Chapter Text
The flower halls of Mahishmati smelled like death and devotion on the night of Vasanta Bandhanam.
Well, obviously not real death, not the kind that stained the battlefields outside the kingdom walls, but the slow, sweet death of a thousand blooms cut from their stems and strung into garlands meant to bind souls together before the gods. Every kind of flower, ranging from Jasmine and marigold and champaka and roses, so red, all there, and they looked like they were bleeding, all piled in baskets taller than the one who is very much alive, and they all waited to be woven into something sacred by hands that had been working since before dawn.
Whose hands, you may ask, well, her hands. Meenakshi, the one who sat cross-legged on the stone floor of the preparation chamber, her fingers moving through the flowers with the kind of speed that only came from years of doing this, years of sitting in this exact spot. At the same time, the palace buzzed above her head with music and silk and the laughter of people who would never once look down and wonder who made the garlands they wore so carelessly. She had been stringing since the fourth hour of the morning, and now the sun had set, and the drums had started, and the Vasanta Bandhanam ceremony was perhaps an hour away from beginning, and she still had four garlands left to finish.
Two of those four were ordinary, meant for minor nobles participating in the mass ceremony, nothing special, nothing that required more than muscle memory and a steady rhythm.
The third and fourth were anything but ordinary, yes, and they carefully sat beside her on a silk cloth, like a sleeping serpent, heavy with night-blooming jasmine harvested under moonlight and woven with threads of real gold. Each bloom had been selected by hand, each knot tied with a prayer, each layer arranged so the fragrance would deepen through the night rather than fade. It was the most beautiful garland Meenakshi had ever made, and she was trying very hard not to think whose neck it was meant for.
Well, the answer is obvious, it's none other than Yuvaraj Bhallaladeva. The name alone made her fingers falter for half a breath before she caught herself and kept stringing.
Everyone in the palace knew what tonight meant for the Yuvaraj, what tonight meant for them!.
The Vasanta Bandhanam was not some annual festival that came and went like the monsoons; it was a once-in-a-century sacred event, a celestial alignment so rare that most people lived and died without ever witnessing one, and the fact that it was happening now, in their lifetime, had sent the entire kingdom into a frenzy of preparation and superstition and awe.
It is said that a binding performed under the Vasanta Bandhanam carried the weight of a hundred ordinary marriages, well, at least that's what the Mahaguru said, and that's what everyone, including Meenakshi, old to believe.
Meenakshi remembered the whispers and how the alks and history were spoken about on this day. It was as if fate itself also said that on this day, the Mumoorthis all will be paying attention.
And Rajmata Sivagami? The one who never let an opportunity pass unweaponised had seized this one with both hands.
Since Yuvaraj Amarendra Baahubali was away on an expedition to distant kingdoms, travelling in disguise on a mission that would see him crowned upon his return, which meant the Vasanta Bandhanam fell to Bhallaladeva, the elder prince, the one who was here, the one who was always here, while his brother collected glory elsewhere. Rajamata personally selected Rajkumari Padmavani from the royal bloodline of Vidarbha. They say she is the perfect match, but for what? The match that would give everything that had negotiated? from dowries, and political promises that stretched far beyond one night in a ceremonial chamber?
Meenakshi, on thinking, shook her head. This doesn't seem like a formance; this is a ceremony that the temple stands on and will expand on, and the garland Meenakshi had poured her soul into for the past three days was nothing more than a beautiful leash disguised as devotion.
She wondered, sometimes, in the secret parts of her mind that she never spoke aloud, whether Yuvaraj Bhallaladeva knew that. Whether he cared? A man like him even thought about things like garlands and who made them and what they meant, or whether he accepted adornment the way a statue accepts gold leaf, passively, inevitably, because that was what power looked like when it was draped in flowers.
She had seen him, of course. Everyone had seen him. You did not live in Mahishmati, nor did you see Bhallaladeva. He was the kind of man the eye went to before the mind could stop it, not because he was beautiful the way the poets described beauty, unlike Baaubali, who has heart of the poeple like her and others, who smiles at everyone and talks wih everyone, but because he was overwhelming, like standing too close to a fire or looking directly at the sun during an eclipse. Tall and broad and carved from something harder than the marble pillars of the court, with a jaw that looked like it had been designed for clenching and eyes that held the permanent low flame of a man who had spent his entire life being told he was second best and had decided, very quietly, very dangerously, to disagree.
