“I wanted you trampled for your treasons,” Smidha snarled from behind and to Jahanara’s right.
“Silence, you—you…witch! You have no right to speak here!”
Smidha continued remorselessly, “You should be grateful to your sister. To have a third opportunity to properly serve the family, despite your history of treason! And to be well-married in the bargain? I should think you would be overjoyed at the opportunity to live.”
Nadira and Jahanara both sat stone-faced. Their very lack of expression indicated their complete agreement.
Seeing no one would silence Jahanara’s advisor, Roshanara fell forward on her hands and knees, then, and started to blubber.
Letting her sister’s noises wash past her in a wave that did not touch her, Jahanara reflected on the fine works the Das brothers had accomplished on her behalf. The merchant had not only negotiated the bride price, he’d preserved the very particular wording of her offer: be awarded the very highest of ranks in both sowar and zat, and marry an imperial princess for your service to the throne. Jahanara would have married Shaista herself, had he arrived in a timely fashion instead of delaying in search of some advantage. Such a marriage was completely out of the question now, even if her uncle had made all speed to ride to Dara’s aid. No, her pregnancy had narrowed options, but then she’d made allowances for Shaista failing to show proper support for Dara. Rarely had anyone been so glad of any such precaution taken in dynastic politics as Jahanara had been since the moment her menses stopped.
“Such a child!” Smidha threw up her hands. “Gauharara is twice the lady you are, and she’s not even ten!”
“Are you done, sister?” Jahanara said the words softly.
“I—I—I can’t, Janni.”
“Oh, stop it! You know you can. And stop trying to play on my affections by using my nickname. We both know you detest me.”
Roshanara sniffled, wiped her nose, peeked out at her sister with one red-rimmed eye. “I do not detest you, not really. I—I—fear you. No one should have been able to pull such a monumental victory from Aurangzeb’s grasp. He was emperor for nearly fifty years in the times your pet sorcerers come from!”
Momentarily stunned that Roshanara should be the one to fully recognize just how Jahanara had made the rest of the family dance to her will, Jahanara slowly shook her head.
“Do this and you will have nothing to fear from me, ever again.”
Roshanara sat up, blinked a few times.
Jahanara let the statement sink in for a moment before continuing, “Shaista Khan is older, certainly, and from all accounts, most generous with his wives. You will have all that you do here, and be treasured by him as befits your station. Better still, you will get away from me and from the shadows cast by your previous bad acts.”
“But”—Roshanara wiped at her face—“Father was always against princesses of the family marrying.”
Jahanara knew she had her sister’s tacit agreement then. A legitimate appeal to tradition from Roshanara was like a tiger asking for tea—fanciful in the extreme.
“He is no longer amongst us,” Jahanara said. She left out adding the words because you helped his assassins, which very much wanted to leap from her lips.
“But what does Dara say about this?”
“He mentioned execution, but I was able to convince him this was the better alternative,” Nadira said. “Smidha was not joking. You could have very easily been staked out for the elephants to crush. Or beheaded, at least.”
That penetrated the last of Roshanara’s reticence. And well it should have. Dara had wanted much the same fate for Shaista Khan, truth be told. The only thing that had stayed the emperor’s hand—well, aside from the problem of having to fight another battle—was the death of Asaf Khan. He’d even said, huffily, “I wouldn’t have put it past the crafty old lion to have died just to advance his son’s designs. I can’t very well have him executed for attending to his father in Asaf Khan’s last days and hours.”
Jahanara had not offered an opinion on that, just let Nadira carry the argument.
And here they were.
Jahanara shook her head.
May God grant that the two of them come to love one another. Or, if He should deem it appropriate, kill one another. Either would serve the rest of us equally well. God, I’d be satisfied if they just stay out of the way.
Agra
Mission House
“Everything?” asked Rodney. “All of the saltpeter, too?”
Bobby nodded. “That’s what Jadu Das tells us.”
“But he said—”
Bobby waved his hand dismissively. “As the man says, that was then, this is now. ‘Now’ being after he sweet-talked Jahanara into giving him a big—huge, he calls it—consignment of her own goods.”
Ricky was grinning. “Which, of course—seeing as how we already had enough of our goods to fill the Lønsom Vind and then some—would require adding another of her ships to the flotilla going to Jeddah.”
“To Jeddah and beyonnnnd,” added Bobby, who was now grinning himself. “That’s one of the new ships we’re about—the ones modeled on USE designs that Jahanara has been building in Surat. She’s even going to let one of them accompany the Lønsom Vind all the way home. And we get one fourth of her hold capacity.”
“I thought those were all warships,” said John, thinking the youngest men of the Mission had matured on their trip east. “And are you telling us she’s already got three built?”
“The third one’s still a few weeks away from being completed—but it’ll be finished by the time we get to Surat.” Ricky shrugged. “And, yes, they’re warships, by seventeenth-century values of ‘warship.’ They all double as troop carriers—or cargo haulers—although they don’t carry as much as a pure merchant ship could. But that’s enough for our purposes. Except for the saltpeter, everything we’re bringing back is high value, low volume.”
“I’ll be damned. That woman is…” John started to lean back and then stopped, wincing. Sitting straight up on cushions put some strain on a spine accustomed to chairs with backrests, but the pain
