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.”

The silence stretched until it hummed. Arjun kept his hand on the doorframe, feeling the wood grain imprint itself against his lifeline. Behind him, he could hear Yudhishthir’s breathing—measured, patient, the sound of a man who had learned to wait out every objection until only duty remained.

“Explain the other path,” Yudhishthir said quietly. “If you see one, name it.”

Arjun turned. The map still lay between them like a wound. He stared at the square that was Hastinapur, at the dot that was Dwarka, at the empty parchment between them where Indraprastha should have been drawn larger, bolder, free. Nothing came. No clever alliance, no hidden army, no treasury they had not already spent.

Nakul spoke into the void. “We send gifts—elephants, gold, a daughter of our own to marry Balaram’s son. He accepts, smiles, signs a treaty. Six months later Duryodhana offers him the same gifts plus a port on the Gomti. Balaram remembers he always liked Duryodhana better. We are back where we started, minus a sister and a coastline.”

His voice was flat, almost kind, the way a physician describes a wound that will not heal without the cautery iron.

Draupadi had not moved from her stool. Her sari pooled around her feet like spilled ink. “Subhadra is not a goat to be traded,” she said. “She is a princess who can read accounts, drive a chariot through surf, recite the Yadava naval codes. If she comes, she comes as commander, not concubine. Give her that, or you will gain Dwarka and lose your own wives’ respect.”

Her eyes flicked to Arjun—warning, permission, he could not tell. The scent of marigold from the garlands overhead drifted down, sudden and cloying, and for a moment he was back on the Manipur riverbank, Chitrangada’s fingers threading wet flowers into his hair while she laughed at his accent.

Yudhishthir folded his hands. “We do not ask you to love her tomorrow. We ask you to bring her today. Love can be built later—brick by brick, like this city.”

Arjun’s jaw ached from clenching. “And if she hates me for it? If she rides into Indraprastha with her wrists bruised and her eyes full of salt?”

“Then we give her an army,” Bheem said. “And the right to train it. And the knowledge that her brother’s refusal made her a queen instead of a pawn. Women forgive much when they are given power.”

He said it simply, the way he spoke of mace angles or grain stores—facts learned by watching, not theory read in scrolls. Arjun remembered Bheem’s first wife, the Rakshasi Hidimba, who had walked away from her forest because Bheem offered her a kingdom of tents and steel instead of pretty words. Maybe he knew something the rest of them did not.

Sahadev added, softer, “Krishna will not let her be shamed. He will spin the story so the bards sing of daring, not dishonor. You know how he turns arrows into songs.”

Arjun did know. He felt the first hairline crack inside his chest—an almost physical pop, like ice breaking on a winter pond. The refusal was still there, but now it had a fissure, and through it seeped the image of a girl on a beach, reins in one hand, bow in the other, hearing his name and feeling her pulse quicken. A girl who might not want to be dragged, but who might also not want to be left behind while her brother bartered her to the highest bidder.

He pushed away from the door. Three steps took him back to the table. He did not sit; he stood over the map, palms flat, letting the ink smudge his skin again. The dot of Dwarka sat under his right hand now, small and final.

“I will go,” he said. The words tasted like iron. “As an ascetic. No abduction. Not yet. I will see her first. Speak to Krishna. If there is any other way—any—then we take it.”

Yudhishthir nodded once, the nod of a man who had already won the larger battle and would let his brother keep this single shard of pride.

Bheem exhaled, the sound of a smith who sees the furnace finally hot enough. “We will ready the chariot at dawn. Plain wood, no banners. You’ll need travel robes, a begging bowl, a story of pilgrimage.”

Arjun straightened. His eyes found Draupadi’s. She held his gaze, then lifted her hand—slow, deliberate—and touched the hollow of her throat where the marriage thread lay hidden beneath silk. The gesture said: go, and come back whole, or come back with her and make us whole. He could not tell which.

He turned to leave again. This time no one called him back. The corridor outside was dark, smelling of cooled stone and distant kitchen smoke. He walked it counting heartbeats, each one a wife, each one a promise already written on his skin. At the far end, moonlight spilled through a latticed window onto the floor like a silver sword. He stepped through it and felt the weight of the kingdom settle heavier on his shoulders than any armor he had ever worn.

The next morning the chariot stood ready before the eastern gate, axles greased, wheels innocent of any crest. Arjun came in the grey light wearing coarse ochre; the cloth scratched the inside of his forearms where the skin still remembered silk. Bheem was waiting, arms folded, a rolled mat of river-reeds under one elbow.

“Ride with me to the cross-roads,” Arjun said. “I want the last voice I hear to be yours, not a council.”

Bheem climbed up, took the reins, and flicked the horses into an easy trot. They passed through unfinished suburbs, past masons already tapping stone for tomorrow’s wall. When the settlement thinned, Bheem slowed.

