The Last Well of Kushara

Kushara is a desert kingdom that lives by its wells, and by its king's open hand. For thirty years old Bhadrasen has bought peace with gifts: silver to the north, horses to the desert clans, feasts for every lord who kneels. His people love him for it.

His elder son Vajra counts. Plain, silent, forgotten the moment he leaves a room, Vajra sits at a table with a roll and a lamp and writes down what the kingdom spends and what it has left. When the old king falls ill and the seal passes to him, he shuts the treasury, stops the gifts, closes the port and sends men with picks up the western road to break the wells his people have drunk from for generations.

The kingdom learns to hate him. His younger brother Dhruv, the prince every house loves, learns it too.

But Vajra has always said one thing and meant it: so that I don't have to guess. And somewhere on his roll, in a small hand, beside every name, there are marks no one has thought to read.

The Last Well of Kushara is a story of two brothers, a father who gave until there was nothing left, and the price of being right when no one will thank you for it. It is set in an invented kingdom of the Thar and its neighbours: the horsemen of the Maru, a northern king with a debt to collect, and a fleet off the southern gulf.