His Captive Queen

The gates of Indraprastha rose before him like a memory he wasn't sure he still owned. Twelve years. The number sat in his mouth like a stone. Arjun guided his horses through the outer wards, past the new grain silos and the wider roads, past the faces that turned to stare and then lit with recognition. He had left here a penitent; he returned with two wives he had never meant to take and a third waiting inside the palace who had every right to hate him.

Draupadi stood on the lowest terrace, the maroon silk of her sari snapping in the hot wind. She had always been able to read distance—she would have counted every league he traveled, every month, every wife. Her eyes found his and held them while the brothers closed in. Yudhishthir first, thinner, greyer at the temples, already wearing the future crown in the set of his shoulders. Nakul and Sahdev, twins still but no longer boys, their arms marked with the scars of skirmishes Arjun had not fought beside them. Bheem, huge, uncomplicated, wrapping him in a hug that lifted his feet from the dust.

“You smell like pine and horse,” Bheem said, setting him down. “And something colder.”

“Snow,” Arjun answered. “Manipur has snow even in summer, high on the hills.” He did not add: I learned to love the woman who rules there. I learned to love the woman who rules the river underground. The words felt obscene in daylight.

Draupadi descended the steps slowly, the gold at her throat catching the sun like a warning. When she reached him she did not touch his face; she touched the leather cuff of his archer’s guard, worn soft by Chitrangada’s rivers and Ulupi’s caverns.

“Your bowstring has been busy,” she said, voice low enough only he heard.

He had rehearsed apologies on the road, whole speeches about duty and loneliness and accidents of rescue that became weddings. Under her fingertip the speeches crumbled. He settled for: “I came back.”

“That remains to be seen,” she answered, and turned toward the palace.

Inside, the halls smelled of sandalwood and fresh lime wash. Servants he did not know ducked their heads. Somewhere a baby cried—someone’s child, not his, never his. He felt the absence of his own children like another exile. Ulupi’s son would be six now, Chitrangada’s daughter four. They would never walk these corridors. That had been part of the price, sealed in river oaths and mountain treaties.

Yudhishthir led them to the council chamber. The maps had changed: new borders inked in red, forests cleared, trade routes redrawn. Arjun saw the shape of a kingdom that had expanded without him, as if his absence had been a necessary cavity to fill with other men’s labor. He sat where he used to sit, the carved backrest pressing the same knots against his spine, and realized the chair had not waited; it had simply accepted his vacancy.

A servant poured water. The silver cup was engraved with the emblem of Hastinapur—lotus and trident—still used here because coin minted in the uncle’s city remained the easiest currency. Arjun drank. The water tasted of the copper pipes it traveled through, metallic and second-hand.

“Tell us,” Sahdev said, leaning forward, “did you find what you were looking for?”

Arjun thought of Ulupi’s scales flashing under torchlight, the way she had pressed her mouth to the pulse at his throat and called it devotion. He thought of Chitrangada straddling him in a tent while monsoon drums beat the canvas, her hair loose and dripping river water onto his chest. He thought of the vow he had broken the night he touched the first of them, and how each subsequent vow had fractured easier, like ice once cracked.

“No,” he said. “I found what was there.”

Draupadi’s eyes closed briefly, as if she could tally the cost from the sound of his voice. When she opened them she looked at the doorway, already calculating the next thing, the thing that would save them from the thing that had already happened.

Outside, dusk pooled against the sandstone. Arjun felt the future arrive—not as a chariot or a summons, but as the simple weight of his own breathing in a room that had learned to live without it.

The lamps were lit late, after the household had settled into its new rhythm of containing Arjun again. They gathered in the small council room off the inner courtyard, the one with only one door and no windows, built for conversations that could not be overheard by cousins in Hastinapur or spies dressed as merchants. Draupadi entered last, her sari changed to indigo, the color of decisions made at night. She took the seat beside Yudhishthir, not behind him, so that her shoulder touched Arjun’s when she breathed.

Yudhishthir unrolled a map that still smelled of fresh ink. The parchment crackled; someone had redrawn the borders that morning. Hastinapur’s lotus sprawled across the upper third, its petals reaching toward their gates like fingers. Below it, Indraprastha sat alone, a red square with no sisters.

“We collect taxes for them,” Yudhishthir said. “We mint their coins. Our granaries feed their armies. If we die tomorrow, the ledger still says we are theirs.”

He did not look at Arjun when he said it, but Arjun felt the words land on the scar tissue beneath his collarbone, the place where Drona’s arrow had gone in the day they won this city. The scar itched whenever someone spoke of ownership.

Nakul traced the river with a fingernail. “Krishna says the other kings wait to see which way the wind blows. If we declare independence, we need their banners before Dhritarashtra finishes blinking.”

“More than banners,” Sahadev added. “We need their soldiers, their grain, their daughters married into our cousins so that when Duryodhana sends an invitation to dice, they remember we exist.”

Bheem’s knuckles cracked. “One signature unlocks the rest. Dwarka. Balaram trains half the princes in the world. If he names us legitimate, the others crawl to us like calves to salt.”

The silence that followed was thick enough to taste. Arjun felt Draupadi’s breathing stop for the space of a heartbeat. He knew the arithmetic: Krishna would give them his friendship, but Balaram loved protocol, loved Duryodhana’s respectful bows, loved the gold Hastinapur sent at every solstice.

Bheem spoke into the quiet. “There is a girl. Subhadra. Balaram’s half-sister, Krishna’s full. Unmarried. Her dowry is the Yadava army and every port on the western sea.”

Arjun’s stomach folded in on itself. He heard Ulupi’s voice in a cave, telling him river water healed everything. He felt Chitrangada’s fingers on his hip the night she whispered that warriors kept count of wives the way they kept count of arrows—one for every battle that mattered. He felt Draupadi’s shoulder against his now, rigid as iron.

Sahadev looked at the floor. “We would use her like a seal on a jar.”

“We would use ourselves,” Yudhishthir answered. “Every marriage in this room began as calculation. Draupadi’s father wanted a prophecy fulfilled. Arjun married two queens to buy armies we could not raise. We are already the thing you dislike; we are simply running out of time to pretend otherwise.”

Arjun found his voice. “I have three homes scattered across rivers and mountains. I left pieces of myself in each. There is nothing left to barter.”

Draupadi turned her head. In the lamplight her eyes were not angry; they were measuring. “You left pieces, but you came back whole. The city needs a fourth wife the way a chariot needs a fourth wheel. You are the only one Krishna will forgive for taking her.”

The map lay between them like a dare. Outside, a night bird called once, the sound of something hunting. Arjun stared at the red square that was his life and saw it shrinking under the weight of a crown he had never asked to wear.

Bheem’s finger stabbed the parchment so hard the ink smudged. “Dwarka or dust. Without Balaram’s bulls on our standard, the others laugh behind their palms.”

Nakul exhaled through his teeth. “Krishna calls us friend already.”

“Krishna isn’t Dwarka’s first voice,” Bheem shot back. “Balaram signs the ledgers, trains the princes, drinks with Duryodhana every spring. One nod from him and the ports close to our grain ships. Another nod and they open to Hastinapur’s spies.”

He leaned forward, elbows on the map, the candle throwing the shadow of his neck across the red square until Indraprastha disappeared under darkness. “There’s a girl. Subhadra. Same father as Krishna, different mother. Seventeen, unbetrothed. Her dowry is every Yadava arrow and every Yadava sail. Marry her, keep her womb in our palace, and Balaram’s bulls graze in our courtyard. Refuse, and we beg for leftovers.”

The words landed like a mace on tile. Arjun felt the vibration travel up the legs of his chair and settle in his teeth. He counted the beats before anyone spoke: one, two, three—long enough to hear the wick sputter and die a little.

Draupadi’s voice came first, flat, practical. “She is Krishna’s sister, not a goat to be led.”

“She is a princess,” Bheem answered. “Princesses are led or they are left for wolves. We are the wolves tonight.”

Sahadev rubbed the scar on his wrist, the one he got practicing with Balaram’s own mace. “Abduction stains the story. We’ll wear the mark forever.”

“So does servitude,” Bheem said. “I’d rather explain a kidnapping to bards than explain tribute to Dhritarashtra every harvest.”

