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.

The next morning I told the steward I wished to review the condition of the grain silos before the monsoon. He bowed, already summoning clerks, and by afternoon I was walking the river road with a scroll of tallies I had no intention of reading. The guards kept formation two steps behind; I felt their confusion as a pressure between my shoulder-blades. I did not explain.

She was kneading clay when I reached the stall, sleeves rolled above her elbows, forearms streaked grey. A strand of hair stuck to her cheek with sweat. She saw me, paused, then resumed pushing the heel of her hand through the mound.

“Inspecting the pottery trade now, prince?”

“Quality control,” I said. “Can’t have citizens drinking from cracked cups.”

She snorted, the sound short and unguarded. “Then start with the palace. Half the ware you send downriver is sun-dried trash.”

I laughed before I could stop myself. The guards shifted; one coughed. I moved closer, blocking their view with my body.

“Your clay,” I said, pointing at the wedge she was folding. “Where do you dig it?”

“North bank, past the cremation stairs. Has to be wet enough to throw, dry enough to fire.” She lifted a handful, let it drop. “Too much sand, it cracks. Too much silt, it slumps.” Her fingers opened and closed as she spoke, unconsciously shaping the air. I watched the movement and forgot to answer.

A week later I returned under the pretext of checking the sewage channel. The stink gave me legitimate reason to hurry; I found her stall clean and bright, bowls set out like moons on a cloth sky. She greeted me with a tilt of her head.

“River still flowing, or did you dam it with speeches?”

“Speeches are cheaper than stone,” I said, and handed her a mango I had carried in my sash, warm from my skin. She took it, thumb brushing mine, then bit directly through the skin without peeling. Juice ran to her wrist; she caught it with her tongue. The sight lodged behind my ribs like an arrow I could not draw out.

We talked about rain patterns, about a merchant who had been caught short-weighting widows, about the best angle for a potter’s kick-wheel. I told her things I had never said aloud: how the tutors measured my arrows against my brothers’, how my mother’s voice tightened when I spoke of war. She listened while trimming the foot of a cup, parings falling like dark petals. When I stopped, embarrassed, she wiped her hands and said, “You’re allowed to want something small.” The sentence hung between us, fragile and exact.

I began scheduling inspections the way other men schedule prayers. Grain, roads, the new well at the weavers’ quarter—any excuse that let me stand in the dust beside her table. She started leaving a bowl of water for me, knowing I would arrive thirsty. I drank from it, tasting clay, tasting her fingerprints, and felt the palace slide off my shoulders like an ill-fitting cloak.

The sky cracked open without warning. One moment the sun pressed white against the canvas awnings; the next, water fell in sheets so dense they seemed solid. Vendors shouted, grabbing cloth, wood, children. I was halfway to her stall when the first wave hit my shoulders, soaking through silk in an instant.

She had already pulled a tarp across her table, hands quick, clay abandoned. I caught her wrist—instinct, not thought—and tugged her toward the recessed doorway of a shuttered textile shop. We stumbled under the narrow overhang together, breathless.

Space was scarce. Her back brushed the carved wooden frame; my arm, extended to keep balance, landed against the wall beside her ear. Rain drummed the lintel, a roar that swallowed every other sound. Water bounced off the street in silver needles, mist rising like steam.

She pushed wet hair from her eyes. “Your guards will think you’ve drowned.”

“They’ll wait.” My voice came out rougher than intended. Droplets clung to her lashes; one slid to the corner of her mouth. I watched it gather, then fall.

The awning dripped in a steady curtain between us and the world. Through it I saw only blurred color, the market erased. We might have been anywhere, nowhere. Her shoulder touched my chest when she shifted to avoid a leak above. The pressure was light, deliberate. I felt it in my knees.

“You’re soaked,” she said.

“So are you.”

The cloth of her tunic had turned transparent across the collarbone, sticking to skin. A streak of clay still marked the hollow of her throat, softened by rain into a pale line. I smelled earth, yes, but also something sharper—her sweat, the faint sourness of fired pots, the almond oil she used to bind her hair. The combination lodged behind my teeth.

