Chapter 422: The Scout Who Came Back

They told their daughter the night before departure, once the day’s preparations had wound down and the small lodging had gone quiet enough for the conversation to actually land properly, Sekar kneeling to meet her eyes the way she always did for news that mattered.

"Mama and Papa both have to go somewhere for a while," Sekar said. "Somewhere considerably farther than Wanagiri. You’ll stay here, in the capital, where it’s safe."

Their daughter’s face did the careful work of processing this, the same deliberate stillness she brought to anything genuinely difficult, and for a moment Rama thought she might cry, braced himself for it, ready to promise anything that might ease it. She didn’t cry. She simply looked between them both, weighing something with a seriousness that made her seem, in that instant, considerably older than four.

"Is it because of the cold ones?" she asked.

"Partly," Rama said, deciding, in the moment, that a partial truth delivered honestly served her considerably better than a full one delivered too bluntly, or a comfortable lie she’d only see through later and resent them both for telling. "There’s something out east that’s been hurting people, and His Majesty’s asked me to go find out what it is. Your mother’s coming with me because she’s better at asking careful questions than anyone else he has."

"For how long?"

"We don’t know yet. Longer than Wanagiri, probably. We’ll send word back whenever we can."

Neither parent answered immediately, and she nodded slowly, apparently satisfied that the silence had confirmed it well enough. "Empu Wirasena told me a little already," she admitted. "Not everything. Just that something’s wrong out east, and that you might both need to go help fix it."

"He shouldn’t have told you that without asking us first," Sekar said, an edge of frustration in her voice that Rama suspected wasn’t really aimed at the old scholar at all.

"I asked him to," their daughter said simply. "I wanted to know, and I didn’t want you to have to be the one who told me something scary. I know it’s hard for you both to say scary things to me. I don’t mind knowing scary things as much as you think I do."

Something in that admission settled heavily in Rama’s chest, the plain, unwelcome evidence of a child who understood too much, too young, about a world that had never once asked her permission before handing her its burdens. He gathered her up anyway, holding her longer than the goodbye strictly required, and felt her small arms tighten around his neck with a strength that belied every worry he’d been carrying about her fragility.

"You’ll be brave," he told her. "The way you were at Tirtayasa. The way you were at the palace."

"I know how to be brave now," she said, muffled against his shoulder. "You taught me that. Both of you did."

Wirasena arrived at first light to see them off, staff in hand, his expression carrying the gravity of a man who understood exactly what he was being trusted with. "She’ll stay with me during the day," he said, "and with palace guardians through the night, under Ardhana’s own seal of protection. I’ll teach her what I can of the local scripts, if she’s willing, and I’ll keep writing down anything she tells me about her dreams, exactly as she says it, the way I asked you to."

"Watch her closely," Sekar said. "Not just her safety. Whatever’s speaking to her, however gently it’s spoken so far, I want to know immediately if that changes even slightly."

"You have my word," Wirasena said, and Rama, studying the old man’s face, found himself believing it fully for the first time since they’d met.

Their daughter tugged once at Rama’s sleeve before they parted, waiting until she had his full attention before she spoke again, quiet enough that only he and Sekar could hear it.

"If he talks to me while you’re gone," she said, meaning the shrine, meaning the warmth she’d stood before on that mountain path, "I’ll tell Empu Wirasena everything, exactly like I promised. But I’ll ask him something for you too, if that’s all right. I’ll ask if he knows anything about the place you’re going. Just in case he does, and just in case it helps."

Rama crouched to meet her eyes one final time, something tightening hard in his chest at the plain, generous bravery of the offer, a four year old trying to help protect her own parents the only way she currently knew how. "That would help enormously," he said. "Thank you, sayang."

"I’m not scared for you," she said. "I just want you both to come back the way you said you would."

"We will," Sekar told her, kneeling to fold her into one last embrace. "We will, and that’s a promise from both of us, not just one."

The expedition assembled at the capital’s eastern gate an hour later, twenty soldiers under a grizzled captain named Surya, supply mules loaded with provisions for a fortnight’s travel, Yudhistira riding at the formation’s head having volunteered himself back into service the moment word of the mission reached the garrison. Surya struck Rama as a careful man rather than a bold one, older than most captains Rama had met in this world, his eyes moving constantly across the assembled column as though counting every man twice before trusting the count.

"I’ve buried soldiers before," Surya said, when Rama fell in beside him to introduce himself properly. "I intend to bury as few of these as the hill country allows. If that means moving slower than His Majesty would prefer, I’ll answer for that choice myself."

"I’d rather move slow and arrive whole," Rama said, "than move fast and lose men to a threat we haven’t properly measured yet."

Surya studied him a moment, something like approval settling into his weathered face, and gave a short, satisfied nod before turning back to his own preparations.

Rama helped Sekar onto her mount, checked the fit of her borrowed riding gear with the same careful attention he’d once given tactical equipment before a deployment, and turned to look back one final time at the small figure standing beside Wirasena at the gate, one hand raised in a steady, deliberate wave. Their daughter didn’t cry, didn’t call after them, simply stood there watching until the column’s slow turn onto the eastern road finally swallowed her from view, and Rama carried the shape of that small, waving hand with him for the entire first hour of riding, unable to shake the feeling that he was leaving behind the only thing in either world that had ever genuinely mattered more than his own survival.

They were three miles out, the capital’s walls already shrinking behind them into pale distance, when the sound of a horse driven far past reasonable speed reached them from ahead rather than behind, hooves pounding the packed road with a desperate unevenness that told Rama something was badly wrong before the rider ever came into view.

The scout who appeared around the bend was barely upright in his saddle, one arm hanging useless at his side, his face gone the color of old ash, and he nearly fell from his mount entirely before Yudhistira caught him, lowering him roughly to the ground while Surya shouted for a healer none of them had thought to bring. Sekar was already moving, dropping from her own mount and crouching beside the fallen man with the same steady competence she’d shown at every crisis Rama had ever watched her walk into, pressing a folded cloth against the worst of the blood at his temple while she checked his breathing with quick, practiced hands.

"He’s in shock," she said. "Whatever happened to him, his body’s still fighting to process it. Someone get water, and something to cover him, he’s freezing despite the heat."

"Sent ahead," the scout managed, blood crusted dark along one temple, his breathing ragged and shallow. "Three days ago. Ordered to scout the outer hill passes before the main party arrived."

"What did you find?" Rama asked, crouching beside him, voice steady despite the cold dread already building in his chest.

The scout’s eyes found his, wide and utterly unmoored, the look of a man who had seen something his own mind refused to properly file away. "Nothing," he said. "No tribes. No villages. No cold ones, even, not the way the stories describe them." His hand closed weakly around Rama’s sleeve, desperate, insistent. "It’s not people out there anymore. It hasn’t been people for a long time. There’s something underneath the whole hill country, something enormous, and three days ago it opened one eye and looked directly at me."

The scout’s grip finally slackened, consciousness slipping from him all at once, and Sekar caught his weight before it could hit the ground, lowering him carefully while she checked the pulse at his throat with steady, practiced fingers.

"He’s alive," she said, relief and dread fighting for space in her voice in equal measure. "Barely. Whatever did this to him, it didn’t finish the job."

Rama rose slowly, looking past the fallen scout toward the hills rising pale and distant beyond the road’s next bend, feeling, for the fourth time since the crossing, that same slow, vast attention brushing against the very edge of his awareness, closer now than it had ever felt before, patient and enormous and entirely unhurried, as though it had already known, long before the scout ever reached them, exactly which direction they were about to ride.