Ujjayini, four days after the dispatch left the war camp
The rider reached the Vedha Shala after dark, mud-splattered from a route that had clearly avoided the main roads for most of its length, and refused to hand his message to anyone except Bhaskaracharya directly, exactly as he'd been instructed.
Bhaskaracharya received him in the lower courtyard rather than the upper study, still dressed in his official attire that he had worn at the palace's granary.
"You've ridden hard," Bhaskaracharya observed, taking the sealed dispatch from the man's outstretched hand.
"His Majesty's own instruction, Acharya. He said this couldn't wait for the regular courier route, and that it was to reach you and no one else first."
"Sit. Drink something before you fall over where you stand." Bhaskaracharya gestured toward a servant already hurrying forward with water, and the rider accepted it gratefully, his hands shaking slightly as he drank.
"I can't stay long, Acharya. His Majesty expects a reply carried back within the week, and the roads west aren't getting any safer the longer this war runs."
"You'll rest tonight regardless. If you are not in good health, you will be dead before reaching out to his majesty with my reply." Bhaskaracharya's tone left no room for argument, and the rider, too exhausted to press the point further, simply nodded.
Bhaskaracharya broke the seal there in the courtyard, reading by the light of a single lamp a servant had brought out at the rider's arrival. Eshaan was crossing the yard on his way back from the observatory's upper platform, when he stopped short at the sight of Acharya whose face was changing as he read something.
"Acharya?"
Bhaskaracharya didn't answer immediately, finishing the letter first, his eyes moving back over certain lines a second time before he finally lowered the page.
"Go inside, Eshaan," he ordered, though his voice carried none of its usual certainty. "This isn't something to discuss standing in a courtyard."
"Acharya, what's happened?"
"Inside," Bhaskaracharya ordered again, more firmly this time, realising the urgency in the tone of Acharya, Eshaan followed his orders without further protest.
Ujjayini, the upper study, later that same evening
Bhaskaracharya set the dispatch down on the low table between them once they were seated, though he didn't immediately let Eshaan take it up to read for himself.
"Before you see this," he said, "I want you to understand that nothing in it is confirmed. It's a report, Eshaan, written by soldiers who don't know what they've actually found, describing something they don't fully understand themselves. I would rather you hear the uncertainty from me first than build a false certainty out of a few written lines."
"Acharya, please."
Bhaskaracharya studied Eshaan with silence, then finally pushed the dispatch across the table. Eshaan read it and followed Acharya's silence.
A patrol operating along the western passes, well behind the main lines of the war, had taken an unnamed prisoner into custody eleven days earlier. An elderly man, travelling entirely alone, found near a stretch of road the army had closed to civilian traffic since the fighting began. He had refused to give a name under questioning, refused to explain his presence in a restricted region, and had offered no resistance at all when the soldiers took him, an oddity the report noted twice, as though the writer himself had found it strange enough to mention.
What he had offered, according to the third paragraph, was a single object found on his person during the search. A small, worn kamandal (A pot usually made of clay or copper), its surface marked with symbols the searching soldier hadn't recognized, they were close enough to an inscription someone would find in an old temple.
Eshaan's hands had gone still on the page.
"Acharya," he said quietly, "this is Kripa's kamandal."
"We don't know that."
"I do know it. I've seen it. He carried it the entire time I trained under him, the entire journey west, and I would recognize it described this plainly anywhere." Eshaan's voice had totally changed into a serious tone.
"An old man, travelling alone, near the western passes, refusing to give his name, and the description matches the one object I know for certain belonged to him. How is that not him, Acharya?"
"Because over a long life, I have learned that the world creates coincidences far more often than certainties, and a wise man waits for the second before he acts on the first."
Bhaskaracharya's voice stayed level, though something in his own expression suggested he found the argument less convincing than he wanted it to sound. "The staff you found at the gate. Now a kamandal matching a description in a soldier's report he barely understood himself. Both could be Kripa's. Both could equally be objects that passed through several hands before anyone we've heard from ever touched them."
"You don't believe that."
Bhaskaracharya was quiet a moment. "No," he admitted finally. "I don't particularly believe it. But belief isn't proof, Eshaan, and I would rather manage this properly than let either of us chase a shadow across a warzone on nothing firmer than a strong suspicion."
"Then what do we do?"
"The king has already done something," Bhaskaracharya said, gesturing toward the dispatch. "Read the final line."
Eshaan looked down, and found it there, written in a slightly different way from the rest of the report, added afterwards.
I have ordered the prisoner brought to my camp near the Mahi river crossing for proper questioning, under guard but unharmed. Should this man be who I suspect he might be, I would rather he answer to me directly.
"He suspects," Eshaan said slowly. "The king already suspects who this is."
"He knows Kripa's name, Eshaan, and he had a conversation with you during his audience almost a year back."
Bhaskaracharya continued, "If the king suspects this prisoner is the same man, he has good reason to want him questioned properly and quietly."
"Then he could be in danger either way. From his own side, if the king's suspicions are wrong and he's simply a prisoner among many. Or from ours, if he's exactly who we think he is, and someone decides to use him as a hostage against His Majesty."
