She was nineteen years old when he found her, bound to a post in a military tent, half-naked, and was about to be raped by one of his generals. The prince, son and heir to the Salar of Rasharwi, High Commander of the royal army that had successfully wiped out her Kha'gan and three more in the Vilarhiti, was said to be in the middle of a damage assessment report and therefore in a mood to cause more damage when the news about a woman being missing from the prisoner's camp had arrived.

The general who had yet to learn––or had been too ignorant to notice––the supernatural ability of the crown prince's most trusted advisor and right hand man to be so shockingly accurate on head counts during the chaos of battle, had thought he could keep a girl for entertainment for a few nights before sending her back to her holding pen. The prince, being already on edge from the heavy loss of his army despite the eventual success of his campaign, had stormed into the tent, unsheathed the two obsidian blades strapped to his back, and executed the general with his own hands—something he hadn't done often, judging from the looks on the guards' faces.

He turned to his advisor, snapped a clear and precise command to have every man who might have been aware of such treason executed and strode toward the exit. He stopped, as though there was a calling or an invisible force of some kind that prevented him from leaving, and turned, in an agonizingly slow and calculated manner, to look over his shoulder toward where she was.

Time inched by like a nervous criminal hoping to escape as three other men and one woman kept their mouths shut, seemed to screech when it was snatched back into the tent by the prince who, after some deliberation, decided to return to the exact same spot from where he'd slain the general.

It took him no time, no time at all to figure out what she was.

"Why," he said, cold anger rising in his tone, "did no one know there's a Bharavi among these Kha'gans?"

The soldiers behind him shifted their weight, suddenly finding something stuck between their teeth or in their fingernails a matter of great importance and proceeded to pick on them in perfect synchronization. Only the man she understood to be his trusted advisor was able to keep his personal hygiene a concern for other times, despite the visible effort to swallow a mysterious object that must have suddenly materialized in his throat.

The prince turned to look over his shoulder when the answer didn't come. "Are you all deaf, or am I?"

Those words, spoken in a mere whisper, had been enough to mute everyone in that tent in addition to their sudden hearing loss. The advisor, however, managed, at long last, to swallow the mysterious object and replied, "I will have the men responsible found and brought to you before dawn, my lord."

The young prince, drawing a breath and exhaling loudly as if to make sure it could be heard by his deaf and mute officers, shook his head. "Have their heads on display before dawn along with General Hamir's accomplices and their crimes clearly explained for all divisions," he commanded in an effortless, practical tone, the same way one might have instructed a meal to be prepared or a table to be set. "Take this woman, wash out the red filth on her hair and bring her to me. I will speak to this Bharavi before nightfall."

The soldiers carried out his instructions with utmost care. They washed out the red dye she'd applied to her hair to hide her identity. The paste, made from a mixture of red wine and the root of a Biba tree, came off easily enough with water, but left a blood-like stain on her clothes. Having been too terrified to touch her after learning what had happened to their general, the small group of soldiers assigned to carry out the task had left her dress on as they emptied buckets of ice-cold water on her hair and decided to deny her a change of clothing.

It had not been a part of the command, one soldier had argued when another suggested giving her something dry to wear. She might be executed soon, he had said, and it could be considered a waste of resources, which the prince didn't like. Then again, her soiled garment and state of appearance might offend him, the first man had argued. The rest had nodded in agreement, but none had found the reasoning sufficient to draw a safe conclusion. The issue, from which more arguments ensued for a considerable amount of time, ended up being passed over to a higher ranking officer on duty to judge. The officer, finding it above his rank to decide, thought it would be best to bring it up to the general of their division, who then decided it was safer to check first with the prince's advisor regarding this highly complicated issue before issuing a command. By then twilight had already approached, and the decision, she overheard from the commotion, ended up being one of sending her over to his tent in whatever state she was in as soon as possible. The most crucial and clearest part of the command, his advisor pointed out, was, 'before nightfall.'

And so she was sent to him, still in her tattered, dye-stained garment, dripping wet from her hair, which was now back to silver, to her toes. They had, fortunately, given her a blanket to dry herself with, for the reason that the prince would definitely find it unpleasant to have his floor wet and stained.

