Vindhyavarman closed the door behind Vidhya and stood there a moment, his hand still resting against the wood, before he finally turned back to face Eshaan.
Eshaan braced himself for questions he didn't have honest answers to but to his surprise, they never came.
"Sit, Eshaan," the king said instead, gesturing toward the low table Vidhya had abandoned only moments ago. "You look like a man who has eaten far too much to digest in one evening."
"Your Majesty," Eshaan started, unsure whether this was an opening or a trap, "about what was discussed—"
"Was discussed between you and her," Vindhyavarman finished, settling onto the cushion across from him with none of the formality he'd worn in the Sabha. "I am not going to ask you to repeat it, child. Whatever passed in this room while I stood outside my own door was not, I suspect, mine to hear, and I have known Vidhya better than anyone."
Eshaan hadn't expected that. He'd braced for pressure, for a volley of questions, so he just had to ask, "You're not curious?"
"I am consumed by curiosity," Vindhyavarman admitted, something dry returning to his voice. "But curiosity and entitlement are not the same thing, whatever most men in my position believe. You'll tell me when you're ready to, or you won't, and either way it is not the end of the world."
Eshaan found himself, oddly, more unsettled by that than he would have been by an interrogation.
"There is something I would ask of you, Your Majesty," he said instead, "Nothing to do with tonight. Something for the year ahead."
"Go on."
"I want to begin preparing properly for my eventual service to you," Eshaan said, choosing each word very carefully. "My father trained me in administration before I travelled to Ujjayini. I understand ledgers, tribute, provincial accounts. What I don't understand is Malwa itself — how earlier rulers organized taxation, roads, trade, the provinces beneath them. If I am to serve you well in a year and a half, I would rather arrive already knowing the shape of the kingdom I'm entering, not learn it fumbling in my first month at court."
Something like genuine surprise crossed the king's face, followed quickly by something warmer.
"An ambitious request for an eleven-year-old," Vindhyavarman said, "though I confess I expected nothing less from you by now. Where do you imagine finding records of that depth? Your Vedha Shala keeps star charts, not land maps."
"I was hoping, Your Majesty, that the palace might."
Vindhyavarman studied him a long moment, and then, unexpectedly, laughed, short and genuine. "The palace has exactly what you're describing, and a great deal more besides. The Granthabhandara has been growing since my grandfather's time — manuscripts, land grants, old correspondence, genealogies, maps drawn and redrawn as borders shifted beneath them. Half of it hasn't been properly catalogued in a generation."
He waved a hand, the decision already made before he'd finished speaking it aloud. "You may have access to it, within the rules the keeper sets. I'll have word sent ahead of you."
"Thank you, Your Majesty."
"Don't thank me yet," the king said, echoing, without seeming to realize it, the exact words he'd used in the Sabha only an hour before. "Dust and old ink have broken stronger wills than yours before now, Eshaan. We'll see if your enthusiasm survives its first month among moth-eaten palm leaves."
Bhaskaracharya didn't so much as narrow his eyes at Eshaan's request.
"The king wants you familiar with the kingdom's administration before you formally enter his service," he repeated what Eshaan had just told him.
"That is sound thinking on his part, and yours for asking. You may go after your lessons are finished, not before, and not at the cost of your work with Lilavati. Is that understood?"
"Understood, Acharya."
"Good." Bhaskaracharya returned to the chart he'd been correcting before Eshaan had even finished explaining himself, already half-lost in it again. "Bring me anything genuinely interesting you find. I have grown fond of surprises, lately, against my better judgment."
Eshaan bowed and left before the old astronomer could ask anything closer to the truth than he'd already been given.
The following months took a toll on Eshaan before he could adjust to his new schedule, but nevertheless, he did get the taste of it sooner than he had expected.
His mornings did stay exactly as they had always been, the gnomon reset before the second prahar, the logbook written in his cramped, familiar handwriting. The meditation Kripa had taught him began to show its effects. It was the first thing Eshaan did every morning, and as the months passed, the changes became difficult to ignore.
His body had grown leaner and stronger, slowly giving way to the beginnings of muscle across his arms, shoulders and stomach. Even his posture had changed, his back straighter and his movements more controlled than they had been before. His hair, once kept short, had grown to medium length, its natural waves becoming more noticeable around his face.
Within these few months, Eshaan sent two letters to Acharya Kripa, and five to Pataliputra. He did receive a reply from Pataliputra every time but Kripa would still not send a reply to him, which worried Eshaan for the safety of his mentor.
Evenings with Lilavati grew harder every day, her questions became sharper, but her patience had grown thinner as the time passed.
"You've grown distracted," she told him once, after she saw Eshaan coming back from the Granthabhandara. "You seem more interested in something outside the Vedha Shala. Geography, I am told, and the old records of the kingdom."
"I want to understand how mathematics and astronomy were used by the scholars who came before us," Eshaan explained, and it wasn't entirely a lie, even if it wasn't entirely the truth either. "How a court decided where a road should run, or where a granary should sit, using nothing but the tools we're learning now."
