Ujjayini, the seventh day since the gates closed
The city had not opened its gates in a week, Eshaan wasn't able to comprehend the situation that arose which required the closing of the city gates. War was happening near Gujarat, but the capital city was shut close like some unknown threat was knocking at its door.
Two letters to Kripa sat unanswered now, the second one was sent nearly two months before the war had even properly begun, back when Eshaan had still believed a delay of a few weeks meant nothing more than a courier taking a slower route than usual. Five letters to Pataliputra had all come back with proper replies in that same span, his father's familiar hand steady on every page, complaining gently about the price of grain and asking after his studies. Kripa's silence sat differently. Kripa had never once, in all the months since they'd parted on the road outside Ujjayini, had went silent without a single information.
Eshaan sat with both unanswered letters spread on the low desk in his room, reading his own words back to himself as though rereading them enough times might change whether an answer had come.
Devendra found him there in the evening, carrying two bowls of the thin rice the kitchens had been serving since the lockdown began, food rationed carefully now that supply carts couldn't reach the city as freely as before.
"You've read those same two letters every night this week," Devendra said, setting one bowl down beside Eshaan without being asked. "I don't think staring harder is going to make the other person write back any faster."
"I know that."
"Then why do it?"
Eshaan didn't have a proper answer, and Devendra, to his credit, didn't press for one. He sat down across from Eshaan instead, eating in silence for a while before speaking again.
"You think the war's got something to do with it."
It wasn't a question, but Eshaan answered it anyway. "Kripa travels constantly. He never stays anywhere long enough for a letter to reliably catch him. That's always been true, and it's never once stopped him from writing back within a few weeks regardless of where he was." Eshaan set his letters down finally, his appetite for the rice mostly gone. "Two months, Devendra. Even if he's somewhere without a courier route for a while, two months is long enough that something should have reached him by now, one way or another."
"And if the war's blocking the roads he'd normally use?"
"Then I'd rather know that for certain than sit here guessing at it."
"You could ask the king's aide," Devendra suggested, setting his own bowl down. "You've got that private audience arrangement now, don't you? Surely a king with soldiers and couriers scattered across half the region could find out more about one traveling sage than either of us could manage from inside these walls."
"The king and his cabinet has a war to run," Eshaan argued. "I'm not going to spend whatever goodwill I have with him asking for a search party over such petty issues."
"And what if the number of unanswered letters increases?"
"Then I'll ask," Eshaan said, though he didn't sound entirely convinced of his own answer even as he gave it.
Devendra didn't have anything further to offer after that, and the two of them finished their rice mostly in silence, the low lamp between them burning down slowly as the evening wore on outside.
Ujjayini, the following morning
Bhaskaracharya had grown quieter himself in the week since the gates closed, called away most mornings now to consult with palace engineers on matters Eshaan wasn't permitted to sit in on, calculations concerning the city's granaries and how long they could reasonably hold if the siege lines around the region tightened further before the war resolved itself one way or another.
He found Eshaan in the observatory's lower courtyard that morning, staring at nothing in particular, the logbook beside him only half filled for the day's readings.
"You've missed two entries this week," Bhaskaracharya stated, not unkindly, settling onto the stone bench beside him. "That's unlike you."
"I know, Acharya. I'll finish them today."
"I didn't come to scold you about a logbook, Eshaan." Bhaskaracharya studied him and met his gaze with Eshaan's eyes. "You've been distracted for longer than a week's worth of war would explain. This started before the gates closed."
Eshaan hesitated, then decided there was little point pretending otherwise with Bhaskaracharya who had already noticed his behaviour. "Acharya Kripa has vanished, and I have no news of him since the last time you mentioned him and his letter."
Bhaskaracharya's expression turned serious, and for a moment Eshaan thought he saw genuine concern on Acharya's face.
"Kripa is a difficult man to worry about properly," Bhaskaracharya started. "I've known him longer than you've been alive, Eshaan, and in all that time I have watched him walk into situations that would have killed three ordinary men and come out the other side with nothing worse than a torn cloak and a story he refused to fully explain. If I had worried every time he went quiet for a season, I would have spent half my life in a state of pointless dread over a man who has never once needed my worry to survive."
"That's not the same as knowing he's actually fine."
"No," Bhaskaracharya admitted. "It isn't. And I won't insult you by pretending the war doesn't complicate matters more than usual. Roads that were open a season ago may not be open now. Couriers who once carried letters freely across three kingdoms may find themselves turned back at borders that didn't exist as hard lines before this fighting started."
He paused. "But Eshaan, listen to me carefully. If Kripa were in genuine danger, the kind that would actually stop him from eventually writing to either of us, I believe we would know it by now in some other fashion. Men like Kripa do not simply vanish quietly. Whatever silence has kept his hand from a letter these past two months, I would wager it has far more to do with roads than with anything worse."