“Listen,” he began without greeting, “because once you reach Dwarka every breath will be overheard.” He kept his eyes on the track. “Our great-grandfather Shantanu took Satyavati the same way—lifted her into his boat while her father’s guards watched. The old king screamed, then accepted, because the story was already larger than his pride. The girl became empress; the kingdom got its navy. That is the precedent.”

Arjun’s stomach tightened. “Satyavati invited the touch. Subhadra has not.”

“We cannot know what she invites until the moment is upon her.” Bheem’s knuckles whitened on the reins. “Balaram will parade suitors before her like cattle at Pushya. She will look for the strongest. If you stand among them politely, you are just another calf. If you carry her off, you prove you can protect what you desire. Women measure strength in motion, not in petitions.”

The scent of wet hay drifted from a roadside shed and suddenly Arjun was twelve again, listening to his mother tell how Kunti had once ordered Bheem to escort a frightened bride past jeering cousins; he had lifted the girl onto his shoulder and walked through the fire, and her family had cheered while the opposition wilted. The memory lodged like a burr.

“Abduction is theft,” Arjun said. “The law books call it virahana. Penance is a year of fasting.”

“The law books also say a Kshatriya may seize what is necessary for the survival of his people. Read the next verse.” Bheem’s voice stayed level. “I am not asking you to ravish her in the dust. I am asking you to place her in your chariot before her brother’s politics knot around her ankles. After that, treat her as your life. The difference between theft and marriage is the honour you give her once the ride ends.”

Arjun stared at the horizon where the road dissolved into monsoon haze. “She will hate me.”

“Maybe for a month. Maybe for a year. But she will live to see her children rule a kingdom that Hastinapur cannot tax. That is a larger love than any greeting-card sentiment you recite under a rose-awning.” Bheem pulled the horses to a halt beside a banyan whose roots straddled two kingdoms. “Walk from here. Decide on the way. If your heart stays closed, ride home; we will find another plan, even if it costs us ten thousand spears. But if you see her and understand that hesitation will chain her to Balaram’s plough, then act before thought catches you.”

He handed Arjun the reed mat—thin, portable, the bedding of a man who owns nothing and therefore owes everything to impulse.

Arjun took it. The fibres pricked his palm like tiny accusations.

Bheem leaned closer, voice dropping. “Krishna will be there. He will not stop you; he will watch. If the girl’s eyes say no, he will intervene. Trust that. But if her eyes flash yes behind the shock, you will have his blessing and Balaram’s eventual gratitude. The only thing you will never have is certainty beforehand. That is why it is called daring.”

He clasped Arjun’s shoulder, fingers digging through the coarse cloth to the muscle beneath. “Bring back a queen, or bring back your conscience—both are dear to me. But do not bring back hesitation dressed as honour. That garment never kept a kingdom warm.”

Bheem stepped down, slapped the horses’ flanks, and walked back toward Indraprastha without another word. Arjun sat alone on the driver’s bench, the reins loose in his hands, the road ahead splitting like two versions of the same story.

Arjun flicked the reins; the chariot rolled toward the fork that pointed south-west. Dust rose, fine and pale, coating the ochre robe until it matched the road. Each rut jolted through his spine, a physical reminder that the decision was not finished—it had only been deferred to a later, quieter moment when no one could watch him choose.

He camped the first night under a tamarind whose leaves whispered like turning pages. While he spread Bheem’s reed mat, the wind carried the smell of crushed buds—the same green bite that used to cling to Ulupi’s hair after she surfaced from the Narmada. He lay back, feeling the hard ground assert itself against his shoulder-blades, and wondered whether Subhadra’s hair would carry the salt of sea-spray or the smoke of sacrificial ghee. The thought arrived uninvited, and he let it pass, counting stars until sleep thinned them into blurred scratches across the dark.

At dawn he braided his hair like a hermit, rubbed ash from last night’s fire across his forehead, and practiced the story he would recite to any patrol: he was Gautama of the hill shrines, travelling to Prabhasa to bathe for ancestral peace. The name felt borrowed, too clean for the grime already collecting under his nails. Still, the disguise held; when two cowherds offered curd at a stream crossing, they asked for a blessing, not his identity, and he gave them a verse about impermanence that sounded sufficiently ascetic. Their gratitude stung more than suspicion would have.

Four days later the road widened, palmyra rows replacing scrub forest. Farmers hailed him for rain predictions; children tugged at the begging bowl until he produced wooden dice, letting them win mangoes while he studied their laughter for clues about the girl who had grown up among them. He learned that Subhadra drove her own chariot to the fields at harvest, that she argued tax figures with elders, that she once hit a crocodile on the snout with an oar to save a cousin. Each anecdote lodged under his ribs like an extra arrowhead: she would not be passive, whatever happened.

