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.

I woke before the sweeper’s broom hit the courtyard stones, the sky still bruise-coloured, and carried slop pails to the lane where the pigs waited. By sunrise I had scrubbed three staircases, blackened nails digging lime from cracks, and earned a bowl of milky tea that tasted of smoke and reward. The work left my shoulders humming, but the ache was mine, not a handmaiden’s proxy, and that made it sweet. Afterward I walked, following cow-tracks that narrowed into deer paths, until the town’s smells thinned into reed and wet earth.

On the sixth morning the path bent south along the river and ended at a clearing circled by sal trees. The ground was beaten bare, littered with white feathers and splintered reeds. He was already there.

Arjun stood barefoot on a patch of packed sand, bow lifted in one fluid motion, string kissing his cheek. The arrow left with a hiss and punched the centre of a bark strip thirty paces away; the after-sound hung, a thin metallic ring. He nocked again, body rotating open, every muscle sliding beneath skin like rope under silk. I crouched behind a clump of cane, pulse knocking, suddenly aware of sweat drying cold between my breasts.

He shot until the quiver was half empty, each release identical, as if the day itself were being stitched by his rhythm. When he paused to wipe his forearm across his brow I saw the small scar above his elbow, pale against the darker flesh, and felt an unreasonable urge to touch it. My knees pressed prints into damp soil; an ant crawled over my foot and I did not move.

A flight of spotted ducks broke from the reeds downstream, wings clapping. Without looking he pivoted, arrow already drawn, and let it fly. The lead bird dropped so cleanly there was no second flap; the rest scattered into low sun. He lowered the bow, expression unreadable, then walked to retrieve the carcass. Blood spotted the sand in perfect round drops. He wiped the shaft on his thigh, inspected the fletching, and only then did his gaze flick toward my hiding place.

“Step out or stay there,” he called, voice flat. “But breathe quieter.”

Heat flooded my neck. I rose, brushing grit from my palms, and stepped into the clearing. Sunlight fell between leaves and slid over his collarbones, the curve of muscle that disappeared beneath the cloth knotted at his shoulder. I smelled iron, river water, and something sharp that might have been my own want.

“I didn’t mean to watch,” I said.

“Yet you did.” He slid the duck into a cloth bag, tied it to his belt, then fitted another arrow. “Ask what you came to ask.”

I had come for nothing, but the question arrived anyway. “How do you make each shot the same?”

He considered me, eyes narrowing, then turned toward the target. “I stop being different each time.” The string sang; the reed bundle shivered. He glanced back. “Your turn.”

I shook my head. “I have no bow.”

“Then fetch the arrows.” He tossed his head toward the strip of bark. “And try not to scrape your knees again.”

The words should have stung; instead they felt like currency I had waited my whole life to spend. I walked past him, close enough to feel heat radiating from his bare forearm, and began pulling shafts from the wood, each tug vibrating through my wrist like a second heartbeat.

The arrows came free with a wet pop, their iron heads dark with sap. I carried them back cradled against my chest like kindling. He held out his hand; I laid the bundle across his palm, steel clacking. For a second our skin touched—his callused, mine salt-stung—and the same jolt I had felt in the market shot up my arm. I stepped back too quickly, almost tripping over the duck’s blood spot.

He inspected each shaft, wiping sap on the edge of his dhoti. “You didn’t bend them,” he said, as if that were the only compliment he owned.

“I used to climb date palms at home,” I answered before thinking. “You learn where to put your weight.”

His gaze flicked to my bare feet, the soles blackened, then to the hem of my coarse cotton where a knee showed through a tear. “You’re not from here.”

“Neither are you.”

The corner of his mouth twitched—not a smile, just skin remembering it could move. He slid the arrows back into the quiver. “The fletching is goose,” he said suddenly. “Left wing, second feather. It holds true in humid air.”

I leaned closer, breathing through my mouth so I wouldn’t have to smell him and think of it. “Why left?”

“Right wing spins the opposite way. My bow is right-handed; I want the arrow to rotate into the string, not away.” He lifted one arrow, twisting the feather between finger and thumb. “See the barbs? They lie flat only if the bird was healthy. A sick bird tells lies in flight.”

I laughed before I could stop myself. “You sound like my brother diagnosing a lame horse.”

He almost answered—lips parted—then pressed them shut, the old irritation returning. “You should go. I train until the sun is two fists high.”

“I can carry targets,” I offered. “Or pull shafts. I don’t talk much.”

