By Duty Bound, By Desire Claimed

The chariot wheels had barely stopped turning when Arjun's boots touched the flagstones of Indraprastha's outer courtyard. Twelve years. The weight of them pressed against his shoulders like wet leather—each month a different woman's scent on his skin, each season a new set of promises he'd made in the dark. Ulupi's cool hands pulling him beneath the river's surface. Chitrangada's warrior thighs gripping his hips in her palace at Manipur. And always, threading through everything, Draupadi's laughter carrying across the years from the hall where he'd left her.

He paused at the threshold, letting his fingers trail along the new marble. They'd built higher walls while he was gone. Carved deeper foundations. The scent hit him first—marigolds, sharp and bright, strung in thick ropes across the entrance. The same flowers Chitrangada crushed into oil for her skin, rubbing the yellow pigment into her collarbones while he watched from her doorway. His stomach turned.

"Arjun." Yudhishthir's voice carried across the courtyard, but Arjun kept his eyes on the garlands. Someone had woven them too tight. The petals were already browning at the edges, dying in their own sweetness.

The hall stretched before him, vaster than anything he'd imagined during those nights sleeping on forest ground. Gold leaf caught the afternoon light, throwing it back in fractured pieces across the floor. His brothers had been busy. They'd built themselves a cage of beauty, and now they needed him to find the key.

He could feel them watching—his mother's eyes sharp with calculation, Draupadi's unreadable from behind her veil. Even from here he caught her scent: sandalwood and something sharper. Anger, maybe. Or desire. With Draupadi, they'd always been the same thing.

"You look tired," Bheem said, clapping him on the back hard enough to rattle his teeth. "The road was long?"

The road was Ulupi's mouth on his throat while her tail wrapped around his ankle. The road was Chitrangada's breasts pressed against his back while she taught him to string her people's curved bows. The road was waking up each morning with another woman's name on his tongue, learning to love them because he'd already married them, because honor demanded he make it real.

"Long enough," he said.

Nakul appeared at his elbow, younger somehow, though the years should have aged them all. "We've prepared your chambers. The eastern wing. You'll have privacy there."

Privacy. As if he hadn't spent twelve years learning the exact weight of women's bodies in the dark. As if he didn't know the way Subhadra's name would taste when they finally made him say it aloud.

He walked deeper into the hall, past the carved pillars his brothers had erected in his absence. Each step echoed. The marigolds were everywhere—strung from balconies, piled in brass bowls, their dying perfume thick enough to choke on. Chitrangada had worn them in her hair the first night, letting them fall across his chest while she moved above him. Later, she'd picked the crushed petals from his skin with careful fingers, telling him stories of her people's wars.

"Arjun." Draupadi's voice stopped him. She stood at the hall's center, her sari the color of river stones. When she lifted her veil, her eyes held the same calculation he'd seen in his mother's face. "Welcome home."

Home. The word sat wrong in his mouth. He had three homes now, three women who'd learned to read his silences. Three sets of promises he'd made with his body. And here was this new hall, these new walls, this new weight settling across his shoulders like a cloak that didn't quite fit.

The marigolds were dying. He could smell it—their sweetness turning, becoming something cloying and desperate. Tomorrow, Yudhishthir would call council. Tomorrow, they'd tell him about Balaram and Dwarka and the girl with Krishna's eyes. Tomorrow, he'd pretend he had a choice.

But tonight, he stood in his brothers' golden hall and breathed in the scent of dying flowers, feeling the weight of all the women he'd already married pressing against his chest like stones.

The summons came before dawn. Arjun was still dressed, hadn't slept—just sat on the edge of the cot they'd given him, counting the hours by the way torchlight faded through the lattice. When the messenger knocked, he was already reaching for his sword.

They gathered in the war room. No marigolds here, just maps curling at the edges and the smell of lamp-oil burning low. Yudhishthir stood at the head of the table, his fingers spread across a parchment that showed Indraprastha as a small square inside a larger square labeled HASTINAPUR. The drawing looked like a child’s lesson in captivity.

“We pay them grain,” Yudhishthir said without greeting. “We pay them horses. We send our physicians when their wives miscarry. And still they call us vassals.”

Bheem’s knuckles cracked. Nakul kept his eyes on the map, as if staring might redraw the borders. Sahadev held an unlit lamp, turning it in small circles.

