Karna could not help but laugh. ‘Fortunate is one way of looking at it,’ he said, remembering his last conversation with Princess Mati and how she had convinced him to bury their secret for the sake of Duryodhan’s happiness. How easily he had consented to sheathing his betrayal. An uneasy compromise born of convenience and lack of conscience. Karna hated Mati now, as fiercely as he had once desired her, for what she had done to Duryodhan, and what she had made him do. She was a whore, a murderer, a cheat, a spiteful creature who could not be trusted. If Karna had his way, Duryodhan would never wed that snake.

‘Karna, stop,’ Savitre Lios held his shoulder. Through the bandages only one of his feline eyes was visible, but it did the work of two, and damned unsettling it was. ‘You haven’t spoken a friendly word to me all day. It appears you have found some reason to hate me. If that is so, then why save me?’

‘To clear my debt to you once and for all.’

‘What debt?’

As if on cue, the memory of the last time he had met Savitre Lios rose to Karna’s mind.

II

For a boy in the ninth summer of his life, everything is dramatic. Infatuation is mistaken for passion, boredom feels like strangulation, advice sounds like a life sentence without hope of parole, while rejection feels like your heart is being crushed in a mailed fist.

Karna had just been rejected by Acharya Dron, the Master-in-Arms of Hastina Royalty, for being a Resht. It was not anything new. He had been rejected, thrown out, cast away, attacked, ridiculed, humiliated and abused at a score of archery training grounds before. But Acharya Dron had been his last hope. The Acharya himself was a Namin, not a Ksharja, meant to take up scriptures, not swords. Karna had thought he would be the one person who would understand that creed and not caste determined if one was to rise as a warrior.

He had been a callow boy then. Disgruntled in the face of despair, he had turned away from what he wanted. His bow was tucked away under his cot, his arrows dismantled, the arrow-heads forgotten in a box. His father, Adirath, had been the White Eagle’s charioteer, and on retirement had been appointed Marshal of Horse. His reference had earned Karna a permit to enter the Crowns and work as a stablehand.

From then on, he had woken early every day, but no longer to tie a blindfold over his eyes and listen for the sounds made by unsuspecting squirrels. Now he woke to shovel horse dung in the stables. He no longer ran with pails of water from the well farthest from his house. Instead, he groomed the tails of the highbred destriers and brushed the dirt from their coats. He no longer sat at the end of the day to oil his longbow, striving to keep the hornwood from drying out. Instead, prior to falling into mindless slumber, he picked out any stones and grass that lingered in the horse’s hoofs. Everyone said Karna was blessed to have a steady job in the Crowns, when the Crows was choked with Mathuran refugees willing to slave for half pay.