Three days since the road betrayed him.

Uday did not let himself think of it in any other terms. Not ambush, not defeat — the road betrayed him, and he would examine how and why later, when there were walls around him and his remaining men were fed and rested. Forty riders where there had been nearly three hundred. He did not look back at them. A commander did not look back.

He had been following the cliffs by instinct when the valley opened — a quiet fold in the red rock that appeared on no map he had ever studied. And inside it, settled like it had always been there: a village. Stone walls the colour of pale sand. A gate of old dark wood. Cooking smoke rising straight into the cooling evening air.

He raised his hand. The column stopped. The fields were tended. The walls were sound. And the figures he could make out moving behind the gate were—

The gate opened. They came out unhurried, which was its own kind of statement. The elder first — white-haired, straight-backed, wrapped in deep red cloth, with the eyes of someone who had long since stopped being surprised by anything the world placed in front of her. Flanking her, spread in a loose line: younger women. Armed. Not decoratively. The kind of stillness in their bodies that comes from knowing how to use what they carry.

They did not advance. They did not retreat. They simply held the entrance and watched his column of dusty, hollow-eyed men with an attention that felt uncomfortably like assessment. Uday dismounted. It was the correct gesture — less threatening, more respectful. He walked forward alone, stopped at a distance that was neither aggressive nor uncertain, and met the elder's gaze.

She spoke first. "You are far from any road I know of." Her voice was unhurried, dry as the cliffs behind her. "And you have the look of men the desert has been chewing on for some time."

"We require water and a place to rest," Uday said. Straightforward. He had learned long ago that false courtesy wasted everyone's time. "We will pay fairly and leave at dawn. We ask nothing more."

"Fairly," she said, tilting her head slightly. "An interesting word for a man standing at a stranger's gate with forty armed riders at his back."

She did not move aside. Her gaze shifted — just slightly — to someone standing near her. A silent question passed between them, the kind that needed no words. The answer, whatever it was, rested with the women of Suryapur.