Yudhishthir hadn’t moved. His eyes stayed on the smudge where Bheem’s finger had been, as if the ink might rearrange itself into a cleaner path. When he lifted his gaze it went straight to Arjun.

“You are the one Krishna forgives,” he repeated, softer now, a statement of fact rather than plea. “No other brother can take her without starting a war. You alone can bring her home and call it fate.”

Arjun’s throat tasted of iron. He saw Ulupi’s river at night, the water sliding over her shoulders like silk; he saw Chitrangada’s thighs slick with sweat after drill, her hand pressing his to the scar her own bowstring had left; he saw Draupadi beside him now, the edge of her sari brushing his skin, the same cloth that had once been wagered and lost and won back with blood. Three women, three geographies, three separate reasons he had promised never to add another name to the list whispered in his prayers.

He opened his mouth to refuse. What came out was a question. “Does she have a say?”

Bheem shrugged. “She’ll have a husband. That’s more say than most princesses get.”

The candle popped, scattering wax across Hastinapur’s lotus. No one bothered to scrape it away.

The wax cooled, sealing the lotus petal to the parchment like a scar. No one spoke. Arjun could hear the small, wet sound of Draupadi’s tongue as she moistened her lower lip, preparing words she did not yet release. Across the table Bheem’s breathing was steady, the satisfied rhythm of a man who had dropped a weight and did not intend to pick it up again.

Arjun’s palms lay open on his thighs. He felt the sweat pool in the creases of his life-line, the one the river-nymph had once traced with a clawed fingertip and called fate. Three lines, three circles, three wedding fires. There was no fourth crease; the skin had run out of space.

He tried to imagine Subhadra. He could not. Instead he saw Ulupi’s gills fluttering when she slept, the thin membrane pulsing like a second heartbeat. He saw Chitrangada’s breast slick with oil the night she had knelt over him and guided his hand to the scar her own sword had left, saying, “Mark me, or I will forget I belong to someone.” He saw Draupadi the morning after the dice hall, her hair unbound and still smelling of smoke, standing at the window while she decided whether forgiveness was a form of survival or surrender. Three territories, three treaties he had signed with his mouth, his sex, his promise to come back alive. Adding a fourth felt like erasing a border war only to start another inside his own ribs.

The silence stretched until it became a presence, a fifth sibling squatting between them. Arjun became aware of his pulse in three separate places: throat, wrist, groin. The last surprised him; it was the same dull throb that had preceded his first wedding, when he had been young enough to mistake duty for desire. He was not young now.

Draupadi shifted. The indigo fabric of her sari whispered against his forearm, a private sentence. He did not look at her. He was afraid her eyes would contain the calculation he had seen in Yudhishthir’s: the ledger where love and politics were entered in the same column, indistinguishable once inked.

Outside the door a guard coughed once, the sound of a man trying not to listen. Inside, the candle guttered lower, thinning the light until their shadows crowded the walls like relatives who had arrived too early for a funeral.

Arjun forced himself to breathe. He tasted the residue of the metallic water, the copper of tribute, the iron of exile. He understood suddenly that the room was waiting for him to speak because refusal was a luxury only the king could afford; younger brothers paid in different coin. If he said no, the silence would simply move to someone else—Nakul would offer, Sahadev would volunteer—and the outcome would be identical: a girl dragged from her father’s house to stand beside a stranger who already had three reasons to wake up sweating in the dark.

He closed his eyes. In the dark behind the lids he saw a chariot wheel spinning alone on a battlefield, the rim still burning. He saw himself reaching for it and finding no axle, no hub, only the endless turn of something that had once been part of a larger thing. The image made him dizzy.

When he opened his eyes Draupadi was watching him, her mouth a straight line. She did not blink. He understood the message: whatever you decide, the price will be mine to help collect. She had paid before; she would pay again. The thought made him nauseous.

Bheem cracked the knuckle of his thumb, a small sound like a twig snapping underfoot. The noise broke the spell. Yudhishthir reached for the candle, tilting it so the wax ran onto the parchment, sealing the smudged lotus beneath a clear, hard shell. The gesture was final, administrative: a document prepared for storage, damage contained.

Arjun felt the cold rise from the stone floor, climbing his calves, his thighs, settling finally in the hollow beneath his sternum. It was the exact temperature of river water at dawn, the temperature Ulupi had warned him meant the naga were watching. He wondered if Subhadra ever felt that chill, if she stood on palace balconies and sensed futures circling her ankles like cold current. He wondered whether she had a choice, and whether the lack of choice would taste different in her mouth than it did in his.

The candle flickered once more and went out. In the darkness Arjun heard his own voice, unfamiliar, already defeated: “I will need a new bowstring.”

The darkness after the candle felt absolute, like being lowered into a well. Arjun heard the rasp of his own breathing, too loud in the sudden black. Then a flint struck; Yudhishthir’s fingers shielded a new flame, and the room crept back in sepia tones.

Arjun pushed his chair away from the table. The legs scraped stone, a sound that made Nakul flinch.

“I have three wives,” he said. The words tasted flat, inadequate. “Three women who signed no treaty, who were told ‘this is the price of peace’ and paid it with their bodies. I will not ask a fourth.”

Bheem’s jaw worked. “The naga queen came to you with a bargain—”

“She came with a corpse,” Arjun cut in. “My corpse, if I had refused. Chitrangada’s father handed her the kingdom’s seal the same hour he handed her to me. Draupadi—” He stopped, throat closing. “Draupadi was the ante in a dice game before she was my wife. Don’t speak to me of bargains.”

Sahadev spoke, voice thin. “A princess is not a grain levy. If we take her like tax, we teach every other kingdom that daughters are currency. We become the thing we fled.”

Yudhishthir pinched the bridge of his nose, the way their mother used to when winter rations ran low. “Our people fled bondage at Hastinapur. They walk barefoot behind our ploughs because they believe we can keep them free. Freedom costs more than arrows.”

“Then take the cost from me,” Arjun said. “Send me to every court with a bow and a bag of gold. I will beg, barter, fight—anything but drag a girl from her bedroom at midnight.”

Draupadi’s laugh was soft, humourless. “You think battle is cleaner? You’ll kill strangers so you don’t have to inconvenience one virgin.”

The flame shivered; wax dripped on Yudhishthir’s thumb. He didn’t flinch. “I would rather explain one compromised girl to the bards than explain slavery to an entire generation. That is the arithmetic of kings.”

Arjun felt the words hit like mace-blows to the chest. He looked at his elder brother: the hollow cheeks, the eyes that hadn’t closed fully since the dice game. Responsibility had eaten the softness from him, leaving only bone and decree.

Still he shook his head. “Find another arithmetic.”

Bheem exhaled through his nose. “Name the groom, then. Nakul? Sahadev? Krishna will not forgive them. Balaram will break their knees before he lets the marriage stand. You are the single thread that can be pulled without unravelling the whole cloth.”

Silence answered him. Outside, a sentry’s spear clinked against stone; inside, the map waited, patient as debt.

Arjun’s palms opened, closed. He thought of Ulupi’s cool fingers sliding across his eyelids the night she taught him to see underwater. He thought of Chitrangada’s laugh when she beat him at sprinting, the sweat beading between her breasts catching sunlight like tiny mirrors. He thought of Draupadi humming while she oiled her hair, the sound travelling through their bedroom like a lullaby made of iron.

Three memories, three anchors. Adding a fourth felt like snapping the chain and letting everything drift.

He stood. “I need air.”

No one stopped him. The door groaned open; the corridor beyond swallowed him in torchlight that smelled of resin and old blood. He walked until the council chamber was a rectangle of dim gold behind him, then kept walking, boots loud against the flagstones, each step a refusal that felt increasingly useless.

The corridor outside the council chamber was colder than the room had been, the stone walls leeching heat from his skin as he passed. Arjun’s footsteps echoed, each one a small, hollow protest that no one heard. He passed a window slit where the night air pushed in, carrying the smell of the stables—horse sweat, hay, the sour tang of urine. It grounded him, briefly, in something other than the weight of what they had asked.

