Gifting Fire Read online

  It rankled, hearing him suddenly talk about me as a princess with genuine enthusiasm. He’d made it plain what a disgrace he thought I was. Our last conversation had left me with few illusions as to why I had been brought to Zindh. He thought perhaps I was clever enough to do him some good, though he was well insulated from the possibility that I would fail. But nowhere in that conversation had he wholeheartedly embraced me as his daughter the way he was doing now. It was such a transparently self-interested manipulation that it made my throat tighten with anger, and with other emotions besides. How I had longed for him to recognize me as his daughter, and now he was using that childhood hope to destroy my life.

  “Give me one good reason why I should marry Karim, Father,” I said.

  “I can think of at least sixteen good reasons,” he answered, nodding toward the ceiling, indicating the thunder zahhaks still swirling overhead, and the ones in the courtyard besides.

  “We might lose this fight,” I allowed, forcing myself to shrug like it didn’t matter, “but if you’re going to take away everything I care about anyway, then what incentive do I have to surrender to you?”

  “Do you really hate me so much that you would see Lakshmi dead?” Karim asked.

  “If you gave a damn about Lakshmi, or me, you’d never have invaded my province and put me in this position,” I shot back, my voice just as icy cold as I could make it.

  But my words were like water off a river zahhak’s back to Karim. He smiled at me. “I think you’re just angry because you’ve been outsmarted for a change.”

  “You think this is clever?” I demanded.

  “I do,” he replied. “While you were playing princess with Arjun, I spent the last few weeks planning this. First we took Ahura, and its acid zahhaks. Thanks to you, the island was without a Firangi fleet to protect it.”

  I scowled, regretting that I’d helped him and his father in their naval war against the Firangis, though if I hadn’t, I never would have won back Sultana, might never have even earned myself a position at Bikampur’s court. My life hadn’t been my own then. I’d had little choice in the matter. Still, it rankled that I’d given Karim the zahhaks he needed to carry out his invasion of Zindh, however indirectly.

  “Then I invaded Kadiro and took it, knowing that the Zindhis wouldn’t be able to put up a fight.” He grinned. “And once I contacted your father with my offer to protect his province and his beautiful daughter in exchange for a marriage alliance, well . . .” He held out his hands to indicate our little meeting.

  “You’re a fool,” I grumbled.

  Of everything I’d said, that seemed to hit home. Anger flashed behind his dark eyes. “Is that so?”

  “It is,” I insisted, though I probably shouldn’t have been taunting him. “The Safavians won’t let you keep Ahura. It was theirs before the Firangis took it, while they were busy fighting Tarkiva. Now that Shah Ismail has won his war against his greatest rivals, he is free to act. His first act will be to retake Ahura. If you had come to me as a friend rather than an enemy, I might have been able to use my influence in Registan, and my own zahhaks here in Zindh, to help you in that fight. But now you will face Safavia’s wrath alone.”

  “I had considered that,” Karim said, the anger having left his face. “But it occurred to me that you might not be willing to start a war between Safavia and Nizam to help my father keep an island. However, after our marriage, the alliance between Nizam and Mahisagar will be a formal one. If Safavia attacks us, they attack Nizam too.”

  I glanced to my father. “And this is acceptable to you? A war with Safavia when you’re so worried about Virajendra?”

  “Mahisagar’s fleet and its armies more than make up for the possibility of war with Safavia,” my father answered. “With their assistance, we will finally be able to strike the Virajendrans where they live—along the coasts and out at sea. If they attack us now, they risk having their entire merchant fleet obliterated by the most fearsome pirates in all Daryastan.”

  “That may deter Virajendra, but it won’t deter Safavia,” I told him. “And with Safavia fighting you in the west, you can be assured that Virajendra will seize the opportunity to attack from the south.”

  “And Registan will join with Safavia and Virajendra against you,” Arjun added, staring straight into my father’s eyes with such a ferocious determination that he put me more in mind of a tiger than a man. “We rarely fight outside of our own borders, but if Safavia and Virajendra go to war, so will we.”

  “You are the prince of Bikampur, not Registan,” my father scoffed. But I noted that Karim wasn’t scoffing; he was shifting uncertainly, tugging nervously at his mustache.

  Arjun leaned forward, so that scarcely a handsbreadth separated his face from my father’s. “If you think you can take Razia from me, you are very much mistaken.”

  “If you value her so highly, you should have offered her marriage, as I have,” Karim snapped. “You made her a concubine. I’m treating her like the princess she is.”

  “As a creature to be bought and sold in exchange for an alliance, you mean,” I corrected.

  “That’s what a princess is,” my father retorted.

  “If that’s what will solve this, then I will marry her,” Arjun said. “My father will approve. I only held back because I thought you would refuse me.”

  “And you were right, I do refuse you,” my father told him. “Bikampur is not Mahisagar. You have no fleet. Your army is smaller. You have far fewer zahhaks.”

  “But if one Registani city is attacked, we all defend one another,” Arjun reminded him.

