I Gave Up My Crown to Live as a Commoner and Fell for a Brooding Archer With a Secret of His Own

The marble beneath my bare feet was always cool, even in the afternoon heat, and I had begun to hate it. In the palace at Dwaraka the corridors were so wide that my footsteps echoed back like a second pair following me, and the mirrors were so tall that I saw myself repeated into infinity—same straight back, same gold bangles, same mouth pressed flat with boredom. I stood on the balcony that looked west over the sea and felt the salt wind slap my face, but even the ocean was arranged for me: barges painted with my family’s colours, waves trimmed with silk flags. Nothing reached me that had not already been approved.

I found Krishna in the library, cross-legged on a low table, reading a farmer’s almanac as if it were scripture. When I said his name he didn’t glance up; he only lifted one finger, the signal that he was listening.
“I want to leave,” I told him. “Not forever. A month. Maybe two.”
Now he looked. His eyes were the colour of rainclouds before they break, and they broke now, amused. “Leave the palace, or leave yourself?”
“Both,” I said. “Let me be nobody.”
He closed the almanac. “Nobody is harder work than princess. You’ll have to carry your own water.”
“I can carry water.”
“You’ll have to bargain for lentils like a fish-wife.”
“I like lentils.”
“You’ll have to keep your tongue civil when men speak to you any way they please.”
I felt the pulse jump in my throat. “Then let me learn how.”
Krishna studied me the way he studied chessboards, head tilted, already eight moves ahead. Finally he nodded. “There is a town on the Ganga where no one sleeps with guards outside the door. I’ll send you as Su, the scribe’s cousin from Mathura. You’ll travel in the back of a salt cart. If anyone asks, your dowry was lost at dice and you’re rebuilding your life one honest day at a time.”
I exhaled, and it tasted like the first honest breath of my life.
“One condition,” he added. “You write to me every week. Not palace reports—real letters. I want to watch the princess fall away line by line.”
I agreed before he could change his mind.

Three nights later I climbed into an ox-cart that smelled of brine and old rope. The driver wrapped me in a coarse blanket that itched against my collarbones; I had left my silk in a chest, along with my name. The cart rolled out through the service gate while the city slept, and the farther we went the lighter the air became, until the sea-smell faded and was replaced by dust and mango blossom. At sunrise I saw the river for the first time without a retinue—just brown water glinting like a blade, and a town on its bank that had no banners of any kind.

I stepped down, bag slung over one shoulder, hair uncombed, mouth already tasting of the metal of anonymity. No one bowed. No one shouted “Subhadra!” The ferryman simply held out his palm for the coin I now owned myself, and when I dropped it in he grunted and turned away. The sound was ugly and perfect. I walked uphill toward the guesthouse, each footfall silent on the dirt, and the absence of echo felt like flight.

The market was a crush of elbows and voices that rose like steam off the river. I moved through it slowly, letting the current of bodies decide my direction, enjoying the way shoulders knocked mine without apology. A woman selling turmeric had stained her fingernails yellow; a boy waved a skewer of roasted guava over a charcoal brazier, the smoke stinging my eyes. Everything smelled of sweat and cardamom. I had three copper coins in my pouch—my earnings from sweeping the guesthouse courtyard at dawn—and I intended to spend them on something unnecessary.

That was when I saw him.

He stood at a bowyer’s stall, back half-turned, left hand testing the waxed threads laid out on the plank counter. The vendor spoke quickly, palms open, but the man wasn’t listening; his head was bent, black hair falling across a forehead fixed in concentration. Sunlight caught on the callused pad of his index finger as he twisted a strand of sinew, judging its give. The motion was small, almost surgical, and it seemed to silence the rest of the square. I had seen warriors drill on palace terraces—grand, choreographed displays for an audience—yet none had ever looked as lethal as this stranger assessing string.

