This must stop, thought Shakuntala.
“Look at me,” she commanded. For all its youthful timbre, her voice was sharp. Not harsh, simply—commanding.
Immediately, the women raised their eyes. Eon, listening, was impressed.
“You are very frightened,” stated the princess. After a moment, the women nodded their heads.
“You fear the Malwa fury, if they discover what is happening. You fear you will be destroyed.”
Again, they nodded.
For a moment, Shakuntala simply gazed at them. Then said:
“Your fear is understandable. But you must conquer it. Fear will gain you nothing, and may betray us all into disaster. You must be courageous. These men—these foreigners—are good men. Brave, and resourceful. You know this to be true.”
She waited. After a moment, the two women nodded.
“You trust these men.”
Again, waited. Again, the nods.
“Then trust them. And me as well.”
Waited.
“I am your princess. Your empress, now. I am the rightful heir to the throne of Andhra.”
The Maratha women nodded immediately. Majarashtra was one of the few lands of India where a woman in power was accepted without question, if she held that power legitimately. Maratha women had even led armies, in the past.
(But thoughts of Majarashtra brought pain, so she forced her way past them.)
“I call you to service, women of the Great Country. Andhra will rise again, and the Malwa filth be destroyed. To that end I devote my life. If you are destroyed by the Malwa, your empress will be destroyed with you. You will not be deserted.”
After a moment, the women bowed. The bow, Shakuntala acknowledged, but did not cherish in her heart. The fading fear in their eyes, and the hint of dawning courage, brought her great joy.
(But joy brought pain, and so she banished it. There would be no joy in her life, she knew. Only courage, and duty. She had made her vow to these women, and she would keep it. Though that vow would banish joy forever.)
She heard the prince mutter something. A phrase in his own language.
“What did you say?” she asked, glancing up at him.
His dark eyes were staring at her, very seriously. After a moment, the prince said softly:
“What I said was: ‘And so, once again, Belisarius was right.’ ”
Shakuntala frowned, puzzled. She knew who Belisarius was, of course. Raghunath Rao had explained (as much as he knew himself, which was little). But she had not met him yet, only seen him out of the corner of her eye.
“I do not understand.”
A quirky smile came to his lips.
“I asked him, once, why we were doing all this. I was not opposed, you understand. It seemed a worthy project in its own right, rescuing a lovely princess from such a creature as Venandakatra. But—I am a prince, after all. In direct line of succession to the throne of Axum. My older brother Wa’zeb is quite healthy, so I don’t expect I’ll ever be the negusa nagast. Which is fine with me. But you learn early to think like a monarch, as I’m sure you know.”
Shakuntala nodded.
“So I asked Belisarius, once—as the cold-blooded heir of a ruler rather than a hot-blooded romantic prince—why were we taking these risks?”
He began to make some sort of apologetic aside, but Shakuntala cut him off.
“There’s no need, Eon. It’s a perfectly good question. Why did you do it?” A smile. “Not that I’m ungrateful, you understand.”
Eon acknowledged the smile with one of his own. Then, when the smile faded:
“We are doing it, he said, for three reasons. First, it is worth doing in its own right. A pure and good deed, in a world which offers few such. Second, we are doing it to free the soul of India’s greatest warrior, so he can turn that soul’s full fury onto the enemy. And finally, and most importantly, we are doing it because we cannot defeat India alone. India itself must be our ally. The true India, not this bastard sired by a demon. And for that, we need to free India’s greatest ruler from her captivity.”
“I am not a ruler,” she whispered. “Much less India’s greatest.”