The desert does not forgive weakness. Neither does he.

Uday Tomar is twenty-eight years old, a sardar of the Tomar clan, a man who has spent his entire life becoming worthy of a name that was never quite handed to him — only held just out of reach. He leads. He protects. He keeps his word when keeping it costs him something. His men follow him not out of fear but out of something quieter and harder to name.

He has never lost before. Not like this.

Forty men where there were two hundred and eighty. A road he knew by heart turned into a trap. The shame does not show on his face — he has been trained too well for that — but it lives in the set of his jaw, in the way his hand finds his sword hilt in moments of stillness, in the silence he carries like armor.

He was not looking for Suryapur. No one looks for Suryapur.

And now he stands at the edge of a village with no men in it, surrounded by women who do not flinch at the sight of his sword, led by an elder who looks at him like she has already taken his measure and found the result — interesting.

Everything he knows about the world has a place for this. He is certain of it.

He is about to find out how wrong certainty can be.

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