Meenakshi had watched him for years many times from behind a pillar during a court session. And once he had been arguing with a general about troop formations and his voice had filled the hall like smoke fills a room, not loud but everywhere, impossible to escape. She had pressed her back against the cold stone and listened to the shape of his words without hearing them, and thought, very clearly, very stupidly, "this man could break the world in half if he wanted to, and the terrifying thing is that he might want to."
Then she had gone back to stringing flowers because that was what servants did. They watched, and they worked, and they kept their terrifying thoughts folded up small inside their chests where no one could find them.
The chaos started exactly seventeen minutes before the ceremony, and Meenakshi knew it was seventeen minutes, you may ask how because the head priest Mahaguru Vishwanath had a habit of announcing the time in booming intervals, and he had just bellowed that the sacred fire would be lit in seventeen minutes and everything should be perfecly ready for the event and just like tha the people of the palace who are in prepaion like her turned into a panic and every person in here aware that they were part of something their grandchildren would hear stories about.
Servants started running around carrying stuff, passing around the flowers to be hung on the last-minute fixation and small garlands were being snatched from baskets and distributed to priests, who were distributing them to attendants, who were distributing them to the nobels and minor wealhy poeple, along wih the enire basket of rose petals being knocked over by someone in the chaos as well the cries of someone because of the garland has been torn, but nothing affected her just that the consant beaing of the ceremonial drums that made Meenakshi's chest vibrate like a second heartbeat.
And in the middle of all of it, the head attendant Rukmini appeared in front of Meenakshi like a monsoon cloud, dark-eyed and furious.
"The royal garland." Rukmini's voice was a knife. "Where are they?" She demanded, which caused, for the first time in the day, Meenakshi to come out of her silence.
"Here, Rukmini Akka." Meenakshi reached for the silk cloth beside her and lifted the heavy garlands with both hands. It was warm from sitting near the oil lamps, and the fragrance rose from it like a living thing, sweet and deep and almost dizzying. They are ready."
Rukmini snatched them, well, of course, in a much careful way, but Meenakshi definitely felt a heavy tug in her arm as she examined it for half a breath, and then, to Meenakshi's surprise, returned it to her arms.
"You carry them. Kamala is sick; Kaantha is handling the garlands for the Vidarbha delegation, and I cannot trust the new girls with this. You will bring it directly to Mahaguru Vishwanath at the royal fire altar." Rukmini grabbed Meenakshi's chin and tilted her face up so their eyes met. "Directly. You do not stop or speak to anyone, ok? You walk and hand it to the Mahaguru, and you disappear. If you drop it or if you damage a single petal, I will personally ensure you spend the rest of your life cleaning the horse stables. Do you understand?"
Mentally, those sentences made Menakshi roll her eyes, just mentally cause reacting will cost more of her short life.
"Ok, Akka."
"Go. Now." Rumini slightly shoved her, and Meenakshi took her cue and started walking.
The corridor between where she is and the great temple was a river of bodies. Nobles in silk and jewels, servants carrying offerings of fruit and sweets and sacred water, musicians with their instruments held above their heads to keep them safe from the crush as they settled in the queue of already seated ones who had started to play the most divine music, making the path even more distracting, soldiers lining the walls with spears and expressionless faces.
Everything around her made her press the garland against her chest and move through the crowd like water through rock as she slipped in to the hole so small enough for her to dash in while keeping her head down because that was how you survived in a palace, you made yourself small and quick and invisible, you became a thing that moved through spaces rather than a person who occupied them.
With the sacred fire burning at the centre, sending soars like prayers, and at the very front of the semicircle, closest to the fire, stood a space reserved for the royal binding, the place ready, draped in the finest silk, marked the spot where Yuvaraj Bhallaladeva and Rajkumari Padmavani would stand.
But it's still empty, suggesting that they have not arrived yet, which made her exhale, "Good, I still have time", she whispered to herself, and her eyes moved in need to find Mahaguru so that she can hand him the garland, and vanish back into the preparation corridor before-
"MAKE WAY FOR THE YUVARAJ!"
The voice split the hall like a crack of thunder, and everyone moved aside, pressing their bodies against the walls, and that action caught the one carrying the garland that was necessary for the event in the crush, like a leaf in a flooding river.
Someone's elbow drove into her ribs, and someone's foot came down on her ankle, which made her stumble. Still, her hands clutched the garlands as if they were her life, and she tried to find a wall to press against, but the crowd was moving, and she was moving with it. The drums were getting louder and louder, and the chanting had started, and she could not see where she was going because there were too many bodies and too much smoke, and she was pushed.
