Free Shadow Princess by Indu Sundaresan Page A

many years, to gain. Dara reached out and rubbed his palm over the stone in front of him. Had she meant so much to their Bapa then? He was old enough (and in a zenana full of women with little to do other than gossip he would not have needed to be very old) to understand the import of the child who mewled away in the wet nurse’s apartments in the palace—she had been the fourteenth child of his parents’ union, which meant that over the past nineteen years no other woman had captured his Bapa’s fancy and imprisoned his heart like his mother had. She had meant so much to him in life that, at her death, Emperor Shah Jahan was willing to throw away everything else he had and to live the rest of his days, aged beyond his time, in obscurity, with a son on the throne instead of him.
    “Where did you hear this?” he said at last, thoughts humming in his head. What did this mean? Who would be his regent? For Prince Muhammad Dara Shikoh knew that he was the heir to the Mughal throne and that, if this news were indeed true, in a few days he could find himself Emperor at sixteen years of age.
    “Aurangzeb,” Nadira said.
    “How does he . . .” Dara shook his head. “He probably listened at the door when the Khan-i-khanan was granted an audience in the fort. Bapa would not have called Mirza Mahabat Khan for counsel—he rarely does such a thing—he would have informed him of this decision . . . which means,” Dara said more to himself than to Nadira, “that he has made up his mind.”
    “No one but you can be Emperor,” Nadira said softly. She was not looking at him, though her head was turned toward him and slanted to one side, her eyes cast down upon his hands.
    Of the four princes, Dara was the one who had been granted his mother’s beauty, her spectacular physical attractiveness, her height and erect carriage. He was also a poet at heart, and his interests lay more in thinking and philosophy than in the saddle or on the battlefield. But, as with most things, Dara was equally accomplished in either. He could ride a horse with such grace that it seemed as though the animal, finely tuned to every twitch of the reins in his hands, was but an extension of him. His childhood masters, great generals themselves, had been awed by the fluidity with which he wielded his sword, his mace, his spear, surpassing their expectations of him. At study, the mullas found him steady and with an unshakable concentration. He asked questions of them about Islam and Hinduism and Buddhism that they could not answer, or did not dare to think about; his grasp of languages was stellar—he seemed to do anything he set his mind to effortlessly. And in that lay Prince Dara Shikoh’s only fault. He was well aware of his talents, and so he was lazy, indolent, uncaring, and unnecessarily disrespectful to others, even his teachers.
    Dara glanced down at Nadira when she spoke. She had uncovered her face, and her veil lay on the floor beside them. It was woven of a thin white muslin, and the cloth had a sheen to it. Dara picked up the veil and wrapped it around Nadira’s shoulders. At his touch, she seemed to tremble, and he looked at her more fully.
    “How old are you?”
    If Nadira realized this to be a strange question—they were cousins and had been in close contact with each other for the past few months in the imperial zenana —she did not show it.
    “Fifteen,” she said. “A year younger than you, Dara.”
    It was the first time also that she had used his name; thus far, when they had talked or played board games together, she had always begun and continued conversations without any form of address. The sun had lurched lower into the sky, and its rays now slanted into the baradari, and in this illuminating light, Dara saw Nadira as though for the first time. He had watched her take off her veil with a sense of shock, although he had seen her face many times before. Here, in public, with the imam at the other end of the baradari and