  “Zindh is not Registani, nor will it be,” my father pointed out. “The maharajas of Registan will not march to the defense of Kadiro or Shikarpur—you know this, boy.”

  “They would march for Razia,” he said, and though he sounded like he really believed that, I wasn’t sure that I did. I had helped Udai, and I had defeated Javed Khorasani, but the other lords of Registan owed me no real loyalty. Maybe they would help me and maybe they wouldn’t, but a war with Safavia was something that had the potential to destroy them all. They wouldn’t enter into that lightly—certainly not for a hijra, even if she was the wife of one of their princes.

  My father shrugged. “Whether they would or wouldn’t is immaterial. I would be a fool to cast aside an alliance that I know will hold in the hopes of gaining a far more tenuous one. And it ignores the reality on the ground. Mahisagar holds Kadiro with fifty thousand men and a hundred ships and thirteen acid zahhaks.”

  “Twelve,” Karim corrected. “The thirteenth is a wedding gift.”

  “You’re gifting me an acid zahhak?” I asked, startled by that. Zahhaks were uncommon gifts, even when sealing alliances. They conferred far too much power, and they tended to be far too closely tied to their masters. Zahhak eggs were different; they were the most valuable of all trade goods, and a single zahhak egg might seal an alliance lasting decades.

  “I am,” Karim told me. He leaned forward, reaching out to take my hand, but I snatched it away before he could touch me. He forced a smile to cover his irritation. “This is to be a real marriage, Razia. You will be my first and primary wife. You will be my queen. Has any man ever offered you so much?”

  I felt bile rising in the back of my throat, but managed to choke it back down before I gagged. Karim wasn’t wrong—no man had ever offered to make me his queen—but being Karim’s queen was an offer it was all too easy to refuse. Just the thought of it made my skin crawl.

  “Have you forgotten what you did to me?” I hissed.

  “That was six years ago,” he said. “We were different people.”

  “Yes, I was a different person then,” I agreed. “I was a helpless child. Well, I am not that helpless child any longer, Karim. I have zahhaks, and I have soldiers, and I have power now, and I will use it if I must.” I looked my father straight in the ey
es and said, “I will not marry him. Either we fight to the death or you go back to Nizam and leave the management of my province to me. It’s your choice, Father.”

  My father shrugged. “Fine. We’ll shout to our soldiers to start the shooting. Your sisters can be the first casualties in this war.” He got up and headed for the door.

  I managed to roll to my feet, putting myself between him and the doorway, stopping him from getting out of my chambers to give Sikander the orders that would see my sisters killed, but it was a mistake. He was wearing armor, and I was wearing a silk blouse and skirt. He grabbed me with both hands and threw me up against the wall hard enough to rattle my brains in my skull.

  Arjun was up in an instant to defend me, but Karim was just as quick. The pair of them drew their swords, but I could already see that it was hopeless. Karim was between Arjun and my father, and my father had my arms pinned up against the wall to keep me from getting to my katars.

  “If you were a man, you could stop this,” my father taunted, his gauntleted hands locking around my forearms until I felt like the bones would snap. He was leaning all of his body weight against me, pressing me against the cool marble wall. If he’d wanted to end this fight, he could have driven a couple of knees into the pit of my stomach and left me gasping for air on the floor. I’d seen him do it to enough men in training. But he just held me there, his face tight with anger. For all his taunts, he wasn’t enjoying this. I wondered what that meant.

  “Let me go, Father.” It wasn’t an order, but I wasn’t quite begging either. When he didn’t listen, I said, “You’re right, I’m not going to sentence my sisters to death, so let us sit and talk.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” he told me. “You will do your duty as a princess of Nizam and that is the end of the matter. I will tolerate no more of this nonsense from you. Your whole life you told me you were a princess and not a prince. You minced around in skirts, and you shamed me.” Those last two words came out with so much pain that it made my own heart hurt.

  “And you told me that if I’d just treated you like a woman, you never would have shamed me, you would have been the perfect little princess.” His hands squeezed tighter around my arms, forcing me to clench my jaw against the pain. “And now I have recognized you as a princess, and you are going to shame me again by refusing to act the part? Maybe the problem wasn’t how you were born. Maybe the problem is you.”

  Those words hit me like hammer blows. Some part of me wilted inside. It was my worst fear made manifest. He was right. I’d always held on to this idea that if I hadn’t been born a boy, I’d have been his perfect little princess. I’d always believed with my whole heart that but for the circumstances of my birth, my life would have been charmed; I would have had a place in the world and a family that loved me and treasured me. But what if that wasn’t true? What if I was just a terrible, worthless child, whatever form I took?

  “Don’t listen to his lies, Razia.”

  I glanced up to see Arjun holding his khanda at the ready in case Karim attacked, but he was looking at me, and there was a warmth in his amber eyes that I’d never seen in another man’s.

  “Your father is a fool and a coward,” Arjun declared.

  My father looked back at him with hate smoldering in his eyes. “Is that so, boy?”

  “It is.” Arjun met his glare without the least sign of fear. “A real father would never marry his daughter to her rapist. He would gut the man for his crimes. You’re no kind of father to her, and no kind of man either.”