He kept walking, not toward the royal quarters but upward, following the narrow spiral that led to the parapet. The stairs were uneven, worn smooth in the center by generations of guards. His hand brushed the wall for balance; the mortar was crumbly, gritty under his fingertips. He emerged onto the roof and the wind hit him full in the face, carrying dust from the practice yards and the faint sweetness of marigolds left over from the evening offerings.

Below, the city was a scatter of lamps, each one a household that believed the Pandavas could keep them safe. He could almost hear Yudhishthir’s voice again: One compromised girl, or slavery for thousands. The sentence had the clean, brutal symmetry of an arrowhead. It would lodge deep and stay there.

He rested his forearms on the parapet, the stone cold enough to sting. His breath fogged in the night air, small clouds that dissolved before they rose shoulder-high. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked once, then thought better of it. The silence that followed felt accusatory.

Three wives. Three separate nights he had stood outside their doors before entering, each time wondering whether consent given under duress still counted as consent. Ulupi had solved it by pulling him into the river and kissing him while he drowned a little; Chitrangada by beating him at wrestling and then pinning his wrists above his head, her thighs sliding alongside his in a sweat-slick promise. Draupadi had simply looked up from her sewing and said, “Close the door, the lamp is flickering,” as if marriage were a fact of weather.

He tried to picture a fourth door. Behind it, a girl who had grown up safe in Krishna’s shadow, who maybe practiced archery in the mornings and teased her maids in the afternoons. He imagined her face changing when she learned why he had come—first confusion, then the slow collapse of trust. He saw himself reaching for her the way he might reach for a shield: because the alternative was letting the sword find bone.

His fingers tightened on the stone. A chip flaked away, sharp enough to cut. He watched a bead of blood well, dark against the pale dust on his skin. It was the first honest thing that had happened since the meeting began.

Footsteps sounded on the stair. He didn’t turn; the gait was familiar, light, deliberate. Draupadi stopped a pace behind him, close enough that her sari brushed his calf when the wind moved it. She didn’t speak immediately. Instead she placed something on the ledge beside his hand: a strip of new linen, clean and folded small.

“You’ll need that,” she said. Her voice was level, neither kind nor cruel. “The cut.”

He wrapped it without comment, the white cloth instantly speckled red. She stayed beside him, looking out at the same scatter of lamps. Her hair was loose, still smelling faintly of the sesame oil she used to keep it from tangling in sleep. He wanted to touch it, to anchor himself, but he kept both hands on the stone.

“I told them no,” he said.

“I know.”

“They’ll keep asking.”

“I know that too.”

He risked a glance. Her profile was sharp against the torchlight from the stairwell, the same angle that had once stopped poets mid-sentence. She was watching the city as if it were a dice board and she could already see the losing throw.

“I can’t go to her room like a tax collector,” he said. “I can’t pull her out of bed and say ‘here is your future, learn to love it.’”

Draupadi’s shoulder lifted, a small shrug that moved the air between them. “Then don’t go as a collector. Go as a thief. Steal her quickly, so she has no time to hate you until it’s already done.”

The words were practical, almost gentle. They horrified him more than shouting would have. He turned to face her fully, but she was already stepping back toward the stair.

“Wait—”

She paused, hand on the wall. Her eyes caught the torchlight, reflecting it like polished obsidian.

“If it were you,” he asked, “would you forgive the man who took you?”

She studied him for a long moment, long enough for the wind to lift her hair and let it fall again. “I already did,” she said, and disappeared down the spiral.

He stayed on the parapet until the lamps began to go out, one by one, households surrendering to sleep. When he finally descended, the blood on the linen had dried stiff. He tucked the strip into his belt like a reminder, or maybe a promise: that the next wound would be his to dress, not hers.

He found Krishna in the elephant stables, leaning against the flank of a pregnant cow. The animal’s belly swelled between them, hide twitching under the brush in Krishna’s hand. Arjun stopped in the doorway, the smell of hay and dung thick enough to taste. Krishna didn’t look up.

“You missed a spot,” Arjun said.

Krishna’s hand kept moving, long strokes that left dark stripes in the grey dust. “She’ll roll in mud five minutes after I leave. Cleanliness is temporary. So is exile, apparently.”

Arjun stepped inside. The cow shifted, ears flicking back; he laid a palm on her neck until the muscles relaxed. “They want me to marry your sister.”

“I know.”

“They want me to steal her, actually. Like a sack of grain.”

Krishna set the brush down. Hay clung to his fingers; he picked it off one blade at a time. “Balaram would refuse a formal proposal. He still quotes the treaty Duryodhan signed last winter, the one that promises Yadava spears to Hastinapur if war comes. A groom who arrives with hymns and gifts walks home empty-handed. A groom who arrives with arrows sometimes walks home with a bride.”

Arjun’s laugh came out hollow. “You make abduction sound reasonable.”

“It’s unreasonable,” Krishna said. “So is monsoon. Yet crops survive it.”

He moved to the next stall, where a colt nosed the rail. Krishna scratched beneath the forelock; the colt’s eyes half-closed in surrender. Arjun watched the easy rhythm, jealous of anything that could yield so simply.

“I already have three wives I barely understand,” he said. “I lie beside them calculating how many allies each kiss buys. I don’t want a fourth ledger entry.”

Krishna’s voice stayed mild. “Subhadra keeps her own accounts. She can outride most men in my guard and out-argue every priest in Dwarka. Last year she broke a minister’s nose when he suggested trading her to a Sindhu prince. Blood on the marble floor—looked like pomegranate seeds. Mother had the tiles scrubbed, but you can still see the stain if you know where to stand.”

The image lodged in Arjun’s throat: a girl with bruised knuckles, refusing to be currency. He felt an unexpected twist beneath his ribs, something between dread and recognition.

Krishna went on. “She dreams of archery at dawn, not palanquins at dusk. If you come singing hymns she’ll bar the door. If you come with thunder she might open it just to see what noise feels like.”

Arjun leaned his back against the stall, wood rough through his tunic. “You’re asking me to gamble her future on that maybe.”

“I’m asking you to gamble yours.” Krishna turned, eyes catching the lamplight. “You’re tired of being the blade other men wield. Steal her and the story becomes yours to tell. Write it badly, write it well—either way you stop being the weapon and start being the hand.”

Outside, a groom whistled; elephants shuffled, chains clinking. The cow beside them exhaled, warm breath brushing Arjun’s forearm. He thought of the linen strip in his belt, the dried blood flaking off like old paint.

“Dress as a sanyasi,” Krishna said. “Live on Raivata mountain. Watch her come and go. When the moment cracks open, drive through it. Don’t hesitate. Hesitation is what turns abduction into assault.”

Arjun’s stomach tightened. “And if she hates me forever?”

Krishna picked up the brush again, offered it handle-first. “Then you spend the rest of your life earning the right to be forgiven. Some debts are worth incurring.”

He took the brush, bristles soft against his palm. The colt nickered, nosing for more touch. Arjun ran a stroke down the sleek neck, feeling the animal’s pulse thrum under skin. Temporary, Krishna had said. Everything clean eventually dirties.

He set the brush on the rail. “I leave at dawn.”

Krishna nodded, already returning to the cow, hand moving in steady circles. Arjun walked out into the night, the smell of hay clinging to his clothes like a promise, or a sentence—he couldn’t yet tell which.

Krishna’s fingers stilled on the cow’s flank. The lamplight caught the edge of his smile, small and sharp. “There’s a word for it in the old texts—rakshasa vivah. The groom takes the bride by force, carries her across boundaries, makes her his before anyone can object. Not rape. Not theft. A claim shouted louder than refusal.”

Arjun’s jaw tightened. “A claim she never asked to hear.”

“True,” Krishna said. “But Balaram listens only to drums, not flutes. If you arrive with priests and dowry lists he’ll bar the gates. If you arrive with thunder he’ll have to decide whether to call it war or wedding.”

He stepped closer, voice dropping. “Do it right and the story becomes legend. Do it wrong and it’s just another crime. The difference is timing—and how you hold her afterward.”

Arjun looked down at his own hands, calloused from years of bowstrings. “I don’t want to hold her like a prisoner.”

