Shadow Princess Read Free

door.”
    “Go, Roshan,” Mumtaz said to her younger daughter. “I want to be alone with your Bapa now.”
    Roshanara went from her mother’s bedside, her mouth pursed with discontent, and sat down with the slave girls, who had made a space along the wall for her. When Jahanara put her hand on the latch, the metal chill against her skin, she heard the midwife mutter, “The head is showing, your Majesty. It will not be long.”
    •  •  •
    Princess Jahanara Begam rested against the door and rubbed the back of her aching neck. Her mother had labored for thirty hours, and now finally the child’s head was crowning. At first, this confinement had been like so many others at which Jahanara had been present. The slave girls had laughed and called out for the birth of a son. The sage primary midwife sat in one corner (holding her own court among the lesser midwives), nodding at the jokes, her fingers busy with her knitting so that they would remain supple when she was needed. Aside from the opium, Mumtaz had wanted to eat only apples. Jahanara had patiently sliced and fed them to her mother. These were early apples from the valleys of Kashmir, exquisitely tiny and well formed, the size of cherries. Their aroma filled the room in this fiery month of June—in the middle of the flat plains and miles from the cool mountains of Kashmir—and all of their senses slavered. Jahanara had seen saliva drip from the primary midwife’s mouth. But the fruits were for the Empress, and no one, not even her children, princesses of royal blood and birth, had a right to them. And then, in the past few hours, something had changed. Not the fact that Mumtaz had labored too long but that she had struggled too hard, her eyes vacant during the contractions, her conversation impeccably lucid in between. As though she would never find the time to speak again.
    At that thought, Jahanara picked up the skirts of her ghagara and fled down the dim corridor in search of her father, and when she reached the end, someone put a hand across, halting her progress. She stopped, breathing hard from the running.
    “What is it, Aurangzeb? Why are you awake? You should be in bed, this is women’s work.”
    Her brother’s figure detached itself from the shadows. At thirteen he was already almost at her height. Aurangzeb was as thin she was, but whereas her gait and her carriage were assured, he was at that awkward, dangling age with his torso not grown into his long arms and legs.
    “Is Mama all right, Jahan? Can I go and see her?”
    Jahanara drew back from him, outraged. “Mama has asked for Bapa—I’m on my way to get him, and even he should not be in her apartments now. How can you think you would be allowed?”
    He shook his head absentmindedly, as though he had not heard her. “Why would I not be allowed? You are. What is wrong? Is the child born? Why is it taking so long?”
    He still had his hand on her arm, and Jahanara shook him off with an impatient gesture. In the semidarkness of this outer corridor of the palaces at Burhanpur, Prince Aurangzeb’s mouth twisted for a brief moment with pain. It was not as though they all did not like him, Jahanara thought. Aurangzeb was one of them; they shared the same father and mother—and this in itself was so unusual in these times, when Bapa could have had numerous wives and concubines—nothing diluted their ancestry. But a minor sliver of irritation lay between them and Aurangzeb. It was . . . his intensity, his supreme confidence (so misplaced in her mind; he was a child, had done nothing yet, and would probably do nothing in the future), his insistence on what he thought was right and what wrong.
    She said, as forcefully as she could, “Don’t be foolish enough to enter the birthing chamber, Aurangzeb. Remember that you are a royal prince and must follow convention.”
    Her brother had turned to the doors at the far end of the corridor, but at Jahanara’s words he paused. She left him and