She looked up, eyes filled with bewilderment as if searching for my intentions, but her feet knew the path. She circled the high table, stood a few paces away, and lowered to one knee.
The sabhasad traded glances like cards.
'This janapada has broken my sister once,' I thought. 'It will not do so again—not under my rule.'
I gestured. A maid stepped forward, bearing a sword on both palms. I had asked for it before I entered the hall, not knowing how I would use it, only that the day demanded it.
"I, Amogh Ashanra, the fourth Samanta of Aranyavarta, son of Prathiraj Ashanra and Yamvitha Ashanra," I said, our names fitting together like links—forged and unbroken, "appoint Pranvi Ashanra as the first female Pratihara of Aranyavarta."
I took the sword from the maid's steady hands and held it out.
Pranvi's eyes widened. The practiced composure cracked, and the girl beneath—the one who loved the weight of a blade more than that of a necklace, looked back at me.
Tears fell, but her spirit did not bend; she set her jaw, and the tears merely softened the stone.
I wanted to tell her I understood—I understood the agony that had engulfed her life since she was forced to put down her sword. I meant it as restoration but words would only bruise the moment.
For a while, I couldn't decipher the meaning behind her expression, but I hoped desperately that I did the right thing.
"I…" Her voice cracked, then strengthened like a bow restrung. "I, Pranvi Ashanra, pledge my eternal loyalty to Samanta Amogh Ashanra, of the Kula of Ashanra. I shall be your shield until the pyres take me."
She took the sword with both hands as if lifting a chalice, and when her fingers closed around the hilt, something enormous, long bound exhaled in the hall.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Mother's composure break—just for a heartbeat. Tears silvered her cheeks while the rest of her face remained carved and commanding.
To see her weep in public and remain a mountain felt like learning a law of nature I had never known existed.
Then...
A grunt split the air, man's rage in an animal's sound, and steel sang.
Indivara stood, blade in hand, walking toward the dais with eyes that were adamant on a murder that had been waiting to be born in that Great Hall.
His glare was fixed on Mother.
The sabhasad around him rose like a field of thornbushes—prickly and blank.
"You conniving, unscrupulous wh—"
Pranvi looked at me; just a glance, a question: May I?
Jayak's words ran through me like water through a broken pot.
'The path you're about to tread shall require countless sacrifices. The color of your decisions shall not be tainted with the hue of regrets.'
So...I nodded.
Then I blinked, for only a moment though. But that was all it took.
Indivara's face seemed to fly toward me. I thought the man had grown a pair of wings and was about to put a sword in my chest.
But something felt off.
Then I realized what my mind refused to shape. There was no body attached to that face. It arced cleanly through the air, jaw slack, eyes bulging with a last thought that would never find voice.
As if looking for answers, my eyes glanced around the room.
The servants of the manor had their eyes shut; the maids had their fists clenched in front of their chests. The sabhasad were looking at something with eyes full of dread, and some even had tears rolling down their cheeks.
I forced myself to follow their line, stomach clenching, back to where his body had crumpled to the floor.
Blood pumped wild from the neck in wet, hot bursts and then subsided into a gruesome fountain. The body spasmed once, twice, and then became meat.
Pranvi stood to the left of that ruin, her face not turned toward it but the men behind it. Her sword, covered in a thin red line that dripped onto the stone like rain after drought.
Dread seized me.
Fear narrows the world, but dread expands it and shows you the gates hell built behind ordinary doors.
In that heartbeat, she was not my sister. The room felt too small to hold her.
The sabhasad who had unsheathed their blades cried out and surged forward.
Adrenaline pushed them past the moment when reason might have saved them. They moved in an untidy wave, too many swords and not enough sense.
Pranvi exhaled once and cut the air to her left; her knees bent, right leg forward, the edge held low, then rising in a clean diagonal that would have disemboweled a man standing closer.
They checked their steps, then screamed and came on. Eight of them—veterans, yes, but veterans of war, not of her.
She moved without hesitation; hilt close, blade thrust, a neat cut in the soft place under the ribs that stole breath faster than prayer.
The second came in high, stroke brutish.
She rolled her wrist and let his blade skid along hers, then drove her pommel into his temple with a sound that made my molars ache.
The third's sword was too heavy. She slid inside the arc of it and opened his wrist.
The fourth hesitated; his hesitation turned his sword into a mirror, and in that mirror I saw a boy who had been told all his life he was not meant for a chair.
'She can't take on all of them,' I told myself, my logic refusing awe.
My mind raced as I began to search for a way to save our family from that impending doom.
That is when my gaze fell over my mother.
She stood there, gazing at me with her lovely eyes, which were shimmering from her tears. There was a genuine smile on her face, and I failed to fathom why.
'Why does she not display even the slightest hint of fear in her eyes? Has she lost it? My mother has lost it!' I concluded.
Vatsal, speaking through his teeth, stepped to Pranvi's right.
"It shall be my honor to die for the Kula of Ashanra."
He did not ask for approval. He offered it to the gods and then to me.
"I never imagined I would need to pick up a sword in court," Jayant said on her left, unsheathing with hands that trembled but did not drop. "But I shall do it for Samanti Yamvitha. I owe her my life. I pay what I owe."
They met the rush. Blades collided. The sound shook dust from the banners and wine from cups.
One of Indivara's men lunged for Pranvi's throat. Vatsal pivoted and caught the man's blade with his own, then shoved him hard enough that the man tripped over Indivara's headless corpse and took a back full of stone.
