As he should have been. Beneath the knife edge of adrenaline, beneath the watchful patience that long years of court and weapons training had inculcated into him, Rao was afraid too.
“Did you have any involvement with the attack on the regent’s mahal?” the commander asked.
“No,” said Baldev.
“The night the conch sounded—you were here?” The commander’s voice was mild.
Silence. Perhaps the reality of what lay before Baldev was sinking in.
“Yes,” Baldev said finally. “We were here. My acolytes and I.”
“Preaching a rebel political ideology,” the soldier prompted.
Baldev said nothing.
The commander took a single step forward, hands clasped behind him.
“Do you have many women come to your… lectures?” The commander’s gaze slid to the women huddled together, shaking faintly with fear. “Speak. Or I’ll gut another man.”
“No. Not many women.”
“Are you sure, poet?”
“Women of repute don’t often enter pleasure houses.”
“We hear Ahiranyi women don’t worry much for their reputation,” said one of the other soldiers. Another next to him laughed. Those two, Rao noticed, did not wear exactly the same uniforms as the rest. They did not have the regent’s mark on their turbans, and the man’s common-speech Zaban did not have the lilting Ahiranyi accent. “What are these women, then? Whores?”
“Hold your tongue,” their commander said evenly.
“Sorry, Commander Jeevan,” the man said. He did not sound particularly repentant.
“Speak,” the commander said to the poet.
“Maidservants,” the poet said stiffly. “Nursemaids. Respectable enough.”
“You’ll have no trouble remembering one particular woman, then: small, young. No taller than that one over there.” He gestured at one of the women, who let out a small exhale—of terror and anger both—without raising her gaze. “Dark skin. You know her?”
“That could be any number of women.”
“She called herself Meena.”
“No,” said Baldev. “I don’t know this woman.”
“Until recently,” the commander continued, “she was a maid at the regent’s mahal. She tried to kill his guest. A messy business. Luckily she was stopped.” A pause. “We wondered,” he said, “where a woman may go to learn such things. A maid. And here you are, poet.”
Rao could almost hear the argument forming on Baldev’s lips: What use could it be, to a man like him, to attack a guest of the regent?
Then Baldev remembered that the emperor’s sister was prisoner in the regent’s care. Rao could see him remembering it: the sudden grayness that came over the poet’s face.
Nothing he said would save him.
“We found a few scribes writing material they shouldn’t have,” the commander continued. “Outright heresy, hidden in Ahiranyi script.”
“Where are they?” one bold woman asked. Her voice shook.
“They’ve been taken to the execution grounds already.”
“Spare the women, at least,” Baldev whispered. In all his evening lectures, his recitations, his voice had never sounded so small.