She lifted a hand to wring out the end of her braid. The movement exposed the curve of her ear, small, perfect, a drop of water caught beneath the lobe. Another strand had escaped, curling against her temple like a question mark. I stared at that ear, at that curl, as if they contained every answer I had ever needed. My palm itched to cup the place where jaw met neck, to feel the pulse I knew would be racing.

Instead I pressed my thumb against the wooden wall until the grain bit. “Bhadra—”

“Shh.” She wasn’t looking at me. She was watching the rain, or pretending to. Her lower lip bore the indent of her teeth. “Listen.”

I listened. The roar had softened into a thousand separate taps: on copper, on cloth, on the clay bowl she still held against her stomach. The sound was intimate, almost indecent, like breath caught on the edge of a moan. When I exhaled it trembled.

She turned then. Our faces were close enough that her breath warmed the rain-cold skin of my cheek. Neither of us moved. Water dripped from the awning onto her bare foot, splashing mud onto my sandals. I felt each drop as if it landed inside my chest.

“I should go,” she whispered.

“Wait.” My hand rose without permission, fingers hovering beside her ear. I didn’t touch. I simply let the space between us hum.

We stood like that while the storm spent itself, while gutters gurgled and the smell of wet lime plaster rose from the walls. When the rain finally thinned to a hush, neither of us stepped away.

The rain had thinned to a silver haze, dripping from the eaves like the last notes of a song. She stepped out first, her sandals splashing through the shallow river the storm had made of the alley. I followed, the hem of my dhoti dark with water, clinging to my calves like a reproach.

“Let me walk you,” I said.

She paused, looking at me over her shoulder. Her eyes were unreadable, the color of river stone. Then she nodded, once, and turned into the maze of lanes that wound behind the market.

We walked in silence. The alleys narrowed until my shoulders nearly brushed the walls, the plaster stained with years of monsoon and smoke. Her hips swayed ahead of me, the wet cloth of her sari clinging to the curve of her backside. I watched the way her feet found the high stones, the arch of each sole flexing as she stepped over puddles. Once she stumbled slightly, and my hand went to her waist without thinking. Her skin was warm through the damp cotton. She didn’t pull away.

The smell of her filled the narrow space—clay and rain and something sharper, like crushed neem leaves. I wanted to press my face to the back of her neck, to breathe her in until I was drunk on it. Instead I kept my hands at my sides, my knuckles brushing the walls as we passed.

She stopped at a wooden door, darker than the others, its iron latch polished by years of use. A single clay lamp burned in the niche above it, the flame steady in the still air. She turned to me, water dripping from the ends of her hair onto her collarbones.

“This is it,” she said.

I looked at the door, then at her. The space between us was no wider than my forearm, but it felt like the length of a sword. I could see the pulse in her throat, beating fast beneath the thin gold chain she wore. Her lips were parted slightly, as if she might speak again. She didn’t.

I reached out, slow enough that she could stop me. My thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, where the raindrop had been. Her breath hitched. I felt it in my groin, a sharp, sudden ache.

“Arjun,” she said, my name strange in her voice. Not prince. Not lord. Just the sound of it, raw and unadorned.

I stepped closer. The door was at her back now; I could feel the heat of the lamp above us on my hair. My hand found her wrist, circling it easily. Her bones felt small, birdlike, but her pulse beat strong against my fingers. I lifted her hand to my mouth and kissed the scar on her thumb, the one I’d watched form under clay and water. She tasted of earth and salt.

She didn’t move. Neither did I. We stood like that, her hand in mine, the city breathing around us—somewhere a dog barked, a child cried, a pot shattered. But here, in this narrow throat of stone and shadow, there was only the sound of our breathing, the slow drag of it, like bellows feeding a fire.

Then she turned, lifting the latch. The door opened inward, revealing a courtyard no larger than a chariot’s turning circle, a single tulsi plant in the center, its leaves trembling with rain. She stepped across the threshold, then looked back at me.

“Come in,” she said, “or don’t.”

The choice was mine. The chasm was still there, but it had narrowed to the width of a doorway, to the space between her body and mine. I crossed it.