The day after the court visit was a hectic one for Eshaan.
By midday, Eshaan had learned that he had apparently become a royal advisor, inherited Bhaskaracharya's observatory, and even been promised a hundred gold coins. The rumours got more absurd as they spread across the Vedha Shala, and Eshaan was laughing at them, since none of it had actually happened.
He was sitting by the water channel when Devendra came and sat beside him.
"They're saying you were offered a seat at court and refused it," Devendra said, and started scraping algae from the same stretch of the water channel he scraped it from every morning. "Out of loyalty to Acharya, apparently."
"That isn't what happened."
"I know. I told the boy who said it that you were offered a horse instead, and he believed it for a full minute." Devendra chuckled, the sound rare enough coming from him that a passing junior attendant actually turned his head to check what had caused it.
Eshaan sighed. His own friend had now started a rumour of his own, and about a horse, of all things. Does he even think I know how to ride one?
"You realise someone's going to ask me to prove that now."
"Someone already has." Devendra didn't look up. "Arjun. This morning. I told him you were an excellent rider and he seemed satisfied with that."
"I've never sat on a horse in my life."
"I know that too." Devendra shrugged, unbothered, as though the truth of the matter had never once been the point of telling the story. "Doesn't change how fast it travels."
Arjun himself arrived a few minutes later, water pot balanced badly on one hip, already talking before he'd fully reached them.
"Is it true you rode alongside the king's own guard on the way back?" he asked, breathless with the effort of both walking and gossiping at the same speed. "Someone said the horse was white."
"I walked back, Arjun. The same way I walked there."
"That's not what I heard."
"It's what happened."
Arjun considered this with visible disappointment, as though the truth were a personal inconvenience to him rather than simply a fact. "Well. It's a worse story that way." He set the water pot down and wandered off toward the kitchens, already, by the look of him, reworking the tale into something he found more satisfying.
Eshaan looked at Devendra. Devendra looked back at him, entirely without apology.
"You did start it," Eshaan argued.
"I did." Devendra went back to his scraping. "Doesn't mean I have to be sorry about it."
Vrushabh found Eshaan that evening, before the meal bell, and stopped him midway toward the dormitory, Vrushika trailing a step behind him.
"A horse," Vrushabh said, before he'd even come to a full stop. "I heard you rode in beside the royal guard like some general returning from a campaign."
Eshaan sighed heavily and gave a look at Devendra, who was covering his mouth to control his laughter. "I walked back with Acharya."
"That's not what half this observatory is saying."
"Half this observatory has never once seen me ride anything, and yet decided I could. That's not really my doing, Vrushabh." Eshaan kept his voice even. "I can't be blamed for what people choose to believe when I've said nothing to encourage it."
"You didn't correct it either."
"I corrected it about eleven times today. It didn't slow anyone down." Eshaan shrugged. "I stopped trying by midday. You're welcome to keep trying, if you think you'll have better luck."
Vrushabh's jaw worked for a moment, clearly hunting for something sharper to say and not quite finding it. In the end, he settled for, "The king called you his subject, even though you're a pariah from Pataliputra."
"You're right," Eshaan agreed. "I hadn't thought of it that way."
Eshaan had, for a moment, clearly forgotten one thing — Bharat wasn't a united nation at this point. Ujjayini stood under a different ruler than Pataliputra did. So, in that sense, he was indeed a pariah here.
Vrushabh wasn't expecting Eshaan to agree with his statement, and so he stood there a moment, off-balance, and Eshaan almost felt sorry for him.
"I'd be troubled," Vrushabh tried again, recovering some of his footing, "if a king who isn't from my homeland was curious about my father's household, even though it isn't a known one."
"Some of us were born already belonging somewhere," Eshaan stated flatly. "It's a different kind of proof. I imagine it takes just as much work to hold onto."
Vrushabh clenched his fists, since he didn't have an answer for that one either. He turned and walked off toward the dormitory instead, but Vrushika lingered.
"He'll tell people he won that," she whispered, once her brother was safely out of earshot.
"Let him. Costs me nothing."
"You didn't even try very hard to stop it."
"There wasn't a version of this conversation where I changed his mind. He'd already decided what he came here believing."
Eshaan looked at her. "You didn't join in this time either."
