Free Rebel Queen by Michelle Moran Page B

courtyard immediately stopped talking, and Anu’s small feet slapped down the hall to fetch me.
    Father’s hand closed over mine. “ Shubhkamnaye , little peacock,” he mouthed. Good luck.
    I fastened the necklace and tucked the charm beneath my angarkha. Then Anu burst into the room and said breathlessly, “Sita, he’s here! The queen’s Dewan is here! It’s time!”
    I hurried to the door, where Grandmother stood with a silver plate. In India, new guests are welcomed by passing this plate in a circular direction close to their head. Different houses will put different items on it, but there will always be a lit aarti—or lamp—and a small dish of vermillion with which to make a red tilak, or mark, on the welcomed guest’s forehead.
    For all of my brave talk with Anu, I couldn’t have been more nervous stepping out into my own courtyard than a stranger would be taking his first step in a foreign land. The Dewan was waitingjust before our wooden gate, surrounded by two dozen well-dressed men in double-breasted Western-style coats; a servant holding a small tasseled umbrella was shielding him from the early morning sun. The servant himself was thin, but the Dewan was even thinner, and so tall that, with his giant head, I thought that he looked like an enormous stalk of corn.
    Father took his place at my left and Shivaji stood to my right. “Calmly,” Shivaji whispered as we approached.
    I held the aarti plate as steady as I could before the Dewan, then moved it in a circular direction. When it was time to push my thumb into the small cup of vermillion and use it to create a mark on his forehead, my hand was shaking. Breathe, I told myself. I would have to perform the same short ceremony for every man there.
    When I was done welcoming each of the men, the Dewan crossed our courtyard and took a seat on the wide yellow cushion a servant had arranged beneath our tree. All of his men immediately positioned themselves to his left, while the villagers of Barwa Sagar sat on the ground to the right. I was left with Father and Shivaji in the middle. All three of us bowed before him. I could feel the villagers watching me, the first woman in Barwa Sagar to have broken purdah in the history of who-knew-when.
    “Sita Bhosale,” the Dewan began, and his voice was surprisingly deep. I thought it would be high and thin, like a reed. “You are the daughter of Nihal, who is the son of Adinath, a member of the Kshatriya. Is that right?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you are seventeen?”
    “I turned seventeen last month.”
    The Dewan snapped his fingers and a servant beside him brought him a pipe, which the young man hurriedly lit. TheDewan inhaled deeply, then exhaled, never taking his eyes off me. “You look like one of Nihâl Chand’s paintings,” he said. He sat forward on his cushion, and the smoke from his pipe curled around his face. “Have you seen them?”
    I knew my cheeks must be flushed. “Yes, Dewan-ji.”
    Who hadn’t seen copies of Nihâl Chand’s work, one of India’s greatest painters? When he lived, the Maharaja Savant Singh gave the artist a sketch of his favorite singer, the beautiful Bani Thani. Nihâl Chand took the king’s simple drawing and created a series of paintings that represented the ideal woman:pale cheeks, sensuous lips, a high forehead, thin brows, and wide lotus-blossom eyes. He used her face for all of his images of our goddess Radha, much as some European masters used prostitutes for the faces of their Madonnas. To be compared to Nihâl Chand’s Bani Thani . . . Well, it wasas much a compliment as an insult.
    “Shall we see if your skills are as impressive as your beauty?”
    He had his servants produce each of the weapons I’d been training with for eight years: matchlock muskets, knives, bows, swords, rifles, pistols, axes, and daggers. Targets were set up around the courtyard, and I was asked to pick my favorite weapon first. I knew immediately—the Dewan’s teak bow. It was