Draupadi entered last. She didn’t sit with them; she stood behind Arjun’s chair, close enough that her breath moved the hair at his nape. He felt her there like a blade he hadn’t decided whether to sheathe.

Yudhishthir continued. “The Rajasuya buys us sovereignty. But the ritual is only the seal. Before it can even be announced we need oaths from a hundred kings. Not polite letters—blood oaths. Hostages. Marriages.” He let the word hang. “Dwarka alone can deliver thirty of those kingdoms.”

Arjun watched his brother’s finger slide eastward across the parchment, stopping at a dot labeled DWARKA. The ink was fresh, still glistening. Someone had drawn it in the last hour, as if the city hadn’t existed on their map until this problem required it.

“Balaram favors Duryodhana,” Bheem said. “He trained the bastard in the mace, remembers him as a boy. Sent him a golden plough last harvest. Friendship gifts.”

“Krishna is ours,” Nakul countered, but his voice lacked force.

“Krishna won’t fight his brother over us,” Sahadev said quietly. “Not without a reason that feels like dharma to him.”

Silence collected, thick as the lamp-smoke. Arjun felt Draupadi shift behind him. Her sari brushed his shoulder—silk, not the rough cotton he’d grown used to in Manipur. He thought of Chitrangada’s calloused palms, Ulupi’s scales flashing silver beneath river water. Three wives already, each one a treaty signed with his body.

Yudhishthir lifted his hand from the map. In the lamplight his skin looked translucent, veins blue as Krishna’s. “There is a girl. Subhadra. Balaram’s ward, Krishna’s sister. Unmarried. Her dowry is Dwarka’s army.”

The words landed like stones in still water. Arjun counted the ripples: one for each wife who would know, one for each child that might come, one for every night he would spend learning to love a fourth woman because his kingdom needed a key.

He opened his mouth to speak, but Draupadi’s fingers settled on his shoulder—light, deliberate. The pressure told him wait. She leaned forward so her lips almost touched his ear.

“Say nothing yet,” she whispered, too low for the others. “Let them finish measuring your life in acres and soldiers. Then decide how much of yourself you’re willing to mortgage.”

Yudhishthir wasn’t looking at him anyway; he was studying the map as if it might offer another solution if he stared long enough. None appeared. The square labeled HASTINAPUR stayed larger, the dot called DWARKA stayed necessary, and the space between them stayed exactly the width of a woman Arjun hadn’t met.

Bheem’s chair scraped back. He stood, the bulk of him blocking half the lamplight, and planted both palms on the parchment so the ink bled under his thumbs.

“Dwarka is blood,” he said. “Our mother’s nephew sits its throne. That tie is older than any treaty Balaram can sign with Hastinapur. But blood is only useful if it’s poured at the right moment.”

He looked straight at Arjun. “A parchment oath won’t hold Balaram. He’ll smile, offer cows, then ride to Duryodhana’s coronation with his plough on his shoulder. The only thing he can’t ride past is a marriage already consummated. A girl pregnant with our claim. A sister whose honor is now Yudhishthir’s honor.”

Nakul’s breath hissed. Sahadev set the unlit lamp down, the glass clinking.

Arjun felt the words hit his chest like mace blows. He counted them: consummated, pregnant, claim. Each one a night he would spend inside a woman he hadn’t yet met, learning the shape of her hipbone so that Balaram would be forced to remember it later.

Draupadi’s fingers tightened on his shoulder, nails pressing through the cotton.

Bheem wasn’t finished. “Subhadra is seventeen. Unbetrothed. Balaram dotes on her—lets her train with the boy’s bow, lets her race chariots on the beach. He’ll want a groom who can out-shoot her, out-ride her, out-shine every Yadava boy she’s ever laughed with. That list has one name.”

He shoved the map across the table. The dot labeled DWARKA slid to a stop beneath Arjun’s wrist, ink smudging his skin like a brand.

“Do it quickly,” Bheem said. “Go as a pilgrim, take her before Balaram can post banns, bring her back with dust on her face and our child in her belly. By the time the moon changes, Dwarka’s spears ride with us or Balaram admits he let his sister be dishonored. Either way, Hastinapur loses a flank.”