He was being stripped down by two handmaidens when they brought her in. The armor had been taken off and laid neatly on a bench to their right, leaving only a thin layer of tunic underneath. The black silk, trimmed subtly with gold threads in a simple yet elegant design, clung to his blood-soaked body as if he'd been riding all day in the rain.

It wasn't that far off from the truth, she thought bitterly. The Vilarhiti could be said to have rained blood all week for how many had died defending the valley, and had the fabric been any color but black, it would have shown.

She wondered, watching the girls remove the last piece of clothing from him with exaggerated care, whether this man had been aware at all how much trouble he'd caused. It was becoming clear to her that the first rule around here was to be competent or be executed, even over something as trivial as the matter of her dress. She could see why the Rashai soldiers, usually intimidated by her people's White Warriors during battle, had fought the way they did. They would have been more terrified of this man—this monster—who was leaving no room whatsoever for mistakes.

It might have been why they'd lost the battle, despite so many Kha'gans having united for the first time against a common enemy. She had heard many stories of the exiled prince, sent to the dungeon of Sabha in his youth as a punishment for his mother's crime of infidelity. The boy who had later been pardoned and reinstated in status after three years of being imprisoned had made it back to the Black Tower and eventually became the new heir to the throne. There had also been, she recalled, stories of several untimely deaths in the Salar's royal household in the past ten years.

The truth to those stories was being made clear to her now, proven by the numerous scars that criss crossed all over the prince's body. He was standing with his back to her, stripped down to the skin in the middle of the tent lit by four hurricane lamps. On the back of his left shoulder, the mark of slavery remained visible even from a distance. It would have had to be left there deliberately, in light of the many procedures available to him to remove or alter such a scar. She might have been able to guess why, but she was too afraid of being right to fully shape that thought.

The girls began wiping him down with a cloth, dipped and washed in scented water that smelled like a mixture of sage and mint. The bucket required change with almost every limb they'd cleaned. He was, she realized, covered almost entirely in blood.

The blood of her people, she thought bitterly, watching it being wiped completely from his skin as if the massacre and the pile of dead bodies outside could be so easily forgotten. She had seen him in battle. Everyone had. A dark figure atop a black horse, snapping precise, efficient command in the midst of chaos at the front where the White Warriors had congregated. He shouldn't have survived, and yet he was standing here, alive, with no more than a few flesh wounds.

'We will not win this fight,' her father had said on the first day of battle, watching the two armies clash against each other from a cliff overlooking the plain. 'Not unless we have that man on our side or we find a way to kill him. Pray,' he'd told her, resting a large hand on her shoulder and squeezing it firmly, 'that he never makes it to the throne.'

The battle had lasted six days. The Vilarhiti had fallen, lost to the Salasar for the first time in the long history of the White Desert. Four large Kha'gans had been disassembled, their survivors taken prisoners down to the last child. Their horses––the very best in the peninsula––had been rounded up to be used by the Rashai army. All the White Warriors had died one way or another, knowing they must not be taken alive for the secret they had sworn to protect. Her father and brothers had been among those deaths. They had died with honor, with pride on the plain of the Vilarhiti.

All because of this man.

The man who was standing naked before her.

Naked and unarmed.

"What is your name, Shakshi?"

The question pulled her from the dangerous thought that had begun to form in her mind. It had been a while since she was tossed into the tent, and up until then, the prince had not shown an acknowledgment of her presence besides the initial nod to his burly personal guard who'd brought her in. The guard who was still, as quietly, standing behind her with a massive axe strapped to his back.

She drew a breath and straightened. "I see no reason why you need to know."

The two handmaidens, in nearly synchronized motion, made a small, startled sound as though someone had just cursed a god in his own temple. Showing no signs resembling that of his attendees, the prince stilled for a time at her words, and with a slow, confident step of someone used to dominating every room he occupied, turned, in all his nakedness, to face her.

Acutely aware of the fact that there was a man standing with every inch of him fully exposed before her eyes, she fought the initial instinct to turn away and kept her gaze precisely where it had been. He regarded her for a time, and, as if in answer to her defiance, took a step forward out of the shadows made by the two handmaidens and into her unobstructed line of sight.

He stood in the middle of the tent, head held arrogantly high, legs firmly apart, and shoulders pulled back to catch the flickering light of the lanterns, inviting—challenging—her to look, to see if she had the stomach for it.

