RAO
He had a headache for the entire first week of travel toward Dwarali, a pounding, burning ache that settled in his temples and behind his eyes and refused to fade.
The simple light of the day often felt painful, and when he closed his eyes there was more light: gleaming embers behind his eyes, and Aditya’s wavering ghost, haloed in fire and smoke, and distant mountains, white, bleeding bright blood. Every conversation grated at his already strained nerves. Even the pounding of hooves disturbed him. He’d tried to prepare for his journey, filling his skull with Dwarali’s particular tangle of politics: the aged sultan, and his lack of heirs, and the relative power of the Lal Qila, a gold-rich fort guarding the edge of the empire; the innumerable, interwoven Jagatay and Babure tribes and clans that hounded the fort, scrabbling over the scarce resources of the mountains beyond the Lal Qila, warring with one another in complex patterns that only Lata had been able to sensibly explain to him. But all of it spilled from his memory like water. He could hold none of it.
Perhaps the nameless still held some love for him, even if he held no love to hand in return, because he was left largely alone by his traveling companions. His men were obedient but not talkative, and the Dwarali riders seemed simply happy to be able to ride freely on their horses under an open sky. Life in the imperial capital Harsinghar clearly had not suited them.
Lady Raziya was polite and kind, her eyes on him thoughtful—but she too respected his clear desire for solitude.
Only Sima seemed interested in breaking his self-imposed isolation, and that surprised him. She had no reason to like him, after all. Hadn’t he left her alone—simply abandoned her—to her imprisonment?
She turned up one evening at his tent, startling him. She slid inside, entering calmly as if she had every right to be there.
“Did my guards not see you?” Rao asked.
“I told them you asked for me,” she said with a shrug. He paused, then decided not to think about what assumptions those men had made about his prisoner coming alone to his tent in the night darkness. Better not to contemplate it.
She moved toward him and sat cross-legged across from him. For a moment she seemed content to simply watch him pour his wine into a small glass.
“You drink too much.”
“Thank you,” he said slowly, “for pointing that out. I’ll stop, then.”
She huffed a laugh. As she watched him drink, her eyes grew grave.
“Does it help? Does it dull—all of it?”
“It does,” he said. “And doesn’t.”
“Let me drink with you, then, Prince Rao.”
He hesitated.
“You should go,” he said finally. “There will be talk.”
“And what does that matter to me? I’m not trying to find a good marriage to a nice Parijatdvipan man.” She wrinkled her nose. “Or a nice Ahiranyi one. Besides, I’m a prisoner. My reputation is already dirt.”
“A prisoner for now,” Rao corrected.
A flick of her eyes to him, then away. She took the wine, grabbed a spare glass, poured and drank. So did he, not stopping her.
“So how should it be done?” she asked. “My potential escape, I mean.”
Her look was guarded, behind the rim of her raised cup. She was testing him. Not quite ready to trust him on this. He could see that.
“Shall I slip away when you’re not paying attention? Or will you arrange it for me? Should we have some kind of signal?”
“I don’t know,” he said. She frowned at him. He tried again. “If you choose to slip away, I can’t stop you. But…” He gestured vaguely around them, not to encompass the tent but to suggest the sheer size and business of the camp—and the impossibility of escaping it unseen. She nodded, understanding.
“Teach me how to play catur,” she said. “Or something else. Anything you like. It’s boring to drink in silence. So teach me.”
He hesitated again. But ah—what could it hurt?
“Let me get the board,” he said.
After that, they played regularly. Some of the wariness left her eyes and the lines of her shoulders. Something uneasily like friendship began to sprout between them.
It did not stop his gnawing grief, or the need for drink to ease the hard edges of the grief-knife digging into him; but it helped lighten his burden, and there were nights that he slept more easily in a tent than he ever had on a soft bed in the imperial mahal.