“Then learn the shape of her days.” Krishna reached into the feed bin, drew out a rough-spun cloth bundle. He unfolded it: saffron robe, wooden staff, a begging bowl chipped at the rim. “Raivata mountain overlooks the road she takes to the dawn temple. Stand among the pines with your face covered in ash. Watch her laugh with the maids, argue with the guards, practice archery until her shoulders burn. When you finally step onto her path you won’t be a stranger—you’ll be the next thing she’s already curious about.”

Arjun took the robe; the fabric was coarse enough to scrape skin. “And if she never looks my way?”

“Then you come home empty-handed, but at least you came as a man who asked first with his eyes.” Krishna’s tone softened. “The exile taught you to survive. This will teach you to want something that isn’t handed to you.”

He lifted the staff, testing its weight. “How long?”

“Festival of Ashwin. Crowds thick enough to hide a chariot. She’ll ride alone for three bow-lengths between temple and palace—custom says the gods protect virgins on holy days. Guards hang back, superstitious. That’s your window.” Krishna traced a line in the dust: a narrow corridor between two stone markers. “Take her here. Drive east. By the time Balaram’s cavalry saddles up you’ll be across the Yamuna.”

Arjun pictured it: the sudden grip, her body stiff with shock, the chariot leaping forward while festival music drowned her first scream. His stomach lurched. “She’ll hate me.”

“Maybe,” Krishna said. “But hate is closer to love than indifference. Both burn. Both demand an answer.”

He folded the robe again, hands moving with priest-like precision. “Remember this: once she’s in your chariot she stops being Balaram’s sister and becomes your responsibility. Feed her, shield her, listen when she curses you. Let her rage fill the miles until it empties out. What’s left might be curiosity. Curiosity can become choice.”

Arjun slung the bundle over his shoulder; it weighed less than a quiver yet felt heavier than any armour. “You make it sound simple.”

“It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do,” Krishna said. “That’s why it has to be you.”

They walked out together into the yard. The moon had climbed, silvering the elephant chains. Krishna stopped at the gate. “One more thing. When you lift her into the chariot, touch her like you would a bow—firm, reverent, ready to adjust your grip the moment she trembles.”

Arjun nodded, the image settling into muscle memory. He turned toward the guest quarters, footsteps quiet on the packed earth. Behind him the cow lowed softly, a sound almost like warning, almost like blessing. He didn’t look back.

The robe chafed his collarbones raw the first day, sweat turning the coarse threads into saw-grass. He walked south-east, keeping off the king’s road, sleeping in mango groves where the fruit bats squeaked overhead. Every dawn he rehearsed the lie: I am a seeker, nameless, celibate. The words tasted like rust. He hid Gandiva in a hollow pipal, wrapped in oil-cloth, the bow’s curve memorised against his ribs so thoroughly its absence felt like missing bone.

Raivata rose abruptly from the coastal plain, a hump-backed ridge thick with nagakesara trees. He climbed at dusk, found a rock overhang that gave him the city spread below—white walls, blue domes, the harbour jammed with lateen-rigged dhows. Dwarka looked smaller than he had imagined, bright as a dropped necklace. He could cover the distance in a fast chariot before the second conch blew for night watch. That thought sat in his throat like undigested meat.

He built no fire the first nights, drank from a rivulet, ate only fallen fruit. The vow of silence was easy; no one spoke to him anyway. Pilgrims passed on the switch-back path—merchants’ wives wheezing up to the sunrise temple, boys leading goats for sacrifice. They glanced at the tall sanyasi with ash-smeared face, then away, embarrassed by their own breathlessness. He learned the rhythm: bells at dawn, drums at dusk, fishermen’s lanterns winking on the black water far below.

On the fourth morning she appeared. He had stationed himself behind a screen of wild jasmine where the path widened. A procession wound uphill—maids with copper water-pots, guards in fish-scale armour, a girl on a red mare picking her way through potholes. She wore riding leathers the colour of river-sand, hair braided tight, one loose strand stuck to her cheek by sweat. She laughed at something a companion shouted, the sound carrying sharp as an arrow-fletch slicing air. He forgot to breathe. The mare shied at a monkey; she steadied it with thighs he could see flex even from twenty paces. Her eyes swept the trees, passed over him, returned. For a heartbeat their gazes locked. He felt the glance like pressure on a bruise.

After that he watched systematically. She came every other day—sometimes to shoot at straw targets the priests set behind the temple, sometimes to argue taxation with port officials who met her on the shaded terrace. Once she broke a bowstring, cursed, borrowed the guard captain’s weapon and out-shot him anyway. Arjun’s fingers twitched for Gandiva. He could have placed three shafts through the centre knot before her fourth. Pride and something darker wrestled in his chest.

Nights he practised with the chariot he had hidden in a bamboo thicket: greased axles, horses fed on stolen gram, the reins shortened for one-handed control. He timed the run—thirty breaths from grove to road, forty more to the river ford where pursuit would lose his wheel-tracks. He drew the route in dirt, erased it with his heel, drew it again. Each repetition felt like signing a confession.

The festival approached. Banners of turmeric-yellow appeared on the city walls. He heard talk of processions, of virgins carrying fire-pots, of Balaram’s order that guards keep respectful distance on the sacred stretch. Krishna’s map had been exact. Arjun lay on his back counting stars, robe bunched at his waist, skin itching everywhere it touched the wool. He thought of Draupadi’s cool hands, of Ulupi’s river-scented hair, of Chitrangada’s mouth on his shoulder the night he left. Their faces blurred, replaced by the girl on the red mare who had looked straight at him and not seen a prince, not yet a criminal, only a man in saffron pretending not to stare. The hypocrisy was no longer just cloth; it had sunk through pores, become blood. Tomorrow he would trade the robe for armour, the begging bowl for reins. The idea felt less like strategy than like stepping off a cliff already crumbling under his toes.

The procession wound up the mountain like a bright snake, drums beating against the stone path. He stood behind the jasmine screen, ash thick on his face, and watched them come.

She rode at the center, not sidesaddle but astride, one hand on the reins, the other free to gesture as she spoke. Her mare was red, the color of new blood, and she sat it as if grown from the same muscle. Sunlight caught on the sweat at her throat, slid down the bare forearm that tightened the rein. She laughed—open-mouthed, head thrown back—and the sound carried straight to his chest, a physical blow.

Arjun felt his body recognize her before his mind caught up: the angle of her spine, the way her calves hugged the horse, the economy of motion when she leaned to accept a garland from a child. Every motion announced I know where I am and why. He had seen that same certainty in mirror-polish before battle, had felt it in his own wrists when he drew Gandiva. He had not expected to meet it in a woman.

Her companions were three—two girls and a boy still beardless—yet she dominated the space without raising her voice. When the boy fumbled the water-skin she took it, drank, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, passed it back. No reproach, no fuss. The girls laughed again, but their eyes kept returning to her, checking for approval. She gave it with a tilt of her head, small, sufficient.

A guard stumbled on loose gravel; metal clanged. Her gaze flicked sideways, catalogued, dismissed. For an instant the smile dropped and he saw the colder architecture underneath: calculation, assessment, the mind that could run tax ledgers while arrows flew. Then the smile returned, softer, aimed at something the others couldn’t see. Arjun’s breath snagged. He wanted that look turned on him, wanted to be the thing that softened the steel.

The mare snorted, shied at a monkey dropping from a branch. Subhadra’s thighs clamped, weight shifted, hands low on the neck. The animal steadied instantly. The movement bared the line of her hip where the riding drape pulled tight. He stared, pulse thick in his throat, and felt the first honest tug of desire—not the abstract duty to marry, but the specific want to put his palm there, to feel the heat and muscle that controlled half a ton of horse with a shift of balance.

She spoke; he could not catch the words, only the cadence—question, answer, laughter again. One girl blushed crimson. Subhadra leaned in, murmured something that made the blush deepen, then straightened, triumphant. Teasing, testing, teaching. He remembered Krishna’s warning: she argues with ministers. Watching her now he understood the flavor of those arguments—sharp, playful, edged enough to draw blood if you leaned the wrong way.