Arjun stared at the black mark on his pulse. He thought of Ulupi’s river, the way water closed over them until sound vanished. He thought of Chitrangada’s thighs flexing under his palms while she taught him to shoot left-handed. He thought of Draupadi’s mouth on his throat the night before the dice game, her whisper that she would never share him unless dharma demanded it.

Dharma was now a seventeen-year-old girl who liked fast horses.

Yudhishthir spoke, voice quiet. “We would not ask if any other path existed.”

Arjun lifted his eyes. Four pairs of pupils—three brothers, one wife—fixed on him with the same calculation: how much of his body they could trade for steel.

He felt the answer settle, cold and final, like a second skin forming over the first.

Sahadev’s voice cut through the smoke. “Subhadra.”

The name landed on the table like a dice throw nobody had meant to make. Arjun felt the black ink on his wrist begin to burn.

“Balaram’s sister,” Sahadev went on, quieter, as if gentleness could soften the arithmetic. “Krishna’s full-blood. Dowry: twelve thousand cavalry, the fortress at Dwaraka, and every coastal king who owes the Yadavas salt.” He did not look at Arjun while he spoke; he watched the lamp-flame, counting costs the way other boys counted stars. “One marriage. Thirty oaths. One hundred kings follow Balaram’s nod.”

Draupadi’s nails eased off Arjun’s shoulder, but her palm stayed, warm, proprietorial, unreadable.

Inside his chest something tired folded itself smaller. He saw Ulupi on the river-rock at dawn, her green skin slick, teaching him how the Naga measure time by shedding skin. He saw Chitrangada in the practice yard, sweat sliding between her breasts while she showed him the Manipuri thrust that leaves a man alive but singing in a different key. Two weddings already inked onto his body, two sets of wrists he had tied with promises thicker than any marital thread. Enough, he thought. I have paid.

He heard himself speak before he chose the words. “We have Ulupi’s archers. We have Manipur’s infantry. Those treaties were cut for exactly this reason.” His voice sounded strange, like someone else borrowing his throat. “Dwarka is cousin to us, yes, but cousins can be bought with gifts that don’t require a fourth bed.”

Bheem exhaled through his nose. “Gifts don’t ride into battle when Karna’s bow is drawn. A sister’s honor does.”

“Honor purchased by kidnapping isn’t honor,” Arjun shot back. The moment it left his mouth he knew it was the wrong argument; they would hear only the refusal, not the fatigue beneath it.

Yudhishthir lifted a hand. “No one speaks of kidnapping yet.”

Yet. The word hung like a noose someone would kindly lower over his head later.

Nakul leaned forward. “Balaram will negotiate for a year, demand half our harvest, then marry her to Duryodhana’s second son anyway. A proposal gives him time to bargain her higher. An accomplished fact does not.”

Accomplished fact. The phrase slid under Arjun ribs: a polite term for a woman dragged through dust until her brother’s pride bent.

He tried again. “I am thirty-five. I have three wives who already share the scraps of my attention. Add a fourth and none of them gets a whole man.”

Draupadi’s hand slipped from his shoulder to the nape of his neck, a slow, deliberate caress that could have been comfort or warning. “A kingdom is not built on whole men,” she murmured, audible only to him. “It is built on broken ones who keep moving.”

He turned to stare at her. Her eyes gave nothing: not jealousy, not permission, only the steady calculation of a woman who had once wagered herself on a dice throw and still kept breathing.

Sahadev filled the quiet. “Subhadra rides like a Chedi bandit, shoots better than her brother’s guard-commander. She will not be a decorative wife. She will be an ally in her own right.” He paused, then delivered the final, quiet shaft. “And she already asks about you. Has since she was fourteen.”

Arjun felt the room tilt. A girl he had never met measuring him against stories, building a hero out of gossip and battlefield rumors, while he stood here counting how many more nights he could spend learning the inside of yet another woman’s mouth.

He looked at the map again. Hastinapur’s square had not shrunk. Dwarka’s dot had not moved. The space between them was still exactly the width of a stranger’s hips.

“I need air,” he said, though the room was not hot. He stood. No one stopped him; they simply watched, four faces carved with the same patient certainty that he would return with the only answer left to give.

At the doorway he paused, hand on the frame. “I will not abduct her,” he said to the dark corridor, not trusting himself to face them. “Find another path.”

Behind him Bheem’s voice followed, soft as iron. “Paths are made by walking, little brother. Start walking.”