  “If my daughter put herself in a position to be raped, then how can I fault a man for doing it?” my father asked.

  “She didn’t put herself in that position,” Arjun replied. “You failed to protect her, and then you punished her for your own failures.”

  “He was a boy!” my father roared back, his face reddening. “And his conduct afterward, whoring himself out to any man he met, makes plain whose fault it was!”

  My heart ached far worse than my body, in spite of the way my father was pressing me against the wall until it felt like my bones would snap. There was a part of me that believed him, whatever Arjun said to the contrary. I had run away from home to become a hijra, and I had sold my body to the highest bidder for years. Any princess who had done such a thing would have so disgraced herself that she would have been killed at best, left to live in the gutter as a common whore at worst. She certainly wouldn’t have been entertaining marriage offers, not even from men as slimy as Karim Shah.

  “It was your fault,” Arjun said, his fist clenching around the hilt of his khanda until his knuckles turned white. “You knew who she was, you knew what she was, and rather than protecting her, you beat her, and tormented her, and left her exposed to men like Karim. You did it on purpose. You let him rape her on purpose.”

  More than Arjun’s words, it was my father’s reaction that shocked me. His eyes widened; his grip slackened. It was true. It was all true.

  “You let him do that to me on purpose?” I asked, tears threatening at the corners of my eyes. Never in my whole life had I imagined that my father had orchestrated what Karim had done to me, but now I saw what I’d been too young and too blind to notice before. I had screamed. I had screamed in a palace full of servitors. I had fought as best I could. No guard could have failed to hear me. But no one had come. And when I had told Sikander what had happened, he hadn’t been surprised, he’d just beaten me for being such a weakling, but he had never once asked me for details, never once asked me where and when it had happened. Because he’d known all along.

  My father let me go with a snarl of frustration. He stood there, his face reddening, whether from shame or anger I couldn’t have said. At last, he threw his arms wide. “I thought it might teach you a lesson! I thought if he used you as a woman, you wouldn’t want to be one anymore!”

  “And this lesson?” I asked, gesturing to Karim, and to him, with arms that were already turning purple from where he’d grabbed me. “What is this meant to teach me, Father?”

  “This is a political decision,” he said, his tone actually softening for once. “Ahmed Shah holds Kadiro. You won’t be able to take it back from him. I cannot afford a war with Mahisagar, as it would only embolden Virajendra. So, we make peace. The price of peace is your marriage to Karim. It will strengthen both of our kingdoms, and it will ensure the safety of Zindh—and your safety too.”

  “You think marrying me to my rapist ensures my safety?” I gave a hollow laugh at that, wondering how the man could be so deluded.

  “I’m sorry for what I did six years ago, Razia,” Karim said, “but things are different now. You will be my wife. I will care for you, and for your sisters. They will want for nothing. You will want for nothing. And with my armies and your brains, we can conquer the world together.”

  “Ah.” That was what Karim wanted. With me as his wife, he would eventually be sultan of Nizam, the most powerful man in Daryastan. And with me at his side, directing his every move, he reckoned that he would grow the empire even more than my father had. The worst part was, I wasn’t sure that he was wrong. I was ambitious, maybe more ambitious than I wanted to admit. For all the talk of living with Arjun in Bikampur, I’d chosen to become the subahdar of Zindh. Why? For freedom? Or for power? I didn’t even know anymore. If this was freedom, it certainly didn’t feel like it.

  I walked past Karim to where Arjun was standing, and I embraced him tightly, pressing my face into his chest.

  “Razia,” he warned, one arm going around me to protect me, the other still keeping his khanda pointed at Karim.

  “He’s not going to hurt you, my prince,” I told Arjun. As if to prove to me how reasonable he could be, Karim sheathed his firangi and held up his hands to show Arjun that they were empty.

  Arjun pulled me back toward the far wall of the chamber before sheathing his khanda and holding me in his arms. We just st
ood there for what seemed like both a long time and no time at all. My mind was racing, struggling to find a way out of this mess, but I wasn’t seeing one. Not unless I could convince my father that this was wrong, that whether it was politically expedient or not, it was unfair and horrible and cruel. I didn’t think those arguments would sway him, but I had to try.

  I turned to face him, surprised to see so much uncertainty on his face. Maybe there was a chance after all. “Father, please don’t do this to me.”

  He reared back, shocked that that was the angle I would take.

  “We have Karim here; we have nearly half of Mahisagar’s zahhaks at our mercy,” I told him. “Let us take him prisoner and make a bargain with Ahmed Shah. He leaves Zindh, and never comes back, and his son gets to live. They will be too busy fighting Safavia in Ahura to strike back at us. And I will have united the Zindhi people by then. I will be able to hold this province. With Arjun’s help, I already have seven zahhaks to fight against their twelve, and more could be brought from Registan. They won’t take those odds, not against me. And Safavia would rather fight for its own island than for my province. It would be far easier for them to risk a war with Mahisagar than Nizam.”

  Karim’