The procession passed within ten arm-lengths. Wind carried her scent: horse, sweat, something citrus crushed between fingers. He inhaled without meaning to, locked it behind the bone cage of his ribs. A twig snapped under his foot; the sound was tiny, swallowed by drums. Still her eyes cut to the trees, swept the shadows. He froze, breath stopped. For three heartbeats she looked straight at the place where he stood, ash-smeared, invisible. He felt seen, skinned, counted. Then the curve of the path took her beyond sight and the world restarted.

His hands were shaking. He uncurled them slowly, found crescent moons carved by his own nails. The plan had been a diagram—kingdom, alliance, window of opportunity. Now it had a mouth that laughed, legs that gripped a horse, eyes that searched shadows for threats. He could still feel the echo of her gaze, the weight of a future balanced on the moment he would step from these trees and close the space between them forever.

He returned before dawn the next day, this time without the robe. A dhoti the colour of river mud, hair un-oiled, bow left wrapped in pipal bark. He needed his hands free to climb the compound wall behind the archery yard. The stone was warm from yesterday’s sun; he pressed his chest to it and watched.

She shot barefoot, hair braided and looped inside itself so the end would not brush the string. Twenty yards, thirty, forty. She loosed six arrows, walked to the target, pulled, walked back, nocked again. No pause for praise, no glance at the servant fanning flies with a palm leaf. The rhythm was military, but her shoulders rotated with the loose grace he associated with dancers. At full draw her front shoulder never hunched; the draw hand kissed the same spot on her jaw each time. He counted breaths: release on the exhale, stillness, then the small click of the bow settling back against her thigh. She could have been teaching a class of one.

A minister arrived—grey beard, ledger under his arm. Arjun recognised the seal on the wooden case: port customs. The man began speaking before he reached her, voice pitched high with complaint. Subhadra listened, arrow still nocked, and when the tirade ended she rotated the bow so the point rested against the minister’s chest, not touching, just enough pressure to indent the cotton. She spoke softly; he could not hear, but he saw the official’s throat bob. She finished, lowered the arrow, returned to the mark. The minister stood another moment, then backed away, bowing so low his forehead almost brushed the dust. The ledger stayed under his arm, unopened. She shot the remaining quiver without looking up.

He found himself smiling—an involuntary twitch of muscle that felt foreign after days of self-loathing. The smile frightened him more than the wall, more than the abduction plan. Admiration was a luxury he could not carry across the river.

Two afternoons later he watched from the mango terraces overlooking the palace garden. She walked with Krishna’s wife Rukmini, both women trailing children like bright geese. Subhadra lifted a toddler onto her hip, the motion economical, then stooped to retrieve a wooden elephant without breaking stride. When the child tugged her braid she dipped her head so he could reach the garland of jasmine pinned there. The gesture was offered and withdrawn in the same breath, private, almost shy. Arjun felt the scene lodge under his ribs like an arrowhead. He had expected pride, vanity, maybe cruelty; instead he kept finding these small efficiencies of kindness that required no audience.

That night he sat inside the bamboo thicket and restrung Gandiva. The bow sighed, recognising his pulse. He told himself the weapon was only insurance—if Balaram’s riders overtook them, he would need to fight. But the lie collapsed under its own weight. He was preparing to steal a woman who shot straighter than most men he knew, who quieted bureaucrats with a tilt of an arrow, who carried children as naturally as quivers. The thought should have cooled desire; instead it flared hotter, a coal he carried closer to skin each day.

On the seventh morning the festival banners went up: saffron and green, garlands of marigold strung between street poles. He watched workmen build a wooden platform at the crossroads, heard conches rehearse their long call. Time narrowing to a window the width of a chariot axle. He returned to Raivata at dusk, found the horses restless from too much grain and not enough work. He led them in circles until their breath steamed, then checked each hoof for stones. The routine steadied his hands; the tremor that had started the day she looked into the trees was almost gone.

Later, lying on his back under the nagakesara branches, he let the memory of her archery replay behind closed lids: the moment the string left her fingers, the small recoil traveling through shoulder to hip to heel. He imagined placing his palm there, at the pivot point, feeling the vibration of release. The fantasy was precise, mechanical, and therefore more dangerous than any romantic gloss. He wanted to know how her body knew what it knew. He wanted to watch her shoot until the motion became language he could read. The wanting felt like hunger, like thirst, like every base appetite he had trained himself to discipline. It also felt inevitable.

He turned onto his side, pressed his face to the earth, and inhaled the sour smell of leaf-rot. The plan was still the plan: take her at the turn of the road, drive hard for the ford, present her to his brothers as treaty made flesh. Nothing had changed except the texture of his reluctance, now threaded with sharp bright fibres of admiration that pricked whenever he moved. He would carry that too. He would carry everything.

He woke before the stars thinned, the sky a bruised purple above the grove. The chariot stood where he had left it, axle-deep in last year’s leaves, its wicker sides smelling of resin and mouse nests. He ran his palm along the rail and felt splinters catch in skin already raw from seven nights of watching her. One horse nickered, recognizing the weight of a man who had fed it stolen gram. He spoke softly, nonsense words that kept his voice from cracking.

The wheels needed grease. He worked by feel, fingers dipping into the clay pot, spreading the rank sheep-fat over iron rims. Each turn of the hub sounded like a joint being forced back into socket. He thought of her shoulder rotating at full draw, the silent click when the bow settled. The same mechanics, the same inevitable motion. Grease on his knuckles looked black in the dark; he wiped it across his dhoti and left a smear that would stay there for days, a mark no bath would lift.

When the yoke was secured he unwrapped Gandiva from its bark sheath. The bow was warm, alive, its belly cupping his left hand like an animal that had waited patiently for its master. He strung it in one motion, felt the cord bite the calluses he had earned watching her shoot. A quiver held thirty shafts; he counted them twice, then again, as if arithmetic could postpone dawn. Each arrow had been fletched with heron feathers plucked beside the Saraswati, white as the wrap she wore to the river. He slid one free, sighted along the shaft, and saw only the line of her jaw when she laughed at the boy’s joke. The arrow trembled. He slid it back.

He should pray. Instead he squatted on his heels and listened to the forest breathe around him: nightjars, leaf-drip, the slow chew of a deer working cud. Prayer would require words, and words would require naming what he was about to do. He had no name for it yet; only the taste of iron at the back of his tongue and the pulse beating in his groin whenever he replayed the moment her thighs gripped the mare. Desire and dread had braided so tightly he could no longer tell which strand pulled harder.

A conch sounded from the city, low, three notes. The first priests waking, lighting lamps, unrolling bolts of silk that would dress the chariot of Subhadra’s brother when he rode at sunrise. Arjun pictured her waking in the palace: a servant bringing warm water, jasmine oil for her hair, the brief, private stretch she allowed herself before the day’s armor of courtesy snapped shut. He had watched that stretch through a lattice of leaves, the arch of her back lifting the cotton wrap away from skin filmed with sleep-sweat. The memory felt stolen, already criminal.

He stood, wiped palms against each other, felt grit embed under nails. The chariot was ready; the horses shifted, sensing mileage ahead. He could still ride back to Indraprastha alone, tell Yudhishthir the Yadavas refused, let Balaram keep his sister and the Pandavas keep their conscience. The thought lasted the length of a heartbeat, then collapsed under the weight of every village hearth his brothers hoped to free from Hastinapur’s tax collectors. Freedom always demanded a body; today it demanded hers.

He climbed into the car, took the reins, and spoke once to the horses, voice flat: “Walk.” They moved, hooves muffled by leaves, and the grove swallowed them. Behind him the sky had begun to pale, color bleeding up from the eastern ridge. Ahead, the road curved toward the temple where she would bow, offer flowers, laugh with her companions. He would meet her at that bend, take her before the sun cleared the trees, before she had time to finish her prayer. The plan was simple, mechanical, inevitable—like releasing the string and watching the arrow fly. He felt the recoil already traveling through his chest, the vibration that would not stop until it had carried her halfway across the world.

The festival day was a riot of colour and sound. Subhadra, returning from her prayers at the temple, was momentarily separated from her guards and companions in the throng. This was the moment Krishna had told him to wait for, the brief window of opportunity.

Arjun moved.