A different noble, older and meaner, drove at Jayant. Jayant parried, poorly though, the shock running through his arm into his shoulder. He gasped, but Pranvi stepped across and split the older noble's forearm at the tendon. The man screamed and dropped his weapon, blood running over his wrist like melted ruby.
My body tried to turn away. The weight of it—the smell, the grunts, the slice of metal through cloth and skin was too overwhelming. I felt bile rise to my throat.
That was when Mother's fingers closed on my arm again, harder this time, and when I looked at her, she spoke in a voice that made the hall's stones listen.
"You must not turn away, son," she said. "You shall bear the burden of your actions. Otherwise, your decisions will always be cloaked in a mist of skepticism."
Her eyes had a way of being cruel and kind in the same breath. I swallowed the bile, and with it, the comfort of ignorance.
'Mother is right.' I told myself, shuddering. 'Vatsal, Jayant, and even my sister fight for us. I am the Samanta. I must not look away.' I resolved silently.
I nodded at Mother and returned my gaze to the gruesome combat.
A crash came from the windows...glass? No, wood and iron!
Jayak moved, finally.
Two sabhasad had slipped from their chairs and tried to edge along the wall toward the windows, the only way out of the hall that did not pass the dais or the guards outside.
Jayak did the arithmetic of distance and blood in a blink, crossed the length between them as if he had trained in that walk all his life (he had), and opened the first man's throat with something so small in his hand it was almost imaginary.
The second man tried to vault the sill. Jayak pinned his ankle under a boot, drove the knife into his side, and pushed him face-first into the shutters. The wood thumped, the hall echoed. I waited for a scream, but it never arrived.
Their only escape route had been cut off, as if he had predicted the outcome of that gathering in the Great Hall.
'How could he have planned so far ahead? Besides, why take the risk of leaving us vulnerable?' I stared at the path between chairs and shutters and saw it as a field of snares.
'He didn't,' I realized. 'Mother did.'
My head turned before I told it to. She stood there, still looking at me, still smiling, as if she had only just remembered a piece of advice for a child.
"It was you," I said softly. "You predicted everything."
She smiled a touch wider as a soft chuckle escaped her lips.
'This woman—my mother is unhinged,' I thought, not in contempt but in wonder. 'Unhinged from fear. Unhinged from what breaks other people.'
Blood slicked the floor, but the fight did not stop. One of Indivara's men screamed, a high, breaking sound, as Vatsal's blade found meat.
Another rushed Jayant and found his own reflection in Pranvi's sword before he realized he was already dead.
The men who had cheered a marriage proposal at knifepoint now bled on their boots.
A third came howling down the aisle between the smaller tables, scattering chairs and plates—a bull in a field of standing wheat. Pranvi stepped in, turned, and caught his momentum on her hip, using his own weight to open him from belt to navel. He folded around the wound and went down hard.
Still, more came. The hall had become a mill that ground pride to flour and colored it red.
Suddenly, the doors at the far end burst open so hard the hinges probably cracked. Soldiers flooded in, white armor under war-tabards bearing the blazing sun of Kula Ashanra—shields up, spears leveled. Their boots hammered the floor in a rhythm that loosened something tight in my chest even as it tightened other men's throats.
And behind them strode a figure in pitch-dark armor that drank the light instead of reflecting it.
He was not large for a warrior, but the way he moved made the hall forget size and measure weight instead. His steps sounded like the bells of doom. The white-armored men parted around him without being told to. The clank of metal became a harmony. The air seemed to know him and brace itself.
He was the mirror of our father in the courtyard the day he'd won his last friendly duel—the set of the shoulders, the angle of the jaw, the contempt for wasted movement. As he drew his sword, the blade spoke with a note I knew the way a child knows his name.
"Brother…" I whispered, not trusting my voice to carry the whole of his name without breaking.
He unsheathed as the soldiers fanned, steel coming free like dawn over a ridge.
He charged, not headlong, not wild, but with the inevitability of a tide.
Indivara's men, those still standing, those still stupid enough to stand, met him as if a wall could stop the ocean.
The first sabhasad swung. The dark blade scythed and took the man at the crook of the elbow. The severed forearm hit the floor before the scream left his mouth.
The second lunged. My brother's sword flicked, and the man fell to his knees as if kneeling to a god. A slick of red spread under him as if the stone had opened and bled.
"Varanth!" Pranvi cried, joy and fury braided, and for a heartbeat they looked at each other across the chaos. Two halves of a storm recognizing themselves.
The hall tilted, every eye dragged toward the dark figure as if gravity had chosen a new center.
Jayak's knife stilled in the air, pausing to honor the presence of his lord.
I felt the ground under my feet shift with the sensation of a world that was rearranging itself around me.
The soldiers tightened their ranks. The servants pressed back against the walls, hands clasped, eyes wide, lips shaping mantras older than our banners.
My brother, Varanth Ashanra, raised his sword and thrust it on the ground as he bent the knee.
Corpses lay on the ground—battered, drenched in sweat, blood, and piss. The hall finally let go of the breath that it had held for far too long.
"I, Dandanayaka Varanth Ashanra, pledge my loyalty to Samanta Amogh Ashanra, of the Kula of Ashanra. Allow me to cut down those who seek to go against your law."
I walked over to him, grabbed him by the arms, and pulled him in for an embrace.
"Brother!" I spoke in between muffled sobs.
"Hey, don't leave me behind!" said Pranvi as she jumped on top of us.
Once again, the Great Hall of Ashanra was filled with laughter, but this time, it didn't feel suffocating.
This time, it felt liberating.