Will Of Infinity

Navigate - Part 3

The walls of Toran Kota were never dull. It had been the first thing to annoy her about her new home when she had come in as the daughter-in-law of the place. There was no visible sign of imperfection, no space for shadow to breathe. The bright blue drapes adorned every possible corner they could find to decorate, the silver sewn into it in rows of miniature rings orbiting around each other in loops.

Mudhra had been the crown princess of Torni for a decade now and she still had moments when she wished she could add bits of holes or stains to them.

Tuhina wished she had such trivial urges back at Agapura. Her most common one involved fire and it was on a different level of darkly humourous, when the entire world believed that it had been a fire that had begun the ruin of her sanity. She didn't care about correcting them.

As they sat facing each other, Tuhina rested her folded leg against the pale blue bolster at the end of her settee. It would take her niece a while before she made her move, she remembered from experience. Mahir said that she got it from his older brother, the dichotomy of caution and chaos.

Well, used to say, she corrected absently in her mind.

"I heard some news," Mudhra said in that tone she once used to bring when she had seen her cousins hatch a plan to jump over the walls in the middle of the night. The rook moved on the board and Mudhra's bangles clinked gently as she withdrew her hand, placing it back on her lap elegantly. Her azure dupatta had slid down to her shoulder from her hair and now sat against her embellished blouse with a butterfly's touch away from drifting to the ground. Tuhina kept her glance on the board and took a sip from her glass of wine before placing it back on the wooden table beside her. The crown princess was smarter than she was before but she was still impatient, the restlessness of a domestic parrot with memory of the sky.

Tuhina had groomed her wings in golden cages for years now and was willing to out-wait the bait of her niece.

The knight slid through the board and Tuhina looked up with a practiced ease of calm. Mudhra's brows creased at the move before she smoothed them out, offering her aunt a pleasant smile.

"You remember the gift I was supposed to receive from the hunters who had the favour from us a while ago?" she continued, bringing up her knee to rest her elbow on it, her sari moulding itself to the new position, "I got news yesterday that they were unable to bring it."

"I'm sure they can make up for disappointing you," Tuhina commented and Mudhra laughed, shaking her head as she leaned over to pick a grape from the pile of fruit beside her.

"It wasn't disappointing," the princess insisted, and Tuhina chose to ignore the blatant lie in favour of letting the news come out further, "I was actually glad that they hadn't brought it. What would I do with an elephant?"

The same thing people did with unnecessary gifts. The older queen offered a hint of an agreeing smile instead.

"He said something interesting though," Mudhra chewed on her grape as she perused her choices of moves, "Apparently it was an animal of Swatan that they had hunted."

Tuhina had suspected something on these lines when she had been asked for the game. She had come to Torni to spend a month in 'safety' until they received news from Agapura of it being right for the Queen to return. She had initially been asked to stay with Mahir's relatives but had refused, making an excuse of wanting to visit her niece instead. It was easy to make people listen when you were a new widow, grief making men weak to requests.

It hadn't been a request but she wasn't particular about fixing misconceptions as long as she got her peace. She would wait until Mogh returned and then -