He came in from behind the portable shrine of the Ashvins, shoulder-checking a drummer who spun away without missing his beat. The crowd was thick enough to hide him until the last three paces; then he was on her, left arm hooking her waist, right palm sealing over her mouth exactly as he had rehearsed on saplings in the dark. Her spine snapped straight against his chest—he felt the gasp she never finished, warm air dampening his skin.

She bit him. Incisors sank into the meat of his palm, pain bright and clean. He did not let go. Instead he lifted, her feet clearing the dust, and pivoted toward the alley that stank of marigold stems and crushed sugarcane. A woman screamed—someone’s aunt, maybe—but the drums swallowed it. He kept walking, her weight negligible, the heat of her back branding his ribs.

The chariot waited behind the silk merchants’ stalls, horses already restless from the roar of conches. He shoved her onto the plank floor, followed in the same motion, and slapped reins. Wheels lurched over ruts; a basket of turmeric exploded under the right wheel, yellow powder fountaining across white robes. He did not look back to see whose.

Only when the city gate was a gaping mouth behind them did he risk easing his hand from her mouth. She did not scream. She rolled to her knees, hair half-undone, and stared at him with eyes the colour of storm water. Her lower lip trembled once—anger, not fear—then stilled. The silence was louder than the festival they had left.

He expected curses, spitting, nails. Instead she spoke one word, flat, almost conversational: “Why.”

He had no answer that would fit between them in that small space. He tasted blood where she had broken skin; the horses thundered on, iron shoes sparking against flinty road. Dust coated her forearms like ochre paint. She looked at his bow propped beside the driver’s box, then at his face, and he saw her catalogue distances: the reach, the angle, the strength required to take the weapon before he stopped her. She was measuring, not pleading.

He should say something—about kingdoms, taxes, Balaram’s fondness for Duryodhana—but the phrases felt obscene in the open air with her sitting there. So he said nothing, only flicked the reins again, urging more speed. Her gaze stayed on him, unblinking, until the sun climbed high enough to burn the shadows from the chariot floor.

The horses settled into a rhythm that ate the miles. Arjun kept his eyes forward, but every nerve tracked the woman beside him. Subhadra’s breathing had steadied; she sat with her spine an inch from the rail, knees drawn up, palms braced on the plank as if ready to launch herself out. The wind snapped the end of her sari against his calf—wet from the river she had crossed that morning, the cloth leaving cool spots that dried almost instantly.

He could still feel the shape of her waist under his forearm, the inward curve just above the belt of her wrap. When he had clamped down he had felt the reflexive flex of her obliques, the small animal jerk that tried to fold her away from him. That reflex had stopped the instant her feet left the ground; she had gone still, conserving air, calculating. He had carried dead antelope that felt less disciplined.

She moved. Slowly, deliberate, she uncurled one leg until her heel touched the front board. The shift put her thigh parallel to his. Through two layers of cotton he felt the heat coming off her skin. She was testing whether he would flinch. He did not. The horses thundered on; the road narrowed to a ribbon between stands of sal.

His hand throbbed where she had bitten. He turned it palm-up on his knee. The crescent marks were deep, beaded red, already swelling. She watched him examine the damage, expression unreadable. Then she did something that stopped his breath: she leaned forward, spat the taste of his blood onto the straw at their feet, and sat back without wiping her mouth. The gesture was so precise it felt like punctuation.

A shout rose behind them—distant, maybe a cowherd, maybe pursuit. Arjun loosened the reins, let the team stretch. The chariot bounced over a ridge; for a moment they were airborne. When the wheels hit, her shoulder brushed his. Neither moved away. The contact was electric, accidental, and therefore more dangerous than the abduction itself. He felt her inhale, small, sharp, as if she too had registered the spark.

She spoke again, voice low enough he had to lean in. “You will have to tie me.”

He shook his head once. “No.”

“Then I will jump.”

He believed her. The road here ran above a gorge twenty man-heights deep. He flicked the reins, guiding the horses left, away from the drop. She noted the correction, filed it. Her mind was working in straight lines, the same way his did when he plotted windage and drop.

Arjun eased his grip on the rail, turned so his body angled toward her. If she lunged he could catch her wrist before she cleared the side. She read the repositioning and mirrored it, weight shifting onto the balls of her feet. They sat like two archers in adjoining lanes, each aware of the other’s draw length.

The sun climbed. Sweat gathered under his breastplate and ran down the groove of his spine. Her upper lip glistened; a strand of hair clung to her cheekbone. He wanted to brush it away, wanted the simple permission of skin on skin without strategy. The wanting felt like another mouth biting him.

She broke the stare first, letting her gaze drop to his hands on the reins. Calluses, knuckles swollen from years of bowstring. She studied them the way she had studied his weapon earlier, estimating poundage. Then she lifted her own hands, turned them palm-out: small, square, a thin white scar across the pad of the thumb. Archer’s hands. She flexed once, a silent declaration that whatever came next would cost them both.

The road curved west, toward the ford. Behind them the horizon stayed empty—no dust cloud, no clatter of cavalry. For now they were a single moving point on an open map. He felt the moment stretch, elastic, dangerous. If he spoke he might say her name, and saying it would acknowledge the heat between them, the impossible intimacy of coercion. So he kept quiet, let the horses decide the tempo, let the sun burn the bite mark deeper into his flesh while she sat close enough that her breath lifted the fine hairs on his forearm.

He hooked an arm under her knees, the other across her back, and lifted. She twisted, elbows driving into his collarbones, heels drumming against his thighs. The impact jarred the breath from him but he locked his arms, muscles straining against silk and skin. Three stumbling steps carried them behind the stall where the horses stamped, nostrils flaring at the scent of her panic. He shoved her over the rail like a sack of grain, her hip striking the plank with a dull thud. She rolled, hair whipping across her face, and came up on hands and knees. For an instant her eyes found his—wide, furious, luminous—and then he was in after her, landing in a crouch that rocked the car.

“Go,” he snapped. The reins were already in his fist; he slapped them across the team’s backs. They surged. The chariot lurched forward, wheels grinding over loose gravel, and her body slid with the motion, shoulder crashing into the side. She didn’t cry out. She scrambled for the rail, fingers clawing splintered wood, one knee braced to vault. He caught her around the waist, yanked her down hard enough that her spine hit his chest. She smelled of sandalwood and sweat and the crushed marigolds stuck to her soles.

Hooves pounded. The city gate rushed toward them, a rectangle of daylight shrinking as the guards hesitated—festival noise masking the abduction, confusion buying seconds. He felt her draw breath, knew she would scream the moment they cleared the arch. He shifted his grip, palm sealing again over her mouth, thumb and fingers digging into the hinge of her jaw. She bit down instantly, teeth slicing the same torn flesh. Blood pooled, metallic and warm, between their mouths. He didn’t flinch. He braced his feet wide, knees flexed against the chariot floor, letting the horses run.

Behind them a conch sounded, thin and frantic. Another answered. Shouts rose, disjointed, swallowed by distance and drumbeats. The road opened into the scrubland beyond the walls; acacia branches scraped the wheels. He risked a glance back—no pursuit yet, only the gate dwindling, a toy carved in wood. He eased the pressure on her mouth but kept his hand there, a warning. Her breath came fast through her nose, hot against his skin. She was trembling, fine tremors running from her jaw into his arm, but the struggle had paused. She was listening now, weighing the speed of the car, the drop of the terrain, the strength in the arm that held her.

He loosened the reins slightly, letting the horses stretch into a gallop that ate the miles. Dust billowed, coating their clothes, powdering her lashes white. She blinked rapidly. A strand of hair stuck to her cheek, dark against the dust. He wanted to smooth it away, wanted the simple permission of touch without strategy. The wanting felt like another mouth biting him. He kept both hands where they were—one on leather, one on flesh—because letting go meant risking her, and risking her meant explaining why he had taken her at all. The explanation could wait until the city was a smudge and the gorge was behind them.

The road curved west, toward the ford. Behind them the horizon stayed empty—no dust cloud, no clatter of cavalry. For now they were a single moving point on an open map. He felt the moment stretch, elastic, dangerous. If he spoke he might say her name, and saying it would acknowledge the heat between them, the impossible intimacy of coercion. So he kept quiet, let the horses decide the tempo, let the sun burn the bite mark deeper into his flesh while she sat close enough that her breath lifted the fine hairs on his forearm.