Eshaan wanted to believe that as completely as his Acharya seemed to. He found he couldn't quite manage it, not entirely.
"Could we send someone to look for him?"
Bhaskaracharya's expression turned careful again. "Send who, exactly, into a warzone, to search for a man who could be anywhere between here and the western mountains by now, based on nothing more solid than a travelling merchant's word of a man who looked like Acharya Kripa? I understand the impulse, Eshaan. I do not think it would accomplish what you hope it would."
"Then what do we do?"
"We wait," Bhaskaracharya said simply. "And we finish the logbook entries you've been neglecting, because a war outside these walls is not a reason to let your work inside them fall apart. Kripa taught you patience for a reason, Eshaan. I suspect he'd be considerably less pleased to learn you'd abandoned it the moment his own letters stopped arriving on schedule."
Eshaan managed a smile towards Bhaskaracharya.
"Do you ever worry about him, Acharya? Truly, I mean. Not the version of worry you're offering me now to keep me steady."
Bhaskaracharya was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Eshaan began to think he wouldn't answer at all.
"Every man I have ever cared for who chose a life like Kripa's has eventually given me a reason to worry," he said finally.
"Some of them justified it. Most did not. I have learned, over the years, to hold the worry quietly rather than let it govern me, because a mind consumed with fear for someone else's safety rarely does either of you any good. That is not the same as saying I don't feel it, Eshaan. I feel it now, sitting here with you. I simply choose not to let it decide how I spend my mornings."
"How do you manage that?"
"Practice," Bhaskaracharya said. "A great deal of unwanted, unwelcome practice, accumulated over more years than I would care to count for you. You are still young enough that this worry feels enormous and unprecedented. It will not always feel that way. That is not a comfort, I realize, so much as it is simply the truth."
Eshaan nodded slowly, though the words settled into him without doing much to ease the tightness still sitting behind his ribs.
The two of them sat together a while longer in the morning light, neither speaking, the observatory's usual quiet stretching comfortably between them until Bhaskaracharya finally rose, patted Eshaan once on the shoulder, and returned to whatever calculations the palace engineers were still waiting on him to finish.
Ujjayini, three days later
The lockdown eased slightly by the tenth day, the palace was permitting a controlled trickle of merchants and couriers through the smaller gate under careful watch, the city's need for supplies eventually outweighed whatever caution had closed it so completely in the first place.
Eshaan spent that morning at the gate himself, not entirely by design. He'd gone to check whether the archive might reopen soon, only to find Keshav standing near the smaller gate instead, overseeing a delivery of fresh palm leaves for the collection's restoration work, and Eshaan had simply stayed, watching the slow procession of merchants and travellers being questioned one by one before they were allowed through.
It was mostly ordinary traffic. Grain merchants. A cloth trader complaining loudly about the delay to anyone who'd listen. A pair of pilgrims who'd been turned back twice already and clearly expected to be turned back a third time.
Eshaan was nearly ready to leave when a traveling merchant near the back of the line caught his attention, an older man with a cart of mixed goods, the kind of trader who carried a little of everything rather than specialising in any one good, moving between towns too small to support proper markets of their own.
Something about the man's cart made Eshaan stop.
Tied to the side of it, alongside baskets of dried goods and bundled cloth, hung a plain walking staff, worn smooth along its length in a pattern Eshaan recognised instantly, the particular wear a staff developed only from years spent in one very specific hand.
Eshaan crossed the courtyard before he'd properly decided to.
"Where did you get that staff?" he asked, more sharply than he intended, and the merchant startled slightly, looking between Eshaan's plain Vedha Shala robes and the guards nearby with obvious confusion at being addressed so directly by a child.
"Traded for it three weeks back," the merchant said carefully. "A man near the western passes, needed coin more than he needed a walking stick, or so he said. Why? Something wrong with it?"
"Was he hurt? The man you traded with?"
"Didn't look it. Tired, more than anything. Traveling light, if you understand my meaning, like he'd left most of what he owned somewhere else in a hurry." The merchant studied Eshaan a moment longer, something calculating entering his expression now. "You know the man this belonged to?"
Eshaan reached out and touched the worn wood, the particular grain of it achingly familiar beneath his fingers.
"I might," he said quietly. "Would you sell it to me?"
The merchant, sensing an opportunity in a boy's obvious urgency, named a price considerably higher than a plain walking staff should have been worth, and Eshaan paid it without arguing, without even properly registering how much coin he'd handed over until the staff was already resting against his own shoulder, the merchant's cart already moving on towards the market beyond the gate.
Keshav found Eshaan still standing there several minutes later, staring at the staff as though it might explain itself if he simply looked at it long enough.
"That's my old mentor's" Eshaan said, before Keshav had even asked. "I'm certain of it."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"I don't know."