Lilavati regarded him a moment, unconvinced and unbothered by her own doubt in equal measure. "A fine enough reason," she said finally. "See that it doesn't cost you your evenings with me. I have less patience for excuses than the king does, whatever soft treatment you've been getting from that quarter."
It became a routine for Eshaan, and he somehow settled into this newfound time without any complaints, and somehow the life became smoother for him.
The Granthabhandara itself was nothing like Eshaan had imagined a royal library to be.
There were no long open shelves, no reading halls lit for scholars to linger in comfort. It was a low, cool building set apart from the main palace, its walls thick enough to hold back both heat and damp. Its interior was a maze of wooden chests stacked floor to ceiling, palm-leaf bundles tied in cord gone brittle with age, the occasional birch-bark scroll wrapped in oiled cloth for older, more fragile things. A pair of scribes worked quietly in one corner, copying a water-damaged genealogy onto fresh leaves by lamplight, their hands moving with unhurried precision.
The keeper was an elderly man named Keshav, whose eyes had gone milky at the edges but whose memory of the collection's contents remained, as far as Eshaan could tell, nearly perfect. He met him at the door on the first evening and looked at Eshaan with suspicion, "How can a child have claimed royal permission?"
By the third evening, that suspicion softened into something closer to tolerance. By the second week, Eshaan had begun to garner a little bit of respect from the scribes and the keeper, and all this happened when Eshaan started asking questions of Keshav that he didn't expect. Cataloguing systems, which bundles had been recopied and which were originals, the small, careful notations scribes left in the margins of texts they'd corrected.
Eshaan didn't search for the Nine Unknowns directly. That, he understood instinctively, would have been the fastest way to draw attention, and he wouldn't want that.
Instead, he searched in layers, the way his father had taught him to work through a stack of ledgers whose fault wasn't yet visible. Starting broad, narrowing slowly, never announcing what he was actually hunting for until he'd found enough.
He began with the Mauryan period. Pataliputra's old administrative structures. The eastern provinces under Ashoka. The roads that had once connected Magadha to territories Eshaan had never heard named in his old life, in his old world, on maps he half-remembered.
From there, carefully, he moved toward Kamarupa, discovering the routes east, the river crossings, the shifting political boundaries between Magadha and Pragjyotishpura across successive centuries. He built, without quite meaning to at first, a private map inside his own head, layered with dates and distances and the names of kings who had held or lost that eastern frontier one after another.
He was surprised that Ujjayini held this information that Pataliputra should have had, but the Mauryan empire stretched far and wide, and it shouldn't be a surprise that the maps from that time were preserved carefully in the centre of India.
It was in the third month that he found something substantial related to what he was actually looking for. It was a description of a royal collection maintained during the later Mauryan period, but it didn't exactly mention which collection. It referred to the contents only once, in a single careless line buried within a much longer account of palace expenditures, as the nine entrusted volumes.
Eshaan went still with the leaf in his hands for a long time, the low lamp beside him hissing faintly, before he set the leaf down very carefully.
Eshaan found another cord tied to the bundle from which he had taken the leaf. A notation attached to it mentioned nine cities of importance, where the nine volumes had first been written. But the palm leaf containing their names was missing from the bundle.
The months that followed were heavy on a half-satisfied Eshaan, as he kept looking for more information on anything that would lead him to any of the Nine Unknowns, but he couldn't find anything, and so he had to drop his mission completely, and his focus went back to the administration part of the Malwa Kingdom and his duties towards the Vedha Shala.
It was an ordinary evening for Eshaan when Keshav walked up to him with a problem. In the last few months, the scribes of the Granthabhandara had reached one conclusion, and it was that Eshaan wasn't an ordinary child and he could easily solve problems that even the experienced scribes couldn't.
The problem had been related to the yearly tax collection, and it was a problem of tax embezzlement, which Eshaan decoded with a little difficulty. He suggested Keshav take this matter to the king and also wrote a letter to him, mentioning the names of those he thought might have committed this crime. He made sure to seal the letter and ask Keshav to hand it directly to no one but the king.
And as Keshav walked away and Eshaan let out a sigh of relief, a single palm leaf suddenly dropped into his lap from somewhere within the maze. He opened his eyes and took the leaf in his hand, his expression turning blank at what was written on it.
Eshaan immediately placed the leaf on his table under the lamp and saw that it mentioned a list of the names of the cities and realised that it could be the lost palm leaf from that day. He began reading and his face lit up.
'First Volume - Kashi'
'Second Volume - Takshashila'
'Third Volume - Nalanda'
'Fourth Volume - Kanchipuram'
'Fifth Volume - Tamralipti'
'Sixth Volume - Ujjayini'
'Seventh Volume - Pragjyotishpur'
'Eighth Volume - Madurai'
'Ninth Volume - Pataliputra'
Eshaan's mind raced with several questions, about how to find the books and their keepers, how to know if the books had stayed in the same place after hundreds of years since they were first drafted. He was more confused than before, and one question that ate at him was,
**"Is the sixth volume still in Ujjayini?"