The horses settled into a long, steady gallop, their hooves drumming a rhythm that swallowed every other sound. Arjun waited until the walls of Dwarka had vanished behind a ridge of thorn scrub, then lifted his hand from her mouth. The skin came away sticky—his blood, her spit, the dust of the road. He expected a scream, a curse, the sharp edge of her nails across his face.

Instead she turned.

It was a slow pivot, shoulders first, spine uncoiling like a drawn bow. Her eyes found his and held. The pupils were blown wide, black eclipsing honey-brown, and in them he saw nothing that belonged to festival lights or temple bells. What lived there was older, colder, the look a warrior gives an enemy he has already killed in his mind. She did not blink. She did not speak. The silence between them became a third person in the car, heavier than armour.

He felt the blow in his sternum, a physical compression that forced air from his lungs. His hand hovered mid-air, fingers curled as if still cupping her jaw, and the absence of her skin seemed to burn worse than the bite. He dropped the reins into his left fist, wiped the blood on his thigh, tried to find words that would not sound like excuses. None came. The road unrolled ahead, empty, accusatory.

She shifted backward an inch, putting the width of a plank between them. The movement was deliberate, economical, the same way she had once stepped out of range on the archery yard when an opponent’s release felt off. Her knees came up, heels planted, ready to spring or kick. Every muscle announced that the next touch would cost him something visible.

Arjun forced himself to breathe. The air tasted of iron and horse sweat. He spoke anyway, voice rough. “We stop at sunset.”

She answered with the same silence, but her gaze flicked to the reins, measured the distance to the rail, returned to his face. The calculation was naked, unashamed. He saw her decide that the car was still too fast, the ground too hard; she would wait. The patience was more frightening than a scream.

A hawk turned overhead, shadow sliding across the chariot floor between them. When it passed, her eyes followed it for a heartbeat, then snapped back. In that flicker he saw the girl who had laughed on the temple steps, and the loss of her felt like a second abduction. He wanted to say her name—Subhadra—wanted to taste the syllables, offer them as payment. He kept his mouth shut; names were power, and he had taken enough.

The sun climbed higher, pressing sweat through the weave of his tunic. Dust stuck to the wet, forming a gritty second skin. Her throat moved—swallowing thirst, swallowing fury—but she gave no other sign. The only sound was the horses blowing, the creak of axles, the soft wet click of her tongue once when she tested the split in her lip.

He realized he was still braced for noise, for the explosion that would break the spell. It did not come. Hatred, he understood, could be quieter than love, and infinitely heavier. Each mile she did not speak laid another stone on his chest. By the time the ford appeared, a silver slash in the dry plain, he could barely keep his shoulders square under the weight of what she was not saying.

She turned her face toward the horizon, presenting him with her profile: straight nose, dusted cheek, the small proud lift of chin that told every passer-by she was a princess. The set of it told him she would rather die of thirst than ask him for water. He reached anyway, lifted the skin from the hook beside his knee, held it out without looking at her. The gesture felt like begging.

She ignored it. The leather bag hung between them, dripping a dark spot onto the boards, until he lowered it again. The rejection was clean, surgical. He felt the cut of it in places the bite had not reached.

Behind them, nothing moved on the road. Ahead, the land widened, anonymous. He understood that until she chose to break her silence, the journey would continue inside this bell of quiet, every heartbeat asking the question he had no right to answer: Who would he be when she finally spoke, and what would be left of her when she did?

The horses ran until their hides foamed white, but the quiet inside the car ran faster. Arjun kept the reins low, wrists locked, letting the lash of wind fill his ears because every other space was already occupied by her silence. She sat on the far edge, spine not touching the backrest, knees together, palms pressed between them as if she could squeeze warmth from her own bones. The road unrolled like a sentence he could not finish.

He had fought demons that screamed battle hymns, had stood under elephant charges that shook the earth, yet the absence of her voice scraped him raw. Each mile she did not speak was another layer of skin peeled away. He found himself counting hoofbeats, measuring distance by the number of times her shoulders lifted in small, controlled breaths. Forty-seven between the ford and the stand of acacia. Sixty-three from the acacia to the first outcrop of red stone. Numbers were safer than names.

At midday the sun pressed iron-hot against the bronze rim of the sky. He slowed the team to a trot, offered the waterskin a second time. She looked through him the way a blade looks through silk—clean, decisive, leaving nothing to snag on. He set the skin on the floor between them, a coward’s compromise, and felt the rejection anyway. The water sloshed once, then stilled, a tiny mirror reflecting the two of them: one thirsty, one adamant, both prisoners.

He spoke to the horses instead. “Easy, girl. Steady, boy.” The words tasted like gravel, but they were sound, and sound kept the hush from sharpening into a scream. Behind him he felt her shift, the barest rustle of cotton, and his pulse leapt like a bowstring after release. She was listening. The knowledge lodged under his ribs, painful, alive. He wanted to turn, to meet whatever lived in her eyes, but the road curved and he kept his gaze forward because courage had limits.

Dusk bled across the plain, turning dust to copper. He chose a bend in the river where reeds grew thick enough to hide the chariot and far enough from the trade route that hoofprints would fill with wind before dawn. The horses blew hard, grateful. He set the brake, looped the reins, and felt the silence follow him down onto the sand. Every motion felt staged, performed for an audience that refused applause.

He gathered dry sticks without looking at her. Each snap of wood cracked like a bone. When the fire caught, the flare painted her face in orange angles: cheekbones sharp, mouth set, eyes reflecting flame instead of feeling. She sat on a flat rock ten paces away, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, a fortress with no gate. He placed a date and a wedge of parched wheat beside her foot, then retreated to the water’s edge to wash the dust from his hands. When he glanced back, the food remained untouched, a small indictment.

Night poured in, thick as oil. He spread his blanket on the opposite side of the fire, not because he wanted sleep but because the ritual demanded it. She would not lie down; she watched the stars as if they might rearrange themselves into an answer. He kept his sword unsheathed beside him, not for protection against beasts but against the part of him that wanted to crawl across the sand and beg. The blade caught moonlight, a thin line of silver between what he had been and what he was becoming.

Hours passed measured in heartbeats. Eventually her head dipped once, twice, then rested against the rock. She did not curl up; even in exhaustion she held herself ready to spring. He watched the shiver run through her shoulders and felt it in his own marrow. He rose, lifted his cloak, took one step. Her eyes snapped open, twin coals. He stopped mid-stride, the wool hanging from his fist like a white flag. She did not speak, did not move, yet the message cracked across the space between them: come closer and lose what remains of your name.

He lowered the cloak, folded it, placed it on the sand beside the dead fire. Then he sat on it himself, back to her, letting the river’s murmur speak where he could not. The cold seeped through the wool into his hips, into his conscience. He listened to her breathing even out, listened to the night insects resume their small songs, and understood that until she chose to break the silence he would remain—warrior, prince, kidnapper—whatever she decided to call him when morning came.

The river muttered over stones, carrying away the day’s heat but none of the quiet that clung to them like wet cloth. Arjun unyoked the horses with hands that felt thick, foreign, as though borrowed from another man. Leather traces slipped, snapped back against his wrist; the sound cracked across the clearing and he felt her flinch without looking. She stood where the sand turned to grass, arms folded so tight the embroidery on her sleeves bit through the silk into her skin. Moonlight laid a stripe across her cheekbone, a scar of silver he had put there.

He kindled tinder from the pouch at his belt, striking steel against flint until sparks leapt. Each flash illuminated her face for an instant—set, remote, beautiful in the way a blade is beautiful when it is aimed at you—then let it vanish again into accusatory dark. The flame caught, crept, became a small sun between them. He crouched, feeding it twigs, all too aware of her gaze drilling the back of his neck. The hair there rose, animal, ready for the axe.

When the fire steadied he risked a glance. She had not moved. Sand dusted the hem of her crimson skirt, a color that had looked festive in Dwarka and now looked like fresh blood against the pale ground. He swallowed, tasted ash. “There’s water,” he said, voice scraping out after miles of silence. He gestured toward the skin hanging from the chariot rail. The words hung, stupid, unnecessary; she could see it as well as he.

