Anahilapataka, 1176 CE
Three years before the war council that would decide his kingdom's future, Bhima was seven years old and already learning that nobody in the palace looked at him the way they looked at his brother. It wasn't cruelty. Nobody was ever unkind to him. It was simpler than that, and somehow worse. When Mularaja walked into a hall, ministers straightened. When Bhima walked into the same hall a few paces behind him, they only nodded.
He'd stopped minding it, mostly. Or told himself he had.
"You're standing wrong again," his mother said, without turning around.
Bhima straightened at once. Naiki Devi didn't need to look at a person to know exactly how they were standing. She rarely needed to look at anything to know exactly what was happening around her. They stood together on the outer wall overlooking the Sahasralinga tank, the great stone reservoir that fed water to half the city below. Evening light caught the water in long gold strips.
"Brother doesn't stand like this," Bhima argued, though he wasn't entirely sure why he'd said it aloud.
"Mularaja stands the way a king is expected to stand," Naiki Devi corrected. "You are learning to stand the way a soldier survives to keep standing. They are not the same lesson, and you would do well not to confuse them."
"Will I ever need the second one?"
Bhima's mother turned to look at him properly for the first time since they had arrived on the wall with an unreadable expression behind her eyes.
"Every son of mine needs it," she stated. "Whether the crown ever sits on your head or not."
Bhima did not understand her then. At seven, he thought his mother was merely saying those words to flatter her son and keep his spirits high. He knew his fate was to become a great general under his brother, and he had no intention of challenging it. He would conquer lands for his brother, and Mularaja would consolidate them.
"Does father know you teach me this?"
Naiki Devi's expression turned bitter at the mention of Ajayapala, but gone as quickly as it had come. "Your father has his own concerns," she answered. "The Jain monasteries occupy most of his attention lately, and not kindly. What I teach you on this wall is between the two of us."
Bhima didn't press further. Even at seven, he understood the particular quiet that followed any mention of his father's temper.
Anahilapataka, 1177 CE
The stories about Kasahrada had already hardened into legend by the time Bhima was old enough to properly understand what they meant, told and retold by soldiers who had stood in the ranks that day, each retelling a little larger than the one before it.
Bhima had heard the story so many times he could recite it without thinking. His mother, regent in his fourteen years old brother's name, riding out herself when half the court insisted a woman had no place doing so. The Ghurid army broken at the foot of the mountains near Mount Abu. Mularaja, not yet old enough to walk without help, credited by the court poets with a victory his mother had actually won with her own hands.
Bhima had never once heard anyone credit it to Naiki Devi in quite the same breathless tone reserved for his brother's name. He asked her about it only once, late enough in the evening that he'd half convinced himself she was too tired to give him a proper answer.
"Does it bother you?" he asked. "That they say Mularaja won it."
Naiki Devi didn't answer immediately. She was cleaning a blade that hadn't needed cleaning in months, the motion more habit than necessity by now.
"A kingdom needs a story it can love," she said finally. "It cannot love an army's discipline, or a season's careful planning, or a mother doing what needed doing while her son slept in another room entirely. It can love a king, even an infant one, if the poets are willing to hand him the victory. Let them have their story, Bhima. I know what actually happened on that field. That has always been enough for me."
"It wouldn't be enough for me."
Naiki Devi looked into her son's eyes and her expression turned from a serious to a caring one. Bhima still couldn't tell whether he had said something wrong.
"No," she agreed quietly. "I don't imagine it would be."
She set the blade down and grabbed Bhima with his hands and pull him into her lap. She started caressing her son's hair and cheeks, "You watch too closely for a boy your age,"
"Most children stop asking questions once the story satisfies them, but you keep asking more and more."
"Is that wrong?"
"No," she said again. "It is simply rare. Mularaja never asked these questions, not even privately. He was content to let the stories satisfy him." She paused. "You will not have that comfort, Bhima. Remember that, in Mahabharata, Bheem was a yuvraj and never became a king. But, he stayed loyal to his brother, Yudhisthira. You have the same duty towards your elder brother."
Bhima didn't understand what his mother meant then, but he would understand it soon enough.
Anahilapataka, spring of 1178 CE
Mularaja died quickly, the way illness sometimes took even boy-kings the poets had already started calling invincible. One week he was training with the palace guard, laughing at something Bhima had said too quietly for anyone else to hear. Three weeks later, the fever that had seemed like nothing at all had taken him entirely, and the palace that had spent his whole short reign celebrating a legend built on his young name now had to bury the boy who had actually worn it.
Bhima was crowned before the mourning cloths had properly come down from the palace gates, the ceremony rushed through by ministers who understood, better than Bhima himself could, that a kingdom without a settled succession was more dangerous than one grieving too briefly.
