He accompanied Raziya to the sultan’s court.
The sultan was ancient, wrinkled and wizened, eyes pearly black beads in his face. But he accepted Lady Raziya gracefully, as a daughter. He was no fool. He knew the way the winds were blowing.
There was a feast of welcome, where Rao sat with the company of a handful of Dwarali lords and administrators, who treated him with courtesy and gentleness. Clearly tales of why he was traveling to Dwarali—to take him, broken as he was, comfortably away from the empress’s war and the political heart of the empire—had spread.
For one night, he rejected liquor and let himself feel everything: grief, and fire behind his eyes, but also the smell of incenserising from the edges of the room, where cones of powder burned; the music of a flute in a young musician’s hands, where he sat alongside a tabla player beneath an arch of white jasmine flowers, in subtle honor to the empress and empire. He let the gossip of the nobles flow over him too, and heard them talk of attacks by the tribes that lived beyond the Lal Qila’s borders, and obliquely of the sultan’s growing frailty. He stored all that information away. It could perhaps be useful.
He stayed as long as he could, among Dwarali’s lords and ladies, then gave his apologies and rose and tried to make a discreet exit.
He thought he’d managed it. He was at the entrance to his chambers when he heard a voice call his name. He turned. Walking toward him, one guardswoman trailing her, was Lady Raziya.
“You’re leaving us, Prince Rao?”
“Leaving the feast, Lady Raziya—yes.” A smile, a bow of his head. “But I will go to the Lal Qila, with your permission, in the morning. If there is anything you wish for me to take…?”
“No.” A smile of her own; a tilt of her head. “And what does our empress seek for you to do in the Lal Qila, Prince Rao?”
“The empress sends me,” he said, “to recover from my grief.”
“The Lal Qila is not known as a soft place for the sick and stricken.” There was amusement in the curve of her mouth, a thoughtful and probing look in the eyes turned on him. “I think she does trust my family with your care—and cares for you, deeply—but I also have no doubt she has other motives that guide her actions. What awaits you there?”
“Nothing that will bring ill luck to you and yours,” he said, and Raziya laughed.
“You won’t deny it, then? Well, you have always seemed an honest man guided by honest stars.”
She placed a hand lightly against his shoulder.
“My daughter Asma rules in my husband’s stead. She will take good care of you, I promise. Rest easily in her care, and if you need anything from her or my family to aid you, simply ask.”
“Thank you,” he said.
Raziya released him and turned in a swirl of skirts back into the feast, leaving him alone.
There was a noise behind him: a quiet, pointed cough.
He turned and saw Sima watching from the archway of the door. She must have been standing silently out of sight, listening.
“Are you really going to the Lal Qila just to rest?” Sima asked.
“Do you think I am?”
“Lady Raziya certainly doesn’t.”
“Well. I am being sent,” he said, “to chase a tale.” He walked into his room and she followed. He itched for some distraction—he thought of Prem with his pipe, soothing smoke, and wished for the first time not for liquor but the bliss of needle-flower smoke.
Instead, he said, “Let me tell you a story.”
He told Sima what Lata had told him: a tale in one of the languages from beyond the borders of Parijatdvipa. It had been poorly translated, or so Lata had claimed with some displeasure. “But even poor translations from beyond Parijatdvipa are rare as pearls,” she had told him.
“In the snow lies the corpse of a king,” said Rao. “He died for his people, when monsters came and ate their land. And from his chest, after his death, his people cut free his heart. But it wasn’t a heart.”
“What a twist,” Sima said blandly. Rao glared at her.
“I didn’t write the tale!” He threw up his hands. “I won’t tell you about the battle with monsters, then. Just know his heart was a ruby with the power to murder beasts—and that is the falsehood I’ve been sent to chase across the empire.”
“Itcouldbe a ruby,” Lata had told him, riffling lightly through the book, her brow furrowed. “Or that could be a translation error. The root word in Jagai—never mind. I can see your attention wandering, Rao. It’s just as likely to be a pomegranate. That’s all.”
Thathad only confirmed his fear that this was a fool’s errand: a search for a smear of a tale, a scratching that could be no more than a mistranslation.
