I flung my arms around her and nestled my head into the crook of her neck as I’d done when I was a child. “Thank you,” I whispered.
I made my way to the council’s chamber, forcing myself to hold my head high even though I could feel the world crumbling below my feet. Chaaya hadn’t told me why I was needed there, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when the guards opened the doors, but I certainly hadn’t expected to find Thevan, alone, standing over a large map and muttering to himself.
He jumped to attention when he saw me, banging the large table and making the stones scattered across the map clatter as they jostled. He bowed deeply. “Rani.”
Dark circles hung beneath his eyes, and he looked even more tired than I felt.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I... I’m reviewing the attack.” He raked his hands through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes, but it instantly fell back toward his face.
I stepped closer and examined the map. It was relatively simple, depicting the fort as a rectangle and its wall as a squiggling line. Beyond it were two dashed lines?—one for high tide and the other for low?—and then the ocean’s waters. Small blue stones were scattered along the beach and in the fort, with clusters of black stones in the ocean and on the beach.
“It’s what my father used to do after every battle,” Thevan said from beside me. He pointed to the black stones. “He’d study the angles of attack and how our defenses had succeeded and failed. As Samanth and I got older, he let us join him. We’d go through the whole thing, altering our defenses and trying to think of how they’d respond. We’d do it over and over until he was satisfied that if the attack happened again, we’d be ready.”
As he spoke, he moved the stones across the map, creating waves and walls of blue around the Porcugi approach. His hands flew, flying from one scenario to another. “He might be gone now, but this still needs to get done. The Porcugi won’t rest, so we can’t either. We have to be ready.”
He spoke in a nonstop stream, shifting the stones this way and that. Before I could make sense of one formation, he had already moved to another. I covered one of his hands with mine, and he fell silent. “Thevan, what are youdoing?”
“What they would have wanted me to do,” he said quietly. He flipped his hand so he was holding mine, and lifted it off the map.
I frowned. “But how... how do you make yourself keep going?”
He laughed hollowly. “I don’t give myself a choice. I have an obligation to the people of Ullal, and I will fulfill it.” He squeezed my hand. “And I know you will too.”
“I don’t know how to start. I want to, but without them, I feel so empty.” My hands were trembling. I wasn’t meant for this. I was the second daughter; that throne was never meant to be mine.
“I know.” The pain in his voice seemed to take his breath away. “I can’t pretend it doesn’t hurt. But we have to continue. We’re not starting over; we’re carrying on. It’s what they would have wanted. It’s what Ullal needs.”
“I don’t know how.” My chin trembled, and I tried to push my tears back down.
“Yes, you do.” Thevan’s eyes were tired and bloodshot, but they were earnest and true. “You can do this, and you will do it better than you ever could have imagined. I’ve trained beside you since you were just a child. Everyone who met you?—every tutor, every soldier, every statesman?—everyone saw the fire within you. You can do this. You just need to start. Start and don’t let anything stop you. Just keep going.”
“But what if they were wrong?” I wasn’t cold, but I was shivering. I tried to tighten my shoulders to prevent them from moving, but that just made it worse.
Thevan hesitated for a moment and then pulled me close. He put his arms around me, his broad shoulders encompassing mine and filling me with warmth. He took deep breaths, rustling my curls with every exhale, and he held me until I stopped shaking.
I didn’t want to let go. I’d never been held like this. Even Ektha’s hugs, which were filled with love, had never enveloped me like this because of her slight frame. I wanted to stay here?—to take refuge and never leave. To let the world and all its problems fly past us as our breaths rose and fell together. To stay safe in his embrace until the pain of all this loss quieted from a scream to a whisper.
But he pulled away.
I grabbed his hands and held them tight. He blushed but didn’t protest.
“You can do this,” he whispered. “It’s what they would have wanted.”
He nodded to himself, and his voice shook less when he spoke again. “They would have insisted that we keep going. We can do that.”
His last words sounded more like a question, and he looked at me with raised brows.
I squeezed his hands. “Yes, we can do that. For Ullal.”
“For Ullal.”
The doors creaked open, and we jumped apart. Chaaya came in carrying a heaping bowl of kadambam on a tray. She put it down on the far side of the table and set out four smaller plates as Parushi and Nikith entered behind her.
I tried to cool my hot cheeks, but there was no denying Parushi’s smirk or Nikith’s frown as their eyes traveled between us.
“Good, you found him,” Parushi said. “I hope you’ve convinced him to eat. He’s been up all night, poring over that map and frantically moving those stones this way and that.”