It just so happened that apart from being a Bharavi, she had also been an experienced healer, making her no stranger at all to the male or female bodies. She sneered a little at the attempt and proceeded to scrutinize––as she had been invited to do––the figure being displayed before her.

Moderately tall and built to the exact proportions from which a sculptor might choose to render his masterpiece, the prince's hard, compact muscles revealed years of training in both combat and endurance. His skin, burnt by the recent exposure to the sun and made substantially darker than the average Rashai, was well covered in scars to rival any experienced White Warrior she knew. He wasn't a big man, not remotely close to his giant bodyguard behind her, but she knew without having to see it put to the test that he would be a match for some of their best wrestlers with those broad shoulders and saddle-hardened thighs. The fact that this man who was about to be handed the Salasar and all its power was so well endowed in every way was a hard, depressing evidence of how unfair the gods could be.

In another place, at another time, and given different circumstances, she thought she might have been able to admire such qualities in a man as capable as this. But here and now he was her enemy, the murderer responsible for the death of her family, and the monster she wanted to see dead. She detested him for what he was, for the detached respect and admiration her father had harbored for his enemy, and for the warmth on her cheeks that had not been from the heat of the fire.

"So you do speak Rashai," he said at length, looking at her with keen interest.

She resisted the urge to bite her lip. No point in denying it. He had asked for her name in Rashai and she had responded without thinking. "I speak four languages," she replied in Samarran.

He nodded, thought for a moment, and picked up the conversation in fluent Khandoor, "You are schooled, then, in the arts of language?"

"No more than in history, geography, and mathematics," she responded, this time, in formal Shakshi. "We are not savages or uneducated camel herders despite what your incompetent informers might have told you. Do you," she asked, switching back to Rashai, "need me to translate?" She had, after all, thrown in some difficult words on purpose for a chance to see that arrogance being subdued a little.

It didn't touch him. Not even a little.

"What does jamanya mean?" he asked with casual curiosity, in the way one might inquire a cook on the ingredients he used.

"Djemanya," she corrected and explained in Rashai, in spite. "Incompetent."

"Djemanya," he repeated, this time in perfect pronunciation. She could see him taking a note of the word in his mind, and was sure he would remember it for next time. She was also sure her master linguist would have wanted to adopt him had he been one of their own.

"Leave us," he turned to the girls and dismissed them, to which they promptly obeyed and left the tent.

The prince, still clad only in his own skin, took three steps across to stand before her. He paused for a time, watching her quietly as if waiting for a chance to catch something she might let slip. She forced herself to remain still, holding his gaze, despite the awareness that the distance between his entirely naked body and hers was no more than a hand-width away—her hand, to be precise. The thought of backing away had crossed her mind several times, but she would not, over her dead body, allow him to intimidate her to that point with or without his clothes on.

There would be nothing, no one at all to stop him from whatever he wanted to do to her. That reality, too, had always been there in her conscience, pressing down on her every time she turned a corner. He would do what it took to get what he wanted, to force her to reveal the secret that would bring down the White Desert––the same secret she had vowed to protect, no matter how vile, how unbearable the torture he would put her through.

The prince leaned forward and reached out a hand to rest on something behind her ear. She closed her eyes at the sudden disappearance of space between them and braced herself for the nightmares to come.

"Don't worry," he said, tugging on the robe hanging behind her and proceeded to cover himself with it. "I'm not as incompetent as my men, however you may think of me."

It came up out of her without thinking, thrown together by the shame of having allowed herself to be played by her enemy––the response she would have considered unwise had she been more calm and composed, only now she found she couldn't stop, "You are just as foul and as despicable as your men, that is what I think of you."

The axe touched her neck the instant she finished the sentence. The burly guard—large as a bear and could be said to look like one—had been quick to respond despite his gigantic size.

"You will bow and apologize before I take off your head, Shakshi!" The tone was raw, etched with genuine anger in every word as if he'd been personally insulted, or his mother.

She kept her eyes leveled on the prince, ignoring the blade at her throat. She had not been raised to fear death or men, and she wasn't going to start now just because her Kha'gan had fallen. Death, in any case, was gift to be desired at this point in her life.

"I am a Bharavi," she said, "daughter to the Kha'a of the largest Kha'gan in the Vilarhiti. I bow to no one but my Kha'a. You do not outrank me here, or anywhere on our side of the peninsula. If you want submission, seek it on your own land."