"I noticed that myself, actually." She said it plainly. "Don't read too much into it." And she left after her brother, though not, Eshaan thought, in quite the same hurry he had.
Not everyone found the whole business amusing.
Shlok said what he thought of it at the evening meal, without much heat in his voice, which somehow landed harder than heat would have. "I've copied that logbook every morning for a month," he said, breaking his bread.
"Reset the same six instruments so many times I could do it blind. Nobody's inventing stories about a horse for me."
"I know," Eshaan agreed. "I didn't ask for any of it either."
"I'm not saying you asked for it, but the rest of us are doing the same work you are, and the instrument just happened to need fixing on the one night you were standing right there." He wasn't angry, exactly. "That's luck, and mere coincidence, that you happened to see what others didn't while you were standing idly by."
Eshaan didn't wish to fish for an answer, so he kept quiet and simply nodded. Not every reaction was sour. Madhavan had apparently told two separate people that whatever Eshaan had done with the tribute figures wasn't luck, and that had travelled almost as fast as the rumours had, though with considerably less embellishment attached to it. Nirvaan, for his part, said nothing to Eshaan directly, but the terrace duties stayed exactly as strict as they had always been, which Eshaan understood, by now, was Nirvaan's own particular way of saying that nothing here had actually changed.
By the time the lamps were lit that night, the rumours had mostly settled into ordinary discussions about the upcoming days' work, and Eshaan was almost grateful for it.
A letter for Eshaan arrived the next morning, before he had even reached the water channel for his duties.
It came by way of a cloth merchant travelling south along the trade road, a man who had apparently been asked by three separate people in the Pataliputra market whether he knew of anyone bound for Ujjayini and the Vedha Shala. He handed it over to the gatekeeper looking thoroughly relieved to be rid of it, and it reached Eshaan folded in its cotton wrapping, his father's seal pressed into the wax exactly the way he remembered it.
He carried it to the far corner of the terrace, away from anyone who still wanted a story out of him, and sat down with his back against the cold stone before he broke the seal.
Dear son,
Your letter reached us nine weeks after you must have written it, which your mother calls a scandal, but I call simply the distance between you and us. We both read it twice before either of us could utter a single word. We are proud of you, son — you travelled far and wide at such a tender age, and finally reached your destination.
I didn't expect, when I gave you leave to travel with Acharya Kripa, that you would travel all the way to Ujjayini, and even pass the test administered there. Your mother wants me to tell you she is proud, though she would say that word is far too small for what she actually means, and would spend a whole page hunting for a better one if I let her write this letter instead of me. So I am writing quickly, before she notices I have already started.
I want to tell you one thing plainly, even though I suspect that you are surrounded right now by a great many people telling you what to do. Stand tall, Eshaan — you are meant for great things, but never forget to look back and take a step back before leaping into the unknown. And Do. Not. Fear. Dangers. We are here for you.
Your mother asks me to add — Vasu came by the house three weeks past, on his way through with a catch for the market, and asked after you. We told him what little we knew, which was your last letter, read to him nearly whole, because he asked, and because neither of us had the heart to make him wait. He said to tell you the river here misses you.
We are well, but the house has grown quiet without you. Learn everything you can from the world you are in. Come home when you are ready, and not one day before.
Your father,
Mahesh
Tears rolled down Eshaan's cheeks as he re-read the letter once more before folding it back along its own creases. He was suddenly missing home, even though he didn't have a great many memories of it — but whatever he had, he treasured.
Eshaan sat by the water channel with everything else set behind him for the moment, his mind completely engulfed in the contents of the letter. A soft tap on his right shoulder snapped him out of the trance, and he saw Devendra standing beside him.
"Let's go, it's already evening."
"Evening…? Already?"
Devendra noticed Eshaan's state and his puffed cheeks that meant he was crying about something, he simply held onto his arm and made him stand.
"Don't worry about anything, everything is under control now, crybaby." Devendra chuckled, and patted Eshaan's back.
"Huh… who is crybaby?"
"You.. hehe"
"Shut up, man. I am not a crybaby."
"Ooooo… Eshaan. Crybaby."
Eshaan started laughing with Devendra as they both reached their end of teasing. That night, Devendra insisted on attaching his bed with Eshaan's even went onto argue and, talked about their homes, until they both fell asleep.