My blood went to ice and then to steam so quickly my skin could not decide which way to burn.
My arms trembled, my fingers dug into the wood of the chair until my nails ached.
I wanted to leap across the space, wrap my hands around his throat, and force the words back into the pit where he had stored them.
I had not known love could be that—that clean fury, that bright desire to unmake a man for speaking sacrilege. Mother—my mother, offered like a coin in the market under the guise of generosity.
'Is this what a son feels for his mother?' Some older part of myself asked. 'Or have I lost my wits?'
I looked at Jayak. He was still as the pillar beside him, eyes shut, a strange smile hiding in the corner of his mouth like a knife behind a curtain.
'Why does he not move? Why not pounce and drag Indivara by the ankle to the courtyard?' I wondered in disbelief.
"Indivara, that's enough!" A voice thundered, not Mother's.
The room flinched.
It was Pranvi. She was standing now, chair edged back with a sound like a warning.
"Indivara," she said, voice ringing off stone, "you have trespassed a line that shall lead to your peril. Retract what you said, and your family might be pardoned. You, on the other hand, are certain to die by my hands!"
I had seen her angry, I had seen her relentless, but I had not seen her like that.
With flared nostrils and eyes full of rage, she looked like a goddess who was about to unleash her wrath upon the freshly tainted grounds of that sacred hall.
My instinct was to stand and command Jayak to seize Indivara, carrying out the only justice that fit the shape of his crime.
That thought would not have occurred to me a week ago. But the storm had already set up its banners inside my ribs.
I pushed to stand...
Suddenly, Mother's fingers closed around my elbow. When I turned, she was smiling—a small, steady thing that had nothing to do with Indivara or the hall and everything to do with the boy she refused to let drown.
She was not enraged; she was not ordering Jayak to slit a throat. Instead, she was stopping me.
"Why…" I managed, helpless, as shame and rage shoved each other inside my mouth.
"It's all right, my son," she said aloud and kissed my forehead in front of them all as if the hall were a cradle. "Your mother shall always protect you."
"I accept your condition, Nayaka Indivara," she said without turning her gaze away from me.
I was perplexed, and my brain completely shut down.
For a second, I could not hear. The world had shifted a stone beneath my foot, and I was stepping into a space where there was no floor.
My father had loved her. She had loved him. I had seen it in their glances over bread, in the way she smoothed the edges of his mail before he rode out, in the way he held her hand like a thing he feared might shatter with the slightest bit of negligence.
Then, why?
Was the seat so indispensable that she would place herself in a snake's mouth and call it strategy?
I could not make my head obey the logic, if logic there was.
"Mother, what is this?" Pranvi demanded, her infuriated gaze now directed at Mother. "How can you accept such unfair conditions? He is a vulture, trying to pick us clean."
"Preposterous!" Vatsal roared, finding the easy path between silence and rage. "The dog has gone insane! I shall put it down at once."
He drew his sword; light crawled along its length.
Indivara stood motionless, smiling with the serenity of a man who had already eaten and was now considering dessert.
The other sabhasad on his side unsheathed their blades with faces that stank of lust...for blood, not battle—different things, always.
"Enough, Vatsal!" Mother thundered. Her voice was cold water down the spine of the room. "I shall not forgive anyone who taints the Great Hall with meaningless blood."
For the first time since I entered the hall, I saw fear. It slid through the eyes of the men clustered behind Indivara like serpents in a basket. Their swords hovered, uncertain whether to be ornaments or instruments.
Vatsal hesitated but sheathed with a disgusted grunt, and the others, watching him more than they watched us, followed like hounds.
Indivara's laughter rasped from his belly, harsh as a pig's grunt. "That's right, my lady, or should I say, my dear?"
The men around him snorted and chortled until their mirth slapped the stone and echoed through the manor like insult made music.
"Now that we have reached a consensus," Mother said as if there were not laughter crawling over the walls, "I ask you sabhasad, to pledge your loyalty to my son, Amogh Ashanra, as the fourth Samanta of the janapada of Aranyavarta."
I turned my gaze toward them. Jayant and Vatsal did not wait for anyone's permission. They went to their knees, raised their swords, and said as one,
"We pledge our eternal loyalty to Samanta Amogh Ashanra, son of Prathiraj Ashanra, of the Kula of Ashanra."
The rest followed—slower, unlike men who were kneeling before their future lord. Even Indivara bent, but the sight made my teeth ache.
Mother nudged me slightly, as if she were signaling for me to stand up.
I rose.
A hall full of men on their knees. The sight should have filled me with something like triumph. Instead, it filled me with a wet, heavy dread like storm-soaked wool.
'Are these the vultures for whom my father laid down his life?' I thought. 'Am I to be thrown to the same winds, manipulated by demons for the rest of my reign? Will I ever deliver justice to my people if I cannot muster the courage to deliver it to myself...to my mother?'
Mother and Pranvi stood and bowed to me.
"Now then, my son… my lord," Mother said, her face unreadable, her expression still steel, "to mark the dawn of this new era, you must pass at least a single law right this instant. Your retainers await your decision."
'My first law. The first stone set would dictate the shape of the house built on it.'
I closed my eyes, and the hall rearranged itself into memories—the courtyard where Pranvi watched from behind a screen when she was forbidden the sword, the laughter buried under silence when they asked her to put it down.
'What do you hold most dear?' my heart asked me. The answer came not like a thought, but a breath.
"Pranvi Ashanra, come forth!"