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.

The next days arranged themselves around other people’s routines. I swept the guesthouse veranda at dawn, carried trays of flattened rice to traders’ mules, then drifted toward the river where the Pandavas bathed. Bheem was always first out of the water, hair plastered to his massive shoulders, laughing at something that had not yet happened. He taught me how to crack a coconut with one elbow; I taught him how to rinse the milk out of his beard so the flies left him alone. When he spoke, the words arrived like ox-carts—slow, heavy, trustworthy. I liked the way he forgot sentences halfway through and started new ones without apology.

Yudhishthir, by contrast, measured every syllable. We sat under the banyan after the midday meal, he with a palm-leaf copy of the dharma-sutras, I with nothing. He read aloud the line “A guest is a messenger of the gods,” then closed the book and asked what I thought. I said I had been a guest my entire life and still waited for the message. He smiled the way a banker counts coins—carefully, pleased with the total. After that he saved me the seat beside him whenever the brothers played dice, explaining probabilities as if they were parables. I listened, asked questions, felt my mind stretch like a limb that had never been used.

Arjun kept to the edge of these circles. He restrung his bow while Bheem arm-wrestled dockworkers, or walked upstream alone, returning when the cooking fires were embers. If I laughed too loudly he looked up, arrow poised mid-fletch, eyes narrowing like a man trying to sight through fog. Once I brought Bheem a second helping of jaggery; Arjun’s knuckles whitened around the shaft he was smoothing. Another afternoon I borrowed Yudhishthir’s comb; when I pulled it through my hair I felt Arjun’s gaze follow each stroke, a heat against my scalp. I told myself it was only the sun.

I began to anticipate the moment he would appear. If the brothers planned an evening at the potter’s shed, I found reasons to decline when I sensed Arjun would not go. If he lingered by the well at twilight, I invented errands that required me to pass with a water-jug. The calculations were minute, shameful, automatic—like checking wind before releasing an arrow I pretended not to care about. When he spoke to me, which was rare, his voice carried the same clipped courtesy he offered the vegetable-seller. Yet the day I joked with Nakul about horse ailments, Arjun left the courtyard mid-sentence, bow clattering against the doorframe hard enough to splinter the wood.

That night I lay on my cot counting the ways I had adjusted my face, my tone, the tilt of my shoulders, all to fit inside a mood that belonged to someone else. The realization tasted metallic, like the edge of a coin pressed to the tongue. I told myself I would stop. The next morning I greeted Bheem with a louder laugh than usual, let my hand rest on Yudhishthir’s sleeve while I pointed out a line of migrating geese. Arjun stood across the clearing, quiver slung low on his hip, watching. I could not read his expression, only the fact that he had one, and that it was directed at me. The laugh died in my throat before the geese were out of sight.

Drums started at dusk, a low heartbeat that made the cooking fires jump. By the time the moon cleared the mango trees the whole riverside had turned into a single shifting body: children with painted faces, grandmothers balancing clay cups of palm wine, traders clapping off-beat. I stood between Bheem and a potter whose name I never learned, rice wine fizzing up my nose while he explained why certain kilns sang when the glaze cracked. When he reached the punch line—something about a donkey, a pot, and a widow’s second wedding—I laughed so hard wine sloshed over my wrist.

The hand closed immediately after: fingers iron, thumb pressing the bone. The laughter choked in my throat. Arjun yanked me backward, through dancers whose elbows still pumped to the drum, past a circle of old men passing a hookah, until the light thinned and the music felt underwater. Two storage huts leaned together, making an alley that smelled of dried fish and lamp oil. He shoved me against the mud wall and planted his palm beside my ear, blocking the exit with his body.

“What are you doing?” The words came out low, almost a hiss, as if the question hurt his throat.

My pulse beat everywhere—wrist, neck, between my legs. “Enjoying myself. Something wrong with that?”

His eyes were two sparks, close enough that I saw my own blurred face inside them. Drums thudded on the other side of the wall; a woman shrieked with delight. Here, only our breathing existed, fast and shallow.

“You were touching his arm.”

“He was demonstrating a handle.”

“You laughed like you meant it.”

I lifted my chin. “Maybe I did.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. He leaned in until the heat of his chest brushed the damp cotton of my choli. I felt the ridge of every finger that had gripped the bowstring, the callus of his thumb now resting against my collarbone. He didn’t kiss me. He stared at my mouth as if it were a target he hadn’t decided whether to loose at or walk away from. The moment stretched, thin and glittering, until I felt my own heartbeat in the soles of my feet.

Then he stepped back, one pace, two. Cool air rushed between us, carrying the scent of toddy and river weed. He opened his hand; the imprint of his fingers flared white on my skin before blood returned in a hot rush.

