In a bid to save the man she loves, Amrit ends up making a deal with the uncompromising Kuwar Veer Pratap Singh. Bound by mutual weaknesses and wounds they hide from the world the two goes from unwilling pretenders to unlikely allies. Sometimes, it...
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Double update 1.0
Summary: "That's the best kind of weapons- ones that doesn't know they are weapons." ____
June, 1928.
Rain - less thunder rumbles in the sky, casting blinding flashes on the empty lawns and dimly lit passages. The air is thick, hanging heavy on notes of delayed rainfall. All seems well in Shrighar.
If there are guards posted on these hallways, they have mastered the art of discretion. The late hour has muffled any possible sounds. Preet still makes a double take before dodging into the shadows.
In her clammy hands she clutches her own dupatta, wrangling it this way and that incessantly with each of her steps. Her jaw is clenched, her lips pursed. There is a particular expression in her eyes that her bowed head and pardah manages to obscure.
With each step she pushes herself forward to take Preet puts distance between the sounds ringing in her ears and herself. Sounds that none but her could hear.
They are stark even when the loudest of thunders boom - and Preet thinks she would go deaf before her task is completed.
Karam may think nothing of triggering a little event in view of winning the king's favour, he may even manage to assure her of the "white - lie" quality of it.
But at the end of the day, Preet was no soldier, she may be loyal, may want a little bit of glory and praise - may even have a taste for an extra coin or two - but she was not a woman to wield a weapon for it, or to actively seek danger. Or, Preet was learning anew, indifferent enough to push others into danger for that.
The attack was supposed to be a hoax. A faux danger staged to give her an opportunity to display a little heroism, while Rani sahiba was away with her younger son, taking a good portion of the nursery staff away, the older Prince is left vulnerable; his wellbeing left in the hands of two maids - Menka and Preet.
Menka was older, established and wide to the head of guard - there was no lack of honor or praise to hunt for. Preet was still a newcomer in her shadow, apart from Karam who himself is struggling to make his place in the king's guard, she was a stranger to everybody.
So when he had proposed this stunt - it might have been the heat or the workload of the day, it had seemed like a master stroke.
Now that she had seen those men, shrouded in shadows with their sinister blades - it didn't seem as bright an idea - or as fake as Karam had convinced her it would be. Preet had already seen them cut into the front guards - there was nothing faux about those blades or the blood they spilled. Her heart thudded in her ribcage. If those men got anywhere near the Kuwar Sahab - no - it was a shuddering thought.
The door opens a crack, despite her clammy hands losing the grip on handles quite a few times.
The darkness inside is rather forbidding. Preet is certain that she had been faster than those men, her knowledge on shortcuts far superior - its not possible that they had beaten her in reaching the child.