Pushed is a very subtle word, not like with the full force of a crowd shifting to make way for something enormous coming through the main entrance. She felt it like a wave hitting her back, a wall of human momentum that lifted her off her feet for one terrifying second and deposited her through, stumbling and gasping, into a gap in the silk curtain that separated the area from the ceremonial ring.
And just like that, she was in the ring, yes, literally standing in the sacred semicircle, directly in front of the holy fire, the royal garland still clutched in her shaking hands.
And Bhallaladeva was right there; he had entered from the other side, so all covered in maroon and gold and his broad chest and platted body, gleaming in the firelight, along with his hair trailing almost touching his shoulders, that made every angle of his jaw and cheekbone look like it had been cut from dark stone. He looked like a weapon someone had dressed in silk. He looked like the kind of man who could stand in front of a sacred fire and make the fire feel inadequate.
For one frozen, airless second, their eyes met. His eyes were dark, and they were not just any dark colour but dark in the way a well is dark, deep and still and hiding something vast beneath the surface. They found her and pinned her in place with the sight of a man who was used to people stopping when he looked at them.
She could not move or breathe or think a single coherent thought beyond what her mind whispered slowly, "I am standing where Rajkumari Padmavani is supposed to be, and I am holding the garland and the fire is burning, and the Yuvaraj is looking at me, and I am going to die."
What she did not know, what she would only piece together later from fragments overheard through walls and whispered between servants, was that Rajkumari Padmavani was at that exact moment still in the chamber on the far side of the temple, delayed by a crisis that should have been resolved an hour ago. The heavy Vidarbha bridal jewellery, worn by more than 10 generations of Vidarbha queens, had a clasp that would not close. Three attendants were working on it with increasingly frantic hands while the Rajkumari sat rigid and furious, and the general of Vidarbha had already sent two runners to the temple to tell the Mahaguru to delay the royal binding by a few minutes, just a few minutes, the Rajkumari was coming, she was nearly ready, please wait.
But the runners never arrived; they couldn't, as the crowd was too thick and the corridors were already too packed. The drums were too loud for anyone to hear a breathless messenger trying to push through a wall of celebrating nobles.
And the Mahaguru could not wait. That was the thing about the Vasanta Bandhanam that made it different from every other ceremony, the celestial alignment was not a suggestion, it was a window which is very narrow and closing, and the sacred texts were explicit about it a binding begun after the window closed was not a binding at all, it was an empty ritual, flowers and words and nothing more. Vishwanath, with the help of his juniors, who could see clearly, had been tracking the stars through the open roof of the temple all evening, and he knew, with the mathematical certainty of a man who had studied the heavens for more than sixty years, that he had minutes left or perhaps less.
So when he saw a woman standing before the Yuvaraj at the royal fire altar, holding the royal garland, he did not pause to examine the fabric of her clothes, the stains on her fingers, or the terror on her face. He saw what the moment demanded of him. He saw the garlands, a woman, a man, a fire, and the gods waiting.
It happened in seconds, as everything did in that moment, while Sivagami was the first to see it. She had been watching for Padmavani's entrance, had been growing quietly rigid with each passing minute that the Vidarbha princess did not appear, and when the crowd surged and a figure stumbled into the ceremonial ring she had leaned forward with relief that lasted exactly the length of one breath before her eyes processed what they were seeing, trhat is plain cotton, not silk or gold bangles, a servant girl's frightened face where a princess's composed one should have been.
She immediately rose with her hand raised in a gesture aimed at the Mahaguru as she began "Mahaguru".
Beside her, Bijjaladeva had seen it too. "Who is that? That is not Padmavani. Sivagami, that is not"
On the other side of the royal seating, the Vidarbha chief minister was on his feet as his face turned ashen in colour, whispering or trying to form words that the drums swallowed whole, "The Rajkumari has not yet arrived, the binding must wait, MAHAGURU THE RAJKUMARI IS NOT—"
But Mahaguru could not hear them with the drums thundering a long with the other priests were chanting and he was at the centre of it all, conducting the most important ceremony of his life, and the window was closing and the stars were moving and he had a woman and a garland and a Yuvaraj and he could not, would not, did not wait.
"Mahaguru-" Meenakshi tried to speak, but her voice was a ghost of itself, lost under the drums and the chanting and the roar of the fire. "Mahaguru, I am not-"
His hand shot out with surprising speed and snatched the garland from her grip.
Behind her, Rukmini's voice heard in a disant shrill "THAT IS THE FLOWER GIRL, STOP THE CEREMONY-"
A royal guard was pushing through the packed semicircle, trying to reach the ring. He could not break through without disrupting the crowd around the sacred fire that was witnessing in that very breath.
