“Stay still,” Lata said. “I’m cleaning your wounds. Your ribs are bruised.”
“At least tell me you didn’t take off my dhoti,” Rao said thinly.
He meant it as a joke, but Lata said, “No. I let Prem do it. Stop trying to raise your head.”
Rao ignored her and looked up. Prem, low prince of Saketa, stood at the end of the divan. He smiled, his eyes crinkling.
“Hello, Rao,” Prem said. “You’re a mess.”
Rao huffed out a weak laugh and lowered himself back down.
“I don’t suppose you had any luck convincing the regent to help us, then,” said Rao.
“You’re lucky I didn’t,” said Prem. “If I hadn’t returned early, you’d be dead on the street.”
“I told your men where I’d gone for a reason.”
“You should have taken them with you.”
“That would have made me a little too conspicuous, I think.”
“You’re right,” said Prem. “You shouldn’t have gone out at all.”
“It was important,” Rao said. And not the first time, he added silently. If Prem’s men hadn’t told him what Rao had been up to, then Rao wasn’t going to.
Prem reached leisurely for his pipe, which had been hidden under the folds of his voluminous shawl: a wool thing of deep, deep blue that draped over his fingers and was tightly knotted around his throat.
“We’re staying in a perfectly good brothel, and you go to a cheap shack instead. Sometimes I don’t understand you, Rao.”
“I went for the poet. A man named Baldev.”
“What did he have that you needed?”
“Information about Ahiranya’s rebels,” Rao admitted.
“I don’t see why rebels would want to help our cause,” Prem said. But he was listening, his eyes a faint glitter in the lantern light.
“They wouldn’t. I didn’t tell him our cause. I told him a lie. I told him I wanted knowledge.” He took a slow, shallow breath, feeling the ache of his own ribs, his own lungs. “And I gained it.”
Prem puffed his pipe.
“The poet,” Rao said after a moment, “the last time I went to his salon, he admitted to me that he and his sympathizers have the support and protection of a powerful figure in Ahiranya. He told me…”
I cannot give you a name. Some things are too precious. And some things, I am not privy to.
Are you not?
A faint smile.
I am not an important man.
The poet had hesitated. Had met Rao’s eyes as the two of them sat in the back room of the brothel, dawn light creeping in through the window. And Rao had stared back, earnest, wide-eyed, a rich and foolish man with a good heart. Those were always the best lies, the ones set over real bones.
Come back and we’ll talk, boy.
“There are sympathizers to Ahiranyi secession from the empire at every echelon of the country’s government,” Rao said eventually. “I didn’t have a chance to obtain a name. The soldiers came before I’d finished with him.”
“Oh, the soldiers. That, I know.”
“The poet saved me,” murmured Rao, thinking of Baldev’s fury. The knife that hadn’t even grazed him, for all the anger with which it had been slammed into the floor. “He didn’t have to.”
“Ah.” Prem took another puff of his pipe. Released a breath of smoke. “And why did he do that?”
Rao rose to a seated position with difficulty. “I earned his trust.”
“How?”
“I told him I’d read the teachings of Sunata.” There was a pause, a silence that stretched until Rao said ruefully, “You don’t know who Sunata is.”
“Not all of us like books as much as you.”
“Sunata was a sage.” Sages were wise men and women with no affiliation to any faith or creed. “Sunata’s teachings underpin—never mind.” Rao shook his head. Winced. He’d forgotten for a moment that his body was a pummeled bag of bruises. “He wrote that there is no meaning in the universe: no fate, no high blood, no rights of kings over land. Everything is emptiness. The world only has meaning when we give it meaning.”
“He sounds astute,” murmured Lata, still applying a paste of spices with unnecessary firmness to Rao’s bruised ribs.
“I don’t understand,” said Prem. “Make it simpler, Rao, there’s a friend.”
“People who follow his teachings reject all kings, all royalty, all empires. They believe in… self-determinism. I suppose that’s the closest explanation.”