Bhaskaracharya didn't argue the point, which frightened Eshaan more than any denial could have.
"There's something else in the report," Bhaskaracharya said eventually, his voice quieter now. "A note from the garrison commander, appended near the bottom. He writes that the prisoner, when finally pressed on why he offered no resistance, said only that he had been waiting for someone to find him, and that he trusted it would happen before it is too late either way."
"That sounds like him," Eshaan said, and felt something unsteady rise in his chest at the thought. "That sounds exactly like something Kripa would say."
"It could also be the words of a man who has simply given up hope of anything better, Eshaan. And I have seen and known prisoners who make their own capture sound like they are patiently waiting for someone important to get them out of that place."
"You don't believe that either."
"No, I don't"
They sat with that a while, the lamp between them burning steadily, neither finding much more to say that the silence didn't already carry better than words could have.
Ujjayini, past midnight
Eshaan couldn't sleep, the dispatch's words repeating themselves in his mind long after Bhaskaracharya had finally retired, exhausted, to his own quarters with instructions that Eshaan do the same.
He sat instead on the low step outside his dormitory, the staff he'd bought at the gate resting across his knees, running his thumb along the same worn groove he had been tracing since he found the staff a few days ago.
Devendra came looking for Eshaan and found him sitting there. "You should be asleep," Devendra suggested, settling down beside him without waiting for an invitation.
"I know"
"Acharya told me a little of it. Not everything. Enough to understand why you're sitting out here instead."
Eshaan didn't say anything and kept turning the staff over in his hands.
"If the prisoner is really my old mentor, then he's been in custody for eleven days already, questioned by soldiers and now he's being marched across a warzone to have an audience with the king."
"And if it isn't him?"
"Then, I don't know what to do. I don't know where to look. I am completely a blank slate who couldn't think straight."Eshaan's voice slowly died down, as he dug his face in his lap.
Devendra didn't know how to console him, or what to do that would calm his friend. So, they sat in silence for a long while and watched the last of the courtyard's lamp burn down towards morning.
"What will you do, once you know which one it is?" Devendra asked eventually.
Eshaan had previously considered these questions while talking to Acharya and he couldn't say yet. "I don't know yet, but I don't intend to simply wait here and knowing my old mentor is in trouble."
"You know Bhaskaracharya won't let you ride off into a warzone alone, whatever you decide."
"I know."
"And you're going to try anyway, if it comes to that."
Eshaan didn't answer directly, which was an answer enough. Devendra sighed, and didn't press further. He rose to leave, "For what it's worth, I hope it isn't him."
Eshaan watched him go, the courtyard emptying slowly around him as the last of the household finally settled toward sleep, and sat alone a while longer with the staff still resting across his knees.
Ujjayini, three days later
The second dispatch arrived within considerably less time than the first. It was delivered through the ordinary courier route this time, addressed formally to Bhaskaracharya.
Eshaan was present when it arrived, the two of them sharing the upper study over a set of astronomical corrections neither had properly returned their attention to since the first dispatch had upended the evening it arrived.
Bhaskaracharya read this one in silence, his expression giving away considerably less than it had the first time, and when he finally set it down, he stared at Eshaan for a long time before speaking.
"The prisoner has reached the camp near Mahi river crossing," he said. "King Vindhyavarman questioned him personally, three days past."
"And?"
Bhaskaracharya's hand rested briefly on the letter, as though considering, even now, whether to soften what came next.
"He asked to see you, Eshaan. Specifically. Before he would answer a single question the king put to him."
Eshaan's chest tightened at the words of Acharya and he gasped for air to calm himself down.
"That's him, that has to be him."
"The king believes so as well," Bhaskaracharya agreed. "Enough that he's already made arrangements, pending my agreement, for you to travel to his camp under guard, to confirm the prisoner's identity in person."
"When?"
"As soon as I decide on your departure. But, I haven't decided yet, Eshaan. I want you to understand that clearly before you allow yourself to hope any further than you already have. It is unsafe to send a twelve year old child to a battlefield."
"And if you decide against it?"
"Then I will find another way to have the prisoner's identity confirmed that doesn't involve marching you across a battlefield to do it," Bhaskaracharya said.
"I could ask someone trusted to go in your stead and confirm the identity of the prisoner and ask him to look for the details that you and I would share with the person. And he will carry a handwritten letter from you as well to confirm that he is your spokesperson"
"It wouldn't be the same, Acharya. If it's him, and he's asked for me specifically, then a stranger carrying a description isn't going to give him whatever he actually needs from that meeting. It won't give me that either."
Bhaskaracharya stared at Eshaan with blank eyes, "You've grown considerably more stubborn since the day you first arrived here, Eshaan."
"I had a good teacher for it."
That earned him something close to a tired smile, gone almost as quickly as it appeared. "I'll have my answer for you within two days. Whatever you're already deciding for yourself in that head of yours, I would ask you to at least grant me those two days before you act onit."
Eshaan looked down at the staff still resting against the wall beside his desk, the worn wood catching the lamplight exactly as it had the evening he'd first carried it home.
"Then decide quickly, Acharya," he said. "Because whatever you choose, I already know what I intend to do if you say no."