He hesitated, glancing at the sun as if it had filed a complaint. “Suit yourself.”

For the next hour I became a shadow with hands. I dragged the reed mat he used for buttresses, flipped it when the centre frayed, stacked ducks he dropped—four, then five—onto a rock so ants wouldn’t swarm them. Sweat pooled at the base of my spine; mosquitoes whined in my ears. He never thanked me, but after each round he checked whether I watched the shot, not him, and when he saw I did, he explained: how he locked his wrist so the release didn’t jerk, why he breathed out halfway through the draw, the way the bow’s recurved limbs stored power like a clenched thought.

Between ends I risked questions. “Does the string cut your fingers?”

He held them out: three grooves carved deep, the skin hard as bark. “The body learns faster than pride.”

“And the scar?” I pointed to the pale line above his elbow.

His face closed. “A reminder.”

I didn’t ask of what. Instead I passed him the water skin. He drank, throat working, then offered it back without wiping the mouth. The intimacy of shared water felt heavier than touch. I swallowed where his lips had been.

On the last shot he aimed at a mango hanging high over the river. The arrow severed the stem; fruit smacked the water and floated, yellow against brown. He lowered the bow, breathing hard, and for the first time looked straight at me without measuring distance.

“Your hair is coming loose,” he said.

My braid had half-undone; strands stuck to my cheeks. I lifted a hand to fix it but he reached first, fingers skimming my temple, tucking the hair behind my ear as if it were the most ordinary motion in the world. The touch lasted less than a heartbeat, yet my knees softened like wax near flame. He seemed startled too, hand freezing mid-air before dropping to his side.

“Sun’s up,” he muttered. “Fetch the mango before the current takes it.”

I waded knee-deep, plucked the fruit, and brought it back dripping. He took it, turned it once, then split it cleanly with his knife, juice running over his wrist. Without ceremony he handed me half. The flesh was warm, sweet, threaded with fiber that caught in my teeth. We ate in silence, standing apart, while the river carried away the feathers we had shed.

He wiped his hands on the tail of his dhoti and reached for the quiver, counting shafts with a frown. “One short,” he said, more to himself than to me, and scanned the clearing. His gaze lifted to the banyan that leaned over the water, its aerial roots dangling like unfastened hair. High up, where trunk split into two great limbs, the missing arrow stood quivering, fletching caught in a fork.

I followed his line of sight. “I can get it.”

“Too high.” He was already stringing a second arrow, intending to knock the first one down.

I kicked off my sandals, crossed the spongy ground, and jumped. My fingers closed around the thickest root; bark flaked under my grip, but it held. I climbed the way I had as a child on palace garden walls—knees hugging wood, bare feet finding knobs—only now there was no silk to tangle, no anklet to snag. The rough weave of my borrowed tunic rode up my thighs; the breeze cooled the sweat there. Ten feet, fifteen. Below, the river glinted, slow and indifferent.

He called my name—Su—sharp, half-order, half-question. I didn’t stop. The branch I wanted was as thick as my waist; I swung a leg over and straddled it, inching forward until the arrow’s feathers brushed my cheek. I tugged; the shaft was wedged tight. I wrapped both hands around it and pulled harder. It came free so suddenly I rocked backward, stomach dipping. For a second I hung over empty air, legs locked, heart hammering against bark.

When I straightened, he was directly beneath me, bow lowered, neck craned. Sunlight fell through leaves in moving coins across his face. I felt the absurd urge to show off, to drop the arrow like a flower. Instead I slid down hand-over-hand, soles scraping, until I dangled an arm’s length above him.

“Take it.” I held the arrow out.

He stepped close. One hand closed over the cedar shaft; the other rose to steady my waist, thumb pressing the hollow beneath my lowest rib. Our fingers overlapped for an instant—his skin furnace-hot, mine river-cold—and the shock of it snapped through me like a bowstring released. I let go too fast, nails grazing his knuckles, and dropped the last foot. My shoulder bumped his chest; I felt the thump of his heart through muscle and cloth.

He didn’t move back. For three breaths we stood like that, sharing the same small parcel of air. His pupils had widened, black pushing amber to a thin ring. A bead of sap clung to the arrow’s head; it slid, slow as honey, onto the webbing between his thumb and finger. Neither of us looked away. Then his grip loosened, the arrow lowered, and his hand fell to his side. No word, no change of expression—only the blankness of a man who has just discovered a new country inside himself and has not yet decided whether it is safe to enter.