She answered by turning her shoulder, a slow, deliberate rotation that presented him with the line of her straight back. The rejection was surgical. He felt the cut travel through his chest, parting skin, finding heart. A warrior learned to take blows, but no training taught how to stand still while someone refused the simple mercy of acknowledgment. He busied himself with the horses, checking hooves for stones, fingers trembling so badly he dropped the pick twice. Each metallic clink echoed like a gong.

Night insects began their sawing song. He spread his blanket, then hers—woven wool finer than his, loot from the palace he had stolen her from—placing them on opposite sides of the fire because distance seemed the only courtesy left. When he straightened she was watching again, eyes reflecting flame so that twin fires seemed to burn inside her skull. He felt them consume the last scraps of the man he had thought himself: honorable, necessary, forgivable. Under that gaze the stories he had carried—duty, kingdom, alliance—shriveled to tinder and blew away.

He sat, drew his dagger, began trimming a willow branch for a spit, though they had no meat. The blade slid along green wood, releasing sap that smelled like new beginnings; the irony made him nauseous. Across from him she lowered herself onto the rock, motion fluid yet guarded, every muscle ready to spring. The firelight found the scrape along her jaw where his knuckles had grazed her during the seizure. A bruise bloomed beneath it, purple as royal dye. He had marked her in ways no ceremony could sanctify.

Time passed measured in pops of resin. Once, a jackal cried somewhere upriver; the horses shifted, blew. He looked at her automatically, the way one checks companions in the dark, and found her eyes already on him. The contact lasted less than a heartbeat yet carried entire epics of accusation. He broke first, stared into the flames, felt the heat glaze his own vision until the world blurred orange. When it cleared she was studying the stars, chin lifted, exposing the long curve of her throat. He remembered how it had felt under his palm—warm, alive, trusting nothing—and the memory sickened him.

At last he lay back, sword within reach, blanket pulled to his waist. Sleep was impossible; honor lay in pieces around him like shards of a dropped blade, each edge catching firelight. He listened to her breathing even out, slow, deliberate, the sound of someone forcing calm. The river kept speaking its foreign language, carrying away blood and sweat and maybe, someday, guilt. But not tonight. Tonight the silence remained, patient, absolute, pressing him against the sand while her eyes—open, unblinking—finished the work his hands had begun.

Dawn came the color of old bruises, sky mottled purple and yellow. Arjun rose first, muscles stiff from the ground’s cold arithmetic of stones. He did not look at her; he could feel her awake without seeing, the way one feels an arrow still vibrating in the target. He walked to the chariot, lifted the small wicker basket that held their travel rations: dried figs dark as blood, a clay jar of sesame cakes, the waterskin sloshing half-full. His hand shook so badly the figs rattled against each other like dice in a gambler’s cup.

He circled the dead fire, stopped two arm-lengths away—close enough to offer, far enough not to tower. Knees bent, he set the food on a flat stone between them the way a boy leaves bait for a wounded bird. The waterskin he placed upright, stopper clean, the woven strap coiled like a snake. Words backed up behind his teeth: her name, an apology, a plea for her to drink before the sun climbed higher. None escaped. He straightened, retreated one step, and waited.

She lifted her head. The motion was slow, deliberate, the way a warrior draws a blade when seconds matter. Her eyes—Krishna’s eyes, black and bright and merciless—found his. In them he saw the street in Dwarka where he had grabbed her, the scream she never voiced, the life she would never reclaim. The loathing was absolute, a wall without gate or hinge. It struck him in the chest harder than Bheem’s mace ever had; he actually swayed, breath catching as if ribs had caved inward.

Her chin tilted a fraction. The small, sharp shake that followed cracked across the clearing louder than any slap. No. Not even that syllable; just the pivot of her neck, the swing of loosened hair across her cheek, the finality of a door slammed on a burning house. Then she turned away, presenting him again with the straight line of her spine, the crimson skirt dulled now with dust and river damp. The refusal was complete, surgical, excising him from the category of creatures worthy of sustenance.

The figs sat glistening, split sides weeping sugar. He stared at them, idiot, seeing instead the wedding sweets that would never be offered in Balaram’s hall, the honeyed yogurt Subhadra would never taste from her mother’s hand. He had stolen more than a woman; he had stolen every morsel of her future, and she would rather starve than let him replace even one crumb. The knowledge tasted of iron and ash.

His knees buckled; he sank onto his heels, palms open on his thighs, warrior’s hands that had held Gandiva and now held nothing. The river muttered behind him, carrying away the dew, the smoke of dead fires, the piss of horses—everything but this moment. A breeze lifted her hair; he caught the faint scent of jasmine oil from the morning before her world ended, and it speared him cleaner than any arrowhead.

Minutes passed, measured in the slow thud of his heart. Eventually he reached out, repacked the uneaten fruit, stoppered the untouched water. Each motion felt like dressing a corpse. When he stood, the sun had scaled the sky high enough to brand the sand white. He looked at her one last time—shoulders squared, chin lifted, waiting for whatever came next—and understood that until she decided to live, he would remain the thing that had killed her, walking and breathing and hating itself under the same unforgiving sky.

The moon climbed, a thin blade slicing through black silk. Its light poured over the river, turning every ripple to molten silver, and over her shoulders where she sat knees-drawn on the sand. Arjun watched from the shadow of the chariot wheel, cloak bunched in his fists. Wool scratched his palms; he imagined it around her, imagined her flinging it back at him, and the picture froze his arms.

Her teeth never clicked—she would die before she let them—but he saw the tremor ride the line of her spine, small violent quakes that jerked the gold embroidery at her cuff. Each shiver was an accusation: you did this. He counted them the way he once counted enemy dead, marking sins he could not bury.

He rose at last, soundless, and moved wide around the fire’s corpse so she would not feel his shadow cross her. The horses lifted their heads, blowing steam. He stroked the nearest neck more for his own steadiness than theirs, fingers burrowing into mane while his gaze stayed locked on her back. If she heard his step she gave no sign; she had learned to survive inside stillness.

The cloak stayed in his hand, growing heavy as wet hide. He pictured draping it anyway, pictured her twisting free, the cloth falling between them like a surrender flag she would never pick up. Pride was her only garment now, and he had shredded everything else. He could not force warmth on her the way he had forced her into the chariot; the second violence would be smaller yet somehow worse.

A wind came down the river, carrying spray that needled his cheeks. She shifted, hugging herself tighter, and for the first time he noticed the thinness of her sleeves—silk woven for palace evenings, not for nights on bare earth. The fabric clung, translucent, outlining the curve of her arm where gooseflesh rose in tiny peaks. He tasted iron; he had bitten the inside of his cheek hard enough to bleed.

He lowered himself to one knee ten paces behind her, close enough to share the windbreak of his body, far enough that she could ignore him. Sand soaked through the knee of his dhoti, cold grit against bone. Duty, kingdom, alliance—words that had once rung like steel on steel—now lay in his mouth like river stones, smooth, useless, choking.

Hours passed measured in heartbeats. The moon slid lower, glazing her hair to blue-black metal. A single strand escaped her braid, lifting in the breeze; it quivered, beckoning, and he curled his fingers into his palm to keep from touching. That strand was the distance between them: visible, delicate, impossible.

At last her head dipped, jerked up, dipped again—exhaustion overruling pride. He waited until her shoulders sagged before he moved. One step, two, until he stood directly behind her. He spread the cloak slowly, letting it hang between them like a curtain, then lowered it until it hovered an inch above her skin. If she rejected it now it would fall to the ground and he would walk away.

She did not stir. He eased the wool forward until it brushed her nape; she shuddered, a full-body ripple that shot heat through him, but she did not fling it off. He settled the cloak around her shoulders, fingers grazing the outermost layer of silk, nothing more. Warmth enclosed her; the tremor quieted. She drew the edges together with one hand, still staring at the river, still refusing to look at him.

Arjun retreated three paces, sank cross-legged, and kept watch while the moon thinned to a scar. He was no longer hero, prince, or even man—only a sentinel carved from guilt, guarding the woman he had frozen and thawed in the same night. The river kept speaking, washing nothing clean.