With her hand still raised, Sivagami's mouth hung open slightly, and Bijjaladeva was half out of his seat, with the Vidarbha minister shouting into drums that did not care.
The Mahaguru looped the heavy jasmine-and-gold garlands over both their heads, letting them settle around Meenakshi's neck and Bhallaladeva's neck simultaneously, binding them together in a fragrant noose of night-blooming flowers and sacred thread.
The chanting reached its peak, and the fire surged as if the gods themselves had thrown oil into it.
Every voice that had been rising to intervene fell silent at once, not because they chose silence but because the silence chose them, the heavy, sacred, absolute silence that followed a completed binding, the silence that said, it is done. The fire has witnessed. The gods have spoken. What you meant to prevent has already become what is.
And then there was silence, the silence which lasted three heartbeats. Meenakshi counted them because they were the last three heartbeats of her life as she knew it.
One.
The garland settled against her collarbone, warm and heavy, the gold thread catching the firelight. She could feel the other end of it resting against the broad plane of Bhallaladeva's chest, could feel the faintest vibration of his breathing transmitted through the flowers like a pulse through a rope.
Two.
The court was staring. A hundred pairs of noble eyes were turning toward the royal altar like flowers turning toward an eclipse, something that should not be looked at directly but was impossible to look away from. She could see mouths opening. She could see confusion turn to recognition, then to horror.
Three.
"What..." Bhallaladeva's voice was low, barely a sound, more like the earth shifting before a quake "...is this?
Not a question. In the same way, Rukmini had not asked a question when she demanded the garland. Powerful people did not ask; they stated the shape of their displeasure and waited for the world to rearrange itself accordingly.
But the world was not rearranging. The garlands were around both their necks, connecting with a long, very long golden thread, lopping them together. The chant had been completed. The fire had witnessed. And Mahaguru, finally realising through his old eyes that the woman standing before him was not silk-draped nobility but a flower-stained servant girl in plain cotton, went very, very pale.
"Rajmata", the old priest's voice cracked like dry wood. He turned toward the royal seating. "Rajmata, I...there has been...the binding..."
Sivagami was already on her feet. She had not sat back down since the moment she first rose, and now she stood with the full force of her presence aimed like an arrow at the space where Meenakshi trembled in her flower-stained clothes with the most expensive garland in Mahishmati draped around her unworthy neck. Sivagami looked like a woman watching her empire crack down the middle and already calculating how many pieces she would need to hold together before dawn.
"Remove it." Bijjaladeva's voice cut through the hall like a blade through silk. "Remove the garland immediately."
The Mahaguru flinched as if his words had struck him across the face. But when he spoke, his voice held the particular stubbornness of a man who feared the gods more than he feared queens.
"But the binding is complete. The sacred fire has witnessed. The mantras have been spoken in full. To break the bond before Surya Devta rises tomorrow is to-"
"I know what the scriptures say." Bijjaladeva's jaw was so tight it could crack stone. "I also know what my eyes are telling me. That girl is a servant. A flower-stringer. This binding is a farce."
"With deepest respect, my lord, the fire does not distinguish between silk and cotton. The bond stands until sunrise. To sever it now would bring-"
"Enough."
Bhallaladeva's voice silenced everything, and Meenakshi felt the garland shift as he turned and for one horrible, eternal moment she felt his gaze land on her again, heavy as a hand closing around her throat.
Bijjaladeva, with his face, was a map of everything he stood to lose tonight; the Vidarbha alliance, the political leverage, the months of whispered negotiations that had been his project, his scheme, his path to the power that the throne had never formally given him but that he had spent a lifetime clawing toward through his son's name.
"This is what happens," he hissed, loud enough for the first three rows of nobility to hear, not caring, never caring who heard. "This is what happens when you hand a kingdom's future to priests and rituals instead of acting with sense."
"The Vidarbha alliance, Sivagami." His voice rose, sharp and cracking with a rage he did not bother to conceal. "MONTHS of negotiation. The dowry terms alone took-"
"I am aware of what has been lost tonight," Sivagami said, with the voice of a woman who would not unravel in public regardless of what was unravelling around her. She did not look at her husband, but the steadiness in her tone carried its own message, I hear you, I understand, but this is not the moment. "We will address it. Not here. Not like this."
