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Updated: June 15, 2025
"Thank you," she said, her eyes shining, a flush of colour suffusing her face with glory. "Did you cut those ropes, Amber?" Labertouche interposed curtly. "Yes. Why?" The Englishman explained without turning from his sombre and morose regard of Naraini. "Too bad we'll have to tie this woman up, somehow.
It opened out, disclosing Naraini between two guards, in that moment of passion and fear perhaps more incomparably beautiful than any woman they had ever looked upon, save her who held to Amber's arm, a-quiver with womanly sympathy and compassion.
What to us women in whose bodies runs the blood of royalty, is an edict of your English Government? What, the Sirkar itself to us in Khandawar?" She laughed bitterly. "I am a Rohilla, a daughter of kings: my dishonour may be purged only by flame. Arre! that I should live to meet with such fate I, Naraini, to perish in the flower of my beauty.... For I am beautiful, am I not?"
And here, standing upon the verge of the parapet, with naught but a foot high coping between her and the frightful fall, utterly fearless and unutterably lovely, Naraini flung out a bare, jewelled arm in an eloquent gesture. "See, my king!" she cried, her voice vibrant, her eyes kindling as they met his. "Look down upon thy kingdom. North, south, east, west look!" she commanded.
"And leave me," she pouted prettily, "with no word but that, my king? Am I not worth a caress not even when I beg for it?" He smiled down at her, tolerant and amused, and impulsively caught her to him. "The point's well taken," he said. "Decidedly you're worth it, Naraini. And if you were not, the show was!" And he kissed and left her, all in a breath.
The great emerald seemed to have caught and to be answering the light Naraini called the Eye; in the stone's depths an infernal fire leaped and died and leaped again, now luridly blazing, now fitfully a-quiver as though about to vanish, again strong and steady: even as the light of the strange emerald star above the mountains ebbed and flowed through the night.
Is it meet and wise to speak with levity of that in whose power thou shalt shortly be?" "Perhaps not," he admitted, thoughtful. "'In whose power I shall shortly be. ... Well, of course!" "And thou wilt go on? Thou art not minded to withdraw thy hand?" "Not so that you'd notice it, Naraini." "For the sake of the reward Naraini offers thee?" she persisted dangerously.
"What the deuce!" he said aloud. "Is this another of their confounded tricks?" A low and marvellously sweet laugh sounded at his elbow, and he turned with a start and a flutter of his pulses. "Naraini!" he cried. It had been impossible to mistake the gracious lines of that slight, round figure, cloaked though it was in many thicknesses of white veiling.
"Thou art pledged to produce Har Dyal Rutton in the Hall of the Bell before another sunrise, and none but Naraini knows to what a perilous resort thou art driven to redeem thy word." "I was lied to," he argued sullenly. "A false tale was brought me by one who hath repented of his error!
The east was grey with dusk of dawn a light that grew apace, making garish the illumination of the flickering, smoking, many-coloured lamps in the garden. Naraini clapped her hands. Soft footsteps sounded in the gallery and one of her handmaidens threaded the shrubbery to her side. "The lamps, Unda," said the queen; "their light, I think, little becomes me. Put them out."
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