Flies swarmed around her once beautiful face; her eyes pleaded for mercy.
This is too much, Narendra thought as she stared upon the mounted head on a spike on top of Vidhyadara Torana, which attracted and made people cringed at the same time. When the execution happened, Narendra was away supervising his army’s training. He learned the story from one of the hulubalang in the palace. She is only a child, he thought.
The marsi was one of Amretasari’s handmaids. After she learned that her beloved queen was falsely accused of the attack on Maharaja, she quickly turned herself into the palace’s hulubalang, apologizing in tears. Her husband, a Hindu monk, was one of the monks killed in clash with the rakshin recently. She knew it was not the rakshin who killed her husband, but Maharaja Sumatrabhumi. It was an act of revenge.
As for Amretasari, she had only been unlucky. The marsi who tried to kill her husband wielded keris Mpu Gandring when she carried out her revenge, one of plunders Srivijayan took from Singhasari, which was kept in Amretasari’s room.
Then there was a superstition aspect involved: many people believed that the keris was cursed. It had consumed six lives, most of them Singhasarian royal blood. But the keris had been promised by its maker to take seven, thus the keris was believed to take one final victim. So, the scene was perfect: a former princess of Singhasari killed her Srivijayan Maharaja husband using her royal ultimate weapon when they were together alone in the balairung.
Narendra knew it’s not only about bad luck—he knew some of the people in the palace despised Amretasari. Bad blood between Srivijayan and Singhasarian had given birth to mean prejudice.