”
My stomach growled. Vikram didn’t seem any different from eating the food, so it was likely safe. I crouched beside him, taking thehalwafor myself, and then sat facing the corner of the square room that resembled the view outside my bedroom window.
“Your home?” asked Vikram.
I nodded. “And the corner with the view of Ujijain… is it yours?”
“Yes.”
It was a strange view. Vikram’s view of Ujijain was the realm itself. It was cold. Proprietary.
“You love Bharata,” said Vikram. A statement of fact.
“I do.”
“What made you decide to play in the Tournament? You could’ve just waited for one cycle of the moon and rushed back to your beloved Bharata.”
I bit my lip. If I waited that long without a hope of a plan, Nalini was as good as dead. It wasn’t as if I could stroll into Bharata at the end of the moon cycle. If I set one foot on Bharata’s soil, Skanda would execute Nalini and then pin the blame on me. All the games, manipulation, losses and secrets would be for nothing. Worse, it would plunge Bharata into warfare if we lost the support of Nalini’s tribal home.
“Circumstances,” I said tightly.
Vikram watched me. “What did you do to make your own kingdom want you dead?”
I clenched my hand. “Let’s just say that politics in Bharata forced me to play a game of power I thought I could win. I did not win. Hence the death order.”
Vikram rolled his eyes and clapped slowly. “Did princess study include theatrics? Do you also run around the city as a hooded vigilante?”
“You don’t know anything about my life or what it was like for me,” I said angrily. “All you princes are the same. You’ve never worked for anything so you wouldn’t know the first thing about another person’s struggle.”
His gaze sharpened. “In that, Princess, you are mistaken.”
I let out a breath and pressed my temples. “Now that we’ve eaten and argued, what about the riddle?”
“We know the way to Alaka is to follow true north. The statue bearing Kubera’s image says as much. But the statues are set on a spinning wheel—”
“And they may not be accurate directions when they settle.”
Vikram drew his brows together. Setting down his goblet, he drew an image in the dirt: a dais and eight doors. He studied it, steepling his long fingers. I groaned. Enough was enough.
“Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“That.” I mimicked his hands, flattened my brows and tried to make my eyes look somewhat insane.
“I will have you know that it is my meditative pose.”
“I will have you know that you look ridiculous.”
“What about you?” he asked. He sucked in his cheeks and glowered, pointing at his face and then pointing at me. “What kind of meditative pose is that?”
“It’s not a meditative pose at all,” I shot back.
“My apologies. Is it your bellicose-let-me-drain-your-blood face? Could you not master an expression that looked less like an outraged cat?”
“Better than steepling my hands and looking like an overgrown spider.”
“An overgrown spider who is rarely wrong.”