I stepped forward, meaning to pass behind him, but a goat butted my knee and I lurched. My shoulder brushed the bare skin of his arm. The contact was brief, hot, and I felt the tension in him like a strung bow itself. He turned.

His eyes were the colour of river silt—dark, opaque—and they swept over me once, taking in the borrowed cotton tunic, the sweat at my temples, the coin purse that probably looked empty. Whatever inventory he made, it lasted less than a heartbeat; he found nothing of interest and pivoted back to the bowyer, dismissing me so completely that the air seemed to close behind him. I was still standing there, one hand lifted in apology nobody wanted, when he spoke to the merchant, voice low and precise.

“Fifty more if it sings at full draw. Less if it snaps.”

The vendor swallowed. “Test it, master.”

He nocked an invisible arrow, pulled back until the cord trembled beside his cheek, and held. Veins rose along his forearm; the muscles bunched and held their breath. I felt the strain in my own body, a sympathetic ache behind my ribs. Then he released. The string hummed, a single note that cut through the market’s din, and for an instant everything felt balanced on that vibration. He placed the coil on the counter, paid without haggling further, and walked away. The crowd swallowed him, but the note seemed to linger, buzzing in my teeth.

I realized I had not breathed. When I finally did, the air tasted of charcoal and something sharper—possibility, maybe, or danger. My shoulder still tingled where his skin had touched it. I pressed my fingers there, as if I could trap the feeling, and understood that anonymity was no longer the most interesting thing about this town.

The guesthouse was a long low building of mud and lime, its roof thatched with river reeds that smelled of smoke and last year’s monsoon. I paid two copper coins for a room no wider than a palace wardrobe: charpai, clay lamp, a single window that hinged outward like an eye. The woman who took my money had a purple scar across her upper lip; she spoke only to ask if I wanted dal at dusk, then left me to the quiet. I set my bundle on the floor and sat. No attendants, no bronze bells, only the creak of rope under my weight and the sound of my own breathing. I had never been alone in a room that was not mine by birth. The freedom felt almost indecent.

When the sun began to slide I walked to the ghats. The river was broad here, brown water carrying pieces of every mountain it had touched. Women slapped wet saris against stone steps; boys dived for coins, their bodies slicing the surface with hardly a splash. I found a place upstream where the bank turned sandy and sat with my knees drawn up, chin on the back of my wrists. A funeral procession passed: wrapped body, marigolds, a son with shaved scalp chanting in a voice already detached. I watched until the pyre caught and the smoke braided itself into the evening haze. No one looked at me; I was simply another mourner of strangers. The thought made me dizzy with gratitude.

Dusk pooled. Lamps flickered on across the water like low stars. I was about to leave when I saw them.

Five men climbed the steps from the ferry, laughing in the way men do when they have shared the same womb and the same exile. The tallest carried a clay jar on one shoulder; another slapped his back, nearly spilling it. Their clothes were travel-stained, hair wind-matted, yet they moved with the loose confidence of people who had never been refused entry anywhere. At the rear walked the archer. He had washed; droplets still clung to the hair at his nape. While the others traded jokes with boatmen, he kept silent, gaze fixed on the lane ahead as if measuring distance for an arrow he had no intention of shooting.

One of the brothers—broad as a temple door—noticed me and nudged another. Words were exchanged; laughter rose. The archer did not join. Instead he lifted his eyes straight to where I sat. The distance was perhaps thirty paces, but the look arrived like a hand at my throat. Not anger, not invitation—something rawer, a question he did not intend to ask. My skin prickled, as if the spot between my collarbones had been drawn on with heated ink. Around us the ghat noises continued: bells, gulls, the slap of wet cloth. None of it touched the small sealed chamber his gaze created. Then one brother called his name—Arjun—and the moment broke. He turned, shoulders set, and followed the others up the lane.

I sat until the pyre collapsed into embers, rubbing the place his eyes had touched, wondering what kind of sadness could cling to a man who handled death so beautifully.