The room chosen for negotiations had never before seen such tension.
Once, it had been a music chamber. Mirrors lined the walls, designed to multiply candlelight into endless constellations while sitar strings hummed dreams into the air. Today the instruments had been carried away. In their place: scrolls, maps, quills, witnesses.
The scent of roses was replaced by wax, parchment… and war masked as paperwork.
The King presided at the head of the carved sandalwood table. Anushka sat to his right this time—not behind a screen. This was her territory. Strategy was not a place one watched from behind silk curtains.
Generals.
Ministers.
Scribes.
The Pink Queen quietly praying in the adjacent shrine.
Lord Ashford rolled open a scroll.
Rao translated carefully.
Clause by clause.
Line by line.
Each word was a needle.
Exclusive trading rights in salt extraction.Silk export at tariffs chosen "cooperatively."British garrisons permitted "temporarily" to protect trade routes.
"Temporarily," Anushka repeated, voice smooth as polished obsidian. "How long is temporary in the vocabulary of an empire?"
Ashford smiled pleasantly. "As long as friendship lives, Your Majesty."
"So potentially," she said softly, "forever."
Silence rippled.
The King looked from British envoy to Anushka. His brows furrowed. He hated conflict. He hated thinking of his people as numbers in someone else's ledger. Yet he also saw the growing might of the foreigners—iron ships, rifles that spat fire faster than any musket he owned, and the endless resources of an empire stretching across oceans.
"Your people will prosper," Ashford said gently. "We will purchase your silk for prices that will make your coffers sing. Roads will be built. Railways. Schools."
Anushka leaned forward.
"And in those schools," she asked, "whose language will our children be taught to think in?"
Ashford's pale eyes flicked to her with new interest.
He had underestimated her.
Most men did.Most regretted it later.
The King raised a hand, calming the tension.
"My first duty is to my people," he said quietly. "Their food, their fields, their dignity."
Ashford bowed his head, hiding the flicker of triumph in his expression.
"Exactly, Your Majesty. We are here to ensure all three."
Outside, thunder rumbled though the sky held no clouds.
The Pink Queen's prayers were fierce now, whispered urgently as her rosary beads clicked like bones. She felt it in her chest—the same uneasy shiver she had when a cobra slithered unseen through long grass.
Inside the hall, ink met paper.
The King hesitated only once.
Anushka watched every movement of his hand.
If he signed, the world would not change in an explosion.Empires rarely work that way.
It would change silently.
Grain prices shifting.Language in schools shifting.Orders spoken in accents that never belonged to the soil.
But refusing meant war.
And war meant widows with shaved heads, children without rice bowls, fields red instead of green.
The King closed his eyes.
Then he signed.
A soundless crack echoed through history—like a branch breaking somewhere deep in a forest.
Ashford smiled.
"May this mark the beginning of eternal friendship," he declared.
Anushka stared at the paper, the neat ink strokes glistening like fresh wounds.
No one heard what she whispered under her breath:
"Or the beginning of the slow theft of a kingdom."
But the walls heard.The mirrors heard.And far away in the city, the wind carried it like prophecy.