"A DAASI, Sivagami. My son has been bound to a DAASI in front of the entire-"
"And raising our voices will not unbind them." Sivagami's gaze found her husband's, and what passed between them was not dismissal but partnership forged in decades of shared power and shared frustration, the look of two people who disagreed on method but understood each other's fury perfectly. "The court is watching. The Vidarbha delegation is watching. We will handle this with the dignity this family's name requires."
Bijjaladeva sat back. Not because he agreed but because he recognised the wisdom even through his rage, because for all his scheming and bitterness, he had never once doubted that Sivagami understood the stakes as deeply as he did. But his face, half-lit by the sacred fire, held the expression of a man who was already assembling a list of people who would answer for this, already turning the gears of his mind toward damage and recovery and the particular brand of quiet vengeance that was his speciality.
He looked at Meenakshi. That one looks the way one looks at an insect that has landed on something valuable. She would remember that look later. She would remember it because it was the opposite of how his son had looked at her.
She was on her knees. She did not remember dropping, but her body had made the decision for her, some ancient servant instinct driving her to the ground before the fury could find her standing. Her forehead was close to the stone floor. Her hands were pressed flat beside her head. She was shaking so badly the garland trembled between them, jasmine petals falling like tears around her knees.
"Y-Yuvaraj...I did not...the crowd pushed me...I was only meant to deliver the garland...I would never...please..."
Her voice broke. The words dissolved into the kind of silence that comes after a scream, the kind that rings.
Bhallaladeva looked at her for a long time. She could feel it even with her face toward the floor, could feel the weight of his attention like heat from the sacred fire, like a physical pressure against the back of her bent neck.
Then he looked at his mother.
Something passed between them. Not words, not a gesture, but the kind of silent communication that existed between two people who had spent decades in a power struggle so intricate and so exhausting that they had developed their own language for it. Sivagami's eyes said, "Fix this." Bhallaladeva's eyes said, "You fix it. You arranged this farce. You chose the bride. You orchestrated the ceremony. This is your failure, Mata, not mine."
That made Sivagami's nostrils flare, but she was Rajmata of Mahishmati, and Rajmatas did not crumble in public.
"The binding will hold until sunrise." Her voice was ice-draped in authority. "The Yuvaraj and this...girl will complete the ceremonial night as tradition demands. At dawn, the release ritual will be performed, and this matter will be resolved. Discreetly." Her gaze found Meenakshi like a needle finding a vein. "And then we will discuss how this happened."
Somewhere behind the silk curtains, Meenakshi heard a woman cry out in outrage. Rajkumari Padmavani arrived at last, jewellery finally clasped, silk finally perfect, only to find the ceremonial ring occupied by a servant girl wearing the garland that was meant for her neck. The cry was sharp and wounded and carried the specific fury of a woman who had been dressed like a queen and then told that the throne had already been given away to someone in cotton.
A guard appeared beside Meenakshi and hauled her to her feet with no more gentleness than one would use to lift a sack of grain. The garland pulled ugged between her neck and he one tthat is connected to which is in Bhallaladeva's and she gasped at the sudden intimacy of it, the awareness that she was physically tethered to this man by flowers she had strung herself, bound by her own hands' work in a way that felt like the universe was playing the cruelest joke it could think of.
Bhallaladeva did not look at her again. He turned and walked toward the corridor that led to the ceremonial chambers, every line of his body radiating the kind of controlled fury that was more terrifying than any shout because it meant the explosion had not happened yet, it was building, gathering, storing itself behind his ribs like a monsoon behind a dam.
The same action made a tug on the one standing helplessly through the connection they share now, the golden thread causing Meenakshi to move forward.
"Follow the Yuvaraj," she heard the whispers
She followed.
Because that was what servants did. They followed, they obeyed, they kept their heads down, and their terrifying thoughts folded up small inside their chests.
But as she walked behind Bhallaladeva through the torchlit corridor, the gold thread swaying gently between them like a bridge between two worlds that were never meant to touch, Meenakshi's terrifying thought was this.
The flowers I chose for him were not random. I chose night-blooming jasmine because it only reveals its fragrance in the dark, when no one is watching. I chose it because it is the loneliest flower in the garden, and I thought, without thinking, without meaning to, that it suited him.
And now I am bound to him by my own secret, and the gods are laughing, and the fire is still burning, and I am walking toward a locked room with the most dangerous man in Mahishmati.
And the worst part, the very worst part, is that my hands are not shaking because I am afraid.
They are shaking because when he looked at me, just for that one frozen second before the fury came, his eyes looked exactly like the jasmine I chose. Dark and blooming only in the dark. And unbearably, impossibly lonely.