On the seventh evening he reached the cattle-fair grounds outside Dwarka’s citadel. Merchants shouted prices; flutes skirled; iron rang against iron. He tethered the horses behind a potter’s stall, smeared another layer of dust on his skin, and became part of the moving crowd. The plan was simple: reach the public gardens at first light, intercept Krishna before courtiers gathered, gauge whether the god’s eyes approved or warned him off. Yet simplicity felt fragile when every guard carried a plough-tipped banner that reminded him of Balaram’s contempt for Hastinapur’s politics.

He found Krishna at dusk instead, alone on the river steps, polishing a conch whose lip gleamed like a half-moon. Without looking up, Krishna spoke. “You limp on the left foot since the twentieth monsoon, Arjuna. Change your gait if you want the robe believed.” The words were soft, almost affectionate, but they cracked the hermit persona open. Arjun sat, letting the stone’s residual heat seep through the coarse cloth. For a while neither spoke; boat-lanterns drifted past, orange coins on black water.

Finally Krishna set the conch aside. “She will be at Raivata hill in three days, dressing the altar for the horse-faced god. Balaram wants her promised to Duryodhana’s emissary before the full moon. My sister’s will is flexible steel—bend it and it springs back sharper.” He flicked a pebble into the river; circles expanded, erasing reflection. “Take her only if she signals readiness, not resignation. I will silence the guards long enough for you to reach the forest road. After that, the story is yours to honour or betray.”

Arjun’s throat dried. “And if she refuses?”

“Then you ride home empty-handed, and we seek another path,” Krishna answered, eyes steady. “But hesitation now costs her choices later. Decide which burden you would rather carry—her anger, or your kingdom’s chains.” He rose, leaving the conch gleaming like a private challenge on the step.

Arjun stared at it until moonlight shifted and the river erased even that. He understood the bargain: no orders, only an open gate through which he must walk alone. The ash on his forehead had smudged; he did not replace it. Instead he unbound his hair, letting the warrior’s topknot reappear, and walked back toward the sleeping chariot. Dawn would come, and with it the altar on the hill, the girl, and the single heartbeat in which he would have to read her eyes before the world closed in.

He reached the stables before first light, the grooms still rubbing sleep from their eyes. The chariot he chose was plain teak, its sides scarred by old campaigns, nothing that would proclaim the prince of Indraprastha. While he tightened the harness he caught the smell of linseed oil on the leather—the same oil Chitrangada’s armourers used on the bows she carried across the Manipur river. He pushed the memory aside and checked the axle pins twice, as if a loose wheel were the greatest danger ahead.

He loaded only what a hermit might own: a water skin, the reed mat, a small cooking pot. Beneath the seat he hid his bow unstrung, arrows bundled in an old blanket. The contrast between the visible poverty and the concealed steel felt obscene, like dressing a goddess in rags. He told himself the weapons were for bandits, not for palace guards, but the lie sat sour on his tongue.

The horses knew restlessness; they stamped and blew foam though he had walked them the evening before. He ran his palm along the bay mare’s neck, feeling the pulse jump under the skin. She had carried him away from Chitrangada’s palace the morning after the wedding, when political necessity had still tasted like betrayal. Now she would carry him toward another necessity that felt no different. He whispered an apology into her mane, not certain which woman he was addressing.

He climbed the driver’s bench and took the reins. The eastern sky was the colour of beaten copper, the horizon still free of witnesses. For a moment he imagined simply turning the team west, riding until the names Indraprastha and Dwarka were only syllables lost to wind. The fantasy lasted the length of a single breath; then he flicked the reins and pointed the wheels south, toward the road that smelled of salt and approaching rain.

Each mile rehearsed a different argument. He told himself that Subhadra might welcome escape from Balaram’s plans, that Krishna would not sanction cruelty, that kings had always taken wives with less ceremony than this. The arguments arrived fully formed and died just as quickly, replaced by the image of Draupadi’s face when he had returned with Chitrangada, the careful way she had arranged her features into welcome while her eyes asked how many more. He had promised her then that his heart was large enough; he had not promised that his life would stop expanding.

By midday the road narrowed through a belt of tamarind. He stopped to water the horses at a tank where women were washing clothes. They glanced at the saffron robe, then at the fine lines of the chariot, and curiosity flickered across their faces. He felt the weight of their appraisal: the costume almost convincing, the man inside it never less than fraudulent. He dipped the water skin, keeping his gaze down, and tried to imagine how Subhadra might look at him if she saw him now—ascetic disguise, hidden weapons, heart split like a rotten fruit. The thought made his stomach clench harder than the midday heat.

He drove on. Clouds gathered, purple and low, and the wind carried the metallic scent of rain on hot earth. Somewhere ahead the festival drums would already be beating on Raivata hill, and a girl would be arranging flowers whose perfume he could not yet name. He tightened his grip until the reins cut into his palms, welcoming the small pain. It was the only part of the journey that felt real.