Chapter 407: SUMMONS
Indra’s patrol returned on the fourth day, dust-covered and grim from whatever they’d found at the raided settlement to the northeast, and word of Tirtayasa’s own attack reached him within minutes of dismounting.
He came to the family’s door himself that evening rather than sending Wayan ahead of him, and something in his weathered face carried a weight Rama hadn’t seen from him before — not suspicion this time. Something closer to reckoning.
"I have questions," Indra said, through Wayan’s careful translation, "but I do not think I am the right person to ask them anymore."
The royal messenger arrived two days after that, riding alone on a horse considerably finer than anything Tirtayasa’s own stables kept, dust-streaked from hard travel but carrying himself with the specific bearing of a man accustomed to formal rooms rather than village squares.
He didn’t dismount at the well the way ordinary travelers did. He rode directly to Sartika’s pavilion, presented something wrapped in cloth bearing an unfamiliar seal, and waited with visible impatience while she read whatever the parchment inside contained.
Sartika’s expression, when she finally looked up, told Rama the answer before she’d translated a single word of it.
"You’ve been asked for," she said, gesturing them closer. "By name — or by description, since I doubt anyone here gave the messenger your actual name to carry. The warrior of impossible strength, defender of Tirtayasa." She read the phrase with the specific careful weight of someone quoting language chosen deliberately rather than casually. "King Ardhana requests your presence at court."
"Requests," Rama repeated, testing the word.
"I want to be precise about what that word carries here," Sartika said. "A request from a king is not the same as a request between equals. It is worded gently. It does not require gentle interpretation."
The messenger himself, once Wayan’s translation bridged enough of the gap for direct exchange, proved unwilling to soften the language any further than Sartika already had.
"His Majesty has heard a remarkable account," he said, formal and measured, the specific careful diction of someone who’d rehearsed this exact phrasing before ever reaching Tirtayasa’s gate. "A traveler defending a border village against organized raiders, alone, with capability no soldier in the royal guard could match. His Majesty wishes to understand this account directly, from the man himself, rather than through the imperfect relay of secondhand report."
"And if the man declines the honor?" Sekar asked carefully, watching the messenger’s face for whatever the answer’s true shape might reveal beneath its diplomatic surface.
The messenger’s composure didn’t crack, but something in his eyes shifted, a flicker of genuine discomfort at having to answer the question directly. "His Majesty would find that decision difficult to interpret favorably," he said. "A man capable of what this traveler is reported capable of, refusing a king’s invitation to explain himself — that reads, in the capital, as something considerably more troubling than simple reluctance."
The messenger accepted Sartika’s hospitality for the night, and left the family alone with the weight of what he’d delivered, and Rama and Sekar sat with it long after their daughter had finally fallen asleep, working through implications neither of them wanted to be the first to name plainly.
"I want to lay out both directions honestly," Sekar said finally, her voice carrying the specific flat precision she brought to genuinely difficult analysis. "Refuse, and we’re telling a king that a man capable of what you did last night doesn’t answer to his authority at all. That’s not neutral. That reads as threat, or as someone actively hiding something worth hiding from royal attention specifically."
"And accepting?"
"Accepting means walking directly into a political structure we barely understand, carrying secrets we can’t fully explain, in front of a court that will be watching for exactly the kind of inconsistency Sartika spent an entire afternoon probing for and never quite found." She rubbed her eyes, exhaustion and clarity fighting for the same space in her expression. "It means our cover story needs to hold up under considerably more sophisticated scrutiny than anything Tirtayasa’s ever thrown at it. Court advisors. Possibly people whose entire job is catching exactly the kind of lie we’ve been telling."
"But we control the story if we go. If we refuse, someone else controls it for us."
"That’s the calculation, yes." She looked at him directly, and Rama recognized in her expression the same weighing precision she’d once brought to institutional council votes worth considerably more than either of their lives individually. "Refuse, and we risk being hunted as a threat too dangerous to leave unaccounted for. Accept, and we risk being exposed as something considerably stranger than a traveling soldier, in front of people with far more resources than a border village to act on that exposure."
Their daughter stirred in her sleep, murmured something too soft to catch, and settled again, and both parents watched her for a moment in the particular silence that followed genuinely difficult decisions when there was no way to make them smaller.
"There’s a third option," Rama said slowly, working through it as he said it. "We don’t refuse outright, and we don’t walk in blind either. We go carefully. We control what we reveal the same way we’ve controlled it here — offer enough truth to satisfy the question, keep the rest buried exactly as deep as it’s stayed for seven weeks."
"With a king this time. Not a village elder with limited resources to press us if the story doesn’t hold."
"With a king," he agreed. "But also with Sartika’s account backing us — a village she governs, defended without loss of life, by someone she’s already vouched for as protector rather than threat. That’s not nothing walking in the door with us."
Sekar considered this for a long moment, turning it the way she turned every genuinely uncertain problem, testing its edges before deciding whether it held.
"I don’t think we have a version of this that’s actually safe," she said finally. "I think we have a version that’s survivable, if we’re careful enough, and a version that guarantees we spend the rest of whatever time we have here as fugitives in a kingdom we can’t navigate without getting caught eventually anyway." She exhaled slowly, the decision settling into her shoulders even before she said it aloud. "I think we go. Carefully. And I think we start building the version of our story that needs to hold up in front of a throne, starting tonight, because we won’t have seven weeks to refine this one."