I Fell For a Commoner, But She Was a Princess in Disguise

The sun pressed against the back of my neck like a hand insisting I pay attention. I walked through the market because I was expected to, because the people liked to see their prince among them, because my mother had said it would be good for the city’s morale. The guards flanked me at a careful distance, close enough to protect, far enough to suggest I was approachable. I hated it. The noise of the vendors, the smell of fish and cumin and sweat, the way people paused their conversations to watch me pass—it all felt like a performance I hadn’t agreed to.

I kept my eyes forward, nodding at the appropriate moments, offering the small, practiced smile that had been perfected over years of training. A child ran past, nearly colliding with my legs, and I stepped aside without thinking. My sandals were already dusty. I could feel the grit between my toes.

Then I saw her.

She was crouched behind a low table stacked with clay pots and bowls, her fingers working a lump of earth into the shape of a lamp. Her hair was tied back, but strands had come loose, clinging to her neck with sweat. She didn’t look up. Not when the crowd parted for me, not when the guards’ armor clinked in rhythm with their steps, not when the silence rippled outward from my presence like a stone dropped in water.

I stopped walking.

The stall was simple—just a few items arranged on a cloth, no decoration, no attempt to draw the eye. But she was absorbed, her thumb pressing a groove into the clay, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. There was something in the way she held her shoulders, the way her foot was tucked beneath her, that made it clear she wasn’t performing. She wasn’t trying to be seen. She was just doing the work.

I waved the guards back. They hesitated, then obeyed, falling into a loose formation a few paces behind me. I stepped closer. The scent of wet earth rose up, clean and grounding, cutting through the market’s stink. I picked up a water jug, one of the simpler pieces, and turned it in my hands. It was heavier than it looked, the surface still slightly rough.

“How much?” I asked.

She looked up then. Her eyes were dark, direct. No flicker of recognition, no bow, no widening of surprise. Just a pause, a breath, and then: “Three coppers.”

Her voice was low, unimpressed. I could have been anyone.

I reached into the pouch at my waist and pulled out the coins. Our fingers brushed as she took them. Her skin was warm, the tips of her fingers calloused. I felt the contact like a jolt, sudden and unwelcome, and then she was already turning back to her work, the moment over.

I walked away, the jug in my hand, the guards falling in behind me. I didn’t look back until I reached the end of the row. When I did, she was still shaping the clay, her head bent, her world closed to mine.

I told the guards to wait at the corner where the grain-seller’s awning ended. They exchanged a look—brief, unreadable—then took up their posts like statues carved from duty. I stepped back into the lane alone.

The earth smell hit me again, stronger now that the sun had baked the morning’s spilled water into steam. I stopped in front of her table. She was smoothing the neck of the same lamp, thumb moving in slow circles, clay giving way under pressure. A bead of sweat slid from her hairline to her jaw and hung there.

“Three coppers, you said?” I kept my voice level, the way I addressed archery instructors when I wanted them to believe I wasn’t rattled.

She didn’t answer immediately. Her thumb finished its circuit, then she set the lamp aside and wiped her hands on a rag that had once been white. “For that one, yes.” She nodded at the jug I still carried. “If you want a bigger, it’s five.”

I shifted the jug to my other hand. The clay left a cool damp ring on my palm. “This is fine.”

She waited. I realized I was blocking her light; my shadow cut across the table like a blade. I moved half a step, she raised her brows—barely—then reached for a bowl that needed trimming. Her fingers were short, strong, the nails clipped close. A scar crossed the top of her right index, pale against the darker skin.

I should have left. Instead I said, “You work alone?”

A flick of her eyes—up, down, away. “Most days.”

“No apprentice?”

“I’m left-handed,” she said, as if that explained everything. She dipped a finger into a bowl of water and drew a wet line around the bowl’s rim, coaxing the clay to obey. The motion was intimate, practiced, almost private. I felt the pulse in my throat.

Behind me the market kept moving: a dog barked, a child cried, copper coins clinked. None of it touched the small space we occupied. I became aware of my own breathing, too even, too loud.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She looked at me again, straight this time. Something moved across her face—amusement, maybe, or irritation—then vanished. “Bhadra.”

“Bhadra,” I repeated. The syllables felt heavier than they should, as if saying them committed me to something. I placed the three coppers on the corner of her cloth. “I’m Arjun.”

“I know who you are,” she said, and picked up the coins without ceremony. Her knuckles brushed the back of my hand—once, deliberately—before she turned back to her wheel.

She wrapped the jug in a square of coarse cloth, knotting the corners with a flick of her wrist. When she held it out, I let my hand linger under hers an instant longer than necessary. The inside of her forefinger was slick with slip; a cool streak transferred to my skin and dried there, tightening as I breathed. I closed my fist around the neck of the jug and stepped back.

The sun had shifted. Light now fell across the upper half of her face, catching the fine down along her cheek. She squinted, raised a hand to shield her eyes, and in doing so exposed the damp hollow beneath her breastbone where clay dust had settled like pale ash. I thought of the palace sculptors who worked marble with chisels and mallets; she used only her palms, yet the shape emerged just as definite.

“Good day, then,” she said, already bending to reclaim her lump of clay. The dismissal was so effortless it felt like kindness.

I walked. Ten paces, twenty. The jug knocked against my thigh, heavier than before, as if it had absorbed something of the riverbank from which the clay was taken. At the corner I stopped. A confectioner was arranging squares of milk sweet on a tray; a boy carried a cage of mynah birds, their wings clipped, their eyes bright with complaint. I looked back.

She had returned to the lamp. One hand steadied the base, the other drew a loop of clay upward, thinning the wall with even pressure. Her foot rocked the wheel in slow pulses. Each rotation seemed to complete a thought I would never hear. A strand of hair had come free again; she blew it away without pausing, the same way she had dismissed me.

I realized I was counting her breaths, matching them to my own until the rhythm faltered. A blister on my heel burned inside the sandal. The scar on her finger kept reappearing each time the wheel spun, a pale interruption in the brown. I imagined the wound fresh, the clay drinking her blood the way the jug had drunk the heat of my hand. The idea lodged behind my sternum, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, only insistent.

A guard cleared his throat. I turned, walked again, the jug now swinging like a pendulum measuring the distance between her world and mine. The cloth wrapping had begun to unravel; I let it trail, collecting dust. Every few steps I brushed the place where her skin had touched mine, half expecting the slip to still be wet, half hoping it had dried into a mark that would not wash away.