Word of the Wanagiri attack reached the capital two days before Rama did, carried by a fast rider Yudhistira had dispatched the same night, and Sekar heard it first from a palace messenger's carefully neutral recitation rather than from her husband's own mouth, a fact that left her hands unsteady for the better part of an hour afterward.
The messenger, a young woman in palace livery who clearly hadn't been told how to soften a report this strange, delivered it in the flat, careful cadence of someone repeating words exactly as instructed rather than words she'd chosen herself: an engagement at the Wanagiri manor, two hostile creatures of unknown origin, one confirmed dead, the foreign traveler unharmed. She left almost as quickly as she'd arrived, bowing twice, clearly relieved to be done with a report she plainly didn't understand any better than Sekar did.
