littlemissfutility: (49)
extemely beth and incredibly greene ([personal profile] littlemissfutility) wrote in [community profile] forbarrayar 2017-02-23 02:06 pm (UTC)

Beth shakes her head. "Rani's fine." If you like it.

Rani--it's hard for Beth to look at her and think Lakshmi--seems so tired, so filled with secrets that don't seem to need sharing. Her name can be one of those; it seems like that must have been Rani's goal, or she'd have introduced herself with the whole thing originally.

So it'll just be something between them. Maharani Lakshmi Bai, queen of Jhansi. Wherever Jhansi is--her guess is India, but she would have guessed that Piotr Vorkosigan was from Russia if she'd met him in a different context. For all she knows, Jhansi is another planet entirely.

"Was it bad over there?" she asks after a few quiet moments. She's sure it was--Rani slept for a week after, Daryl said he was tortured--but asking is gentler than tell me what it was like. This way, Rani can slip out of the question if she wants to.

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