Bhima remembered almost nothing of the ceremony itself. He remembered the weight of the crown, heavier than he'd expected, sitting uncomfortably against a head still small enough that the palace jewellers had needed to pad the inside of it twice over just to keep it from slipping.
He remembered, more clearly than anything else, that his mother was not there to see it.
She had been unwell since the campaign at Kasahrada, a wound that never fully closed properly reopening again and again through that final winter, though she had refused, until the very end, to let anyone treat her the way they would have treated any ordinary soldier carrying the same injury. Bhima understood, only much later, that she had spent the last months of her life holding herself together through sheer will alone, long enough to see one son safely into adulthood and the next one safely into the hands of her capable adult son, who was now a king.
She died three weeks before Mularaja's illness took over. Bhima remembered that he was not allowed to enter either of his mother's or brother's chambers when they breathed their last.
Nobody wrote poems about that.
The ministers who arranged his coronation spoke of continuity, of stability, of the kingdom's need to see its throne occupied without delay. None of them spoke of an eight-year-old boy who had lost his father to illness two years earlier, his mother by the end of winter season, and his brother to fever that same spring, expected now to sit through council meetings with men three times his age discussing wars he barely understood the shape of.
Arnoraja had come to him once, in those first raw weeks, and said the only thing anyone said to him during that entire period that felt honest rather than ceremonial.
"Your mother did not raise a boy who needed comforting," Arnoraja told him, kneeling so their eyes met properly. "She raised a boy who needed to understand what was coming for him. I intend to keep doing the same, Your Majesty, whether or not it is the kindest thing available to me."
Bhima had nodded, because it was the only response that felt true, and because crying in front of a general who had watched his mother command an army felt like a betrayal of something he didn't yet have words for.
Anahilapataka, present day
Bhima sat alone in his private chamber that night, the war council from earlier finally dispersed, Arnoraja already gone to prepare for his ride east.
On the low table before him sat the only thing of his mother's he had ever kept close rather than surrendered to the palace's formal treasury, a plain iron bracelet, unremarkable to anyone who hadn't watched her wear it through every council, every campaign, every quiet evening on the wall above the Sahasralinga tank.
He turned it over once in his hands, the metal cool and unadorned, nothing about it suggesting the woman who had once worn it into battle against an army twice her own size.
Every son of mine needs it, she had told him once, on that same wall, some years back which felt like a lifetime to him. Whether the crown ever sits on your head or not.
The crown had found him anyway, faster and crueller than either of them had ever imagined it might. Vindhyavarman's army was already crossing toward the border fortresses even now, and the treasury minister's warning from earlier still sat uncomfortably in his chest, that every feudal lord watching this war would be measuring exactly how much a boy-king could actually hold onto before deciding whether his own province was worth defending or worth abandoning entirely.
He thought of Mularaja, briefly, and found he wasn't angry at his brother anymore, not the way he had been at seven, watching ministers giving him respect. Mularaja had never asked to become a legend either. He had simply been fortunate enough, or unfortunate enough, to die before anyone expected the legend to be tested properly.
Bhima did not have that particular fortune available to him.
He thought of his father too, though less willingly, the memory of Ajayapala's temper still carrying a weight he hadn't fully examined in years. His father had ruled through fear, had made enemies of communities that had done nothing to earn his anger beyond existing differently than he preferred, and had left behind a kingdom that respected him without loving him, the same way soldiers respected a blade they didn't particularly want to hold. Bhima had decided, quietly, sometime during those first weeks after his coronation, that he would rather be remembered the way his mother had chosen to be forgotten than the way his father had chosen to be feared.
He wasn't certain yet how a nine-year-old could accomplish it either.
The council's arguments replayed themselves in his mind, the treasury minister's certainty that pride alone should hold Malwa, Arnoraja's harder, plainer honesty about what the kingdom could and could not currently afford. Bhima understood, sitting with his mother's bracelet in the lamplight, that he had spoken only once in that entire meeting, and that the single sentence he'd managed had come out of him almost before he'd decided to say it.
I will not be remembered as the king who sat still while a province my father bled for slipped away because I was too young to say otherwise.
Bhima wondered if it had sounded as young as he suspected it had, the moment it left his mouth. He wondered whether Arnoraja had bowed to him out of genuine respect.
He set the braceless down finally, though he didn't put it away.
Somewhere in Malwa, a child around his own age was being taught the same lessons Bhima had learned from his mother, though his understanding of them was far more empirical than Bhima's. Neither Eshaan nor Bhima knew that fate had already begun weaving their lives into the same cruel yet remarkable tapestry. One that would eventually bring them to the same battlefield, with weapons in hand, drawing blood from one another until only one of them remained alive.
Tomorrow would mark the beginning of a fate that would be written either in blood or with it.