“Go back to your festival,” he said, voice flat, already turning.

I stayed against the wall, listening to his footsteps disappear, the drums suddenly too loud, the wine in my mouth tasting like smoke.

I pushed off the wall, closing the distance he’d opened. “You don’t own me, Arjun.” My voice shook only on the last syllable. “Not my laughter, not my hand on a potter’s sleeve, not even the air I breathe out here.”

His nostrils flared. “I never said I did.”

“Then why does your face shut like a gate every time someone else makes me smile?” I jabbed two fingers against his breastbone, felt the give of muscle, the iron beneath. “Why drag me into the dark to ask questions you won’t even finish?”

He caught my wrist again, looser this time, thumb sliding over the bruise he’d already made. “Because I can’t hear anything over the noise of you being everywhere.” The admission scraped out, raw, like skin dragged across stone. “Because when you laugh with them, it sounds like you’re already gone.”

The alley narrowed, pressing us together. Lamp-oil smoke curled between our mouths; my breasts brushed his chest with each breath. I felt the tremor in his forearm, the same vibration that ran through a bow just before release.

“Gone where?” I whispered. “I’m right here.”

His gaze dropped again—mouth, throat, the damp cloth clinging to the hollow between my breasts—then flicked back up. “Are you?” he asked, so quietly I felt it more than heard it. “Or are you still pretending Su is real?”

The name hit like cold water. I swallowed, tasting rice wine and panic. “You never asked who I was.”

“I didn’t need to.” His free hand lifted, hovered an inch from my cheek. “I know the shape of what you hide.”

I should have moved, spoken, laughed it off. Instead I leaned forward until his knuckles grazed my skin. The touch was tiny, accidental, and it detonated something. His breath stuttered; mine stopped entirely.

He bent, slow, deliberate, until his forehead rested against mine. No kiss—just the shared heat of skin, the slide of his nose along my temple. I felt the ridge of his teeth as he exhaled against my jaw, a sound closer to pain than desire. My hands found his waist, fingers curling into the coarse cloth of his dhoti, pulling him the last half-inch until his hips pinned me to the mud. The wall was cool, he was furnace-hot, and between them I throbbed like a drum.

“Tell me to leave,” he muttered against my ear. “Say it once and I walk.”

I answered by tilting my face, brushing my parted lips across the corner of his mouth—not a kiss, only promise. His whole body went rigid; then he tore himself away so fast the air burned. Footsteps cracked on dried fish scales; the alley coughed him out into the firelit roar.

I stayed, spine printed with mud, pulse hammering at every place he hadn’t touched.

He came at dawn, boots soundless on dew-slick sand. I was washing my face, sleeves rolled to the elbow, river water still stinging the bruise he’d left. When I straightened he was ten paces away, bow slung across his back like an accusation he hadn’t decided to voice.

“I thought you’d be gone,” he said.

“I thought you’d want me gone.”

The apology arrived in pieces: a scuff of his heel, a swallow, finally words that collided with each other. “I shouldn’t have… the alley… your wrist.” He rubbed the back of his own as if it hurt in retrospect.

I lifted the marked skin, let him see the purple half-moon of his thumb. “It’ll fade.”

His eyes said he wasn’t sure that would be enough.

We started walking upstream because the bank narrowed there and we would have to walk single file or touch. After a mile the path gave up and we pushed into sal forest, saplings whipping our shins. He held branches aside so they wouldn’t snap back on me; I broke spider threads before they crossed his face. Neither of us spoke. The quiet felt borrowed, something we could return cracked if we weren’t careful.

At a clearing floored with last year’s leaves he stopped. Sunlight lay in coins across the mulch. He unslung the bow, laid it deliberate as a baby on the root of a karam tree.

“I carry that thing like armor,” he said. “Sometimes I forget I can put it down.”

I told him I carried my own armor, flimsier but heavier. He waited. The story came out flat, no titles, no kingdoms: a house too big, a name that arrived before I did, the ache of being looked through. When I finished he nodded as if I’d given him directions he already knew by heart.

Then he touched me: two fingers under the chin, raising my face. No bow, no audience, no drumbeat. His thumb traced the shape of my lower lip once, twice, the pressure so light it was almost inquiry. I felt the pulse in his wrist jump against my cheekbone.

“Say yes,” he said.

I said it.

He kissed me like someone confirming a fact he was afraid would be disproved: mouth hard, then suddenly soft when I sighed. My back found the sal trunk; bark bit through cotton. His hands slid to my waist, lifted until my feet barely brushed the ground. The forest smelled of crushed leaves and something sharper—resin heating where our skin met.

When we broke apart we were both breathing like we’d run the entire distance from the river. He rested his forehead against mine.

“Walk farther?” he asked.

I nodded. We left the bow where it lay, a silent witness to the fact that we were choosing unarmed distance now, together.

We walked until the trees thinned into a clearing no wider than a chariot track, sunlight falling in bright, shifting patches. He stopped first, turning to face me as if the words he needed had finally caught up.

“I was born with a bow in my hand,” he said. “Not literally, but close enough. My mother tells me I drew an arrow before I cried.” He rubbed his palm against his thigh, a small, unconscious motion. “Everyone looks at me and sees the weapon. Not the hand that holds it. Not the man who might want to put it down.”

I listened, arms crossed over my chest, feeling the weight of my own secret press against my ribs.

“They call it destiny,” he went on. “A great war coming. A kingdom to reclaim. Justice, or something like it. And I’m supposed to be the tip of the spear. The one who never misses.” He laughed, but it was a dry sound. “Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just… didn’t.”

I stepped closer. “And what would you do instead?”

He looked at me then, really looked, as if the answer might be written somewhere on my face. “Walk. Sit. Speak to someone who doesn’t want anything from me.”

I swallowed. “I know what it’s like to be wanted for what you represent. Not who you are.”

His brow furrowed. “You said your family… they expect things?”

“They don’t see me at all,” I said. “They see a name. A role. A piece on a board.” The lie tasted bitter now, but I couldn’t stop. “I came here to be someone else. Just for a while. Just to breathe.”

He nodded slowly, as if he understood more than I’d said. Then he reached out, fingers brushing my jawline with such care it made my knees weak. His thumb settled on my lower lip, tracing it once, then again.

“I see you,” he said.

The words cracked something open in me. I surged forward, kissing him hard, desperate, as if I could pour every unspoken truth into the press of mouths. He responded instantly, arms wrapping around me, pulling me flush against him. My back hit the rough bark of a tree, but I didn’t care—his tongue slid against mine, hot and urgent, and I moaned into him, fingers clawing at his shoulders.

He broke the kiss only to trail his lips down my neck, teeth grazing the hollow above my collarbone. My hands found the hem of his dhoti, tugging blindly, needing skin. He groaned when my palm brushed the hard line of him through the cloth, hips jerking forward.

“Subhadra,” he breathed against my throat, not knowing it was my real name.

I shivered, arching into him, legs parting instinctively as he pressed closer. The forest faded—only the heat of him, the scrape of bark, the wet slide of mouths remained.

He yanked the knot at my throat; the cotton ripped, neckline gaping to my sternum. Cool air hit sweat-damp skin, then his mouth—open, hot—closed over the slope of my breast. I felt the drag of teeth, the flick of tongue across a nipple already peaked. My spine scraped bark; splinters bit, but the sting dissolved under the next pull of his lips.

His hand shoved the hem of my skirt upward, bunched it at my hip. Fingers slid between my thighs, found the slick gathered there, and he groaned—an animal sound—against my collarbone. Two fingers pushed inside, crooking once, twice, as if testing readiness more than offering pleasure. I clenched around them, heels lifting off the ground, and he answered by withdrawing, hoisting me higher.

My legs locked around his waist; the knot of his dhoti gave under my tug. He freed himself—hot, rigid, pulsing in my grip for the single breath it took to position us. Then he drove upward, one thrust that seated him fully, my back slammed to the tree so hard leaves showered down.

Pain flared, bright and brief, swallowed by the stretch of accommodating him. He paused, forehead grinding mine, breath ragged. “Still yes?”

I rolled my hips. He took the movement as consent and withdrew, slammed back, setting a rhythm that rattled the trunk. Each stroke dragged my shoulders up the bark; I clung to his neck, nails scoring the nape, thighs trembling around his ribs.

Sweat slicked the space between us, his chest sliding against my bare breasts, friction building where our bodies met. I felt the slide of his shaft, the drag of my own wetness coating us both, smelled crushed leaves and sex thick as smoke. My release built low, a tightening coil that snapped when he shifted angle, pelvis grinding my clit. I came silently, mouth open against his shoulder, muscles clamping hard enough to stall him.

He groaned my false name, “Su,” voice breaking, then drove through the aftershocks until his own finish hit—hips jerking, spending inside me in hot pulses I felt against my womb.

We stayed locked, breathing hard, his forehead braced against the tree beside my ear. When he eased out, a rush of mixed fluid slicked my inner thighs. He lowered me gently, palms steadying until my feet found the mulch.

My tunic hung in strips; his dhoti was streaked with bark dust and seed. We didn’t speak. He tucked himself away, eyes never leaving the mess we’d made of each other. I pressed shaking fingers to the bite mark blooming just above my nipple, felt the throb echo between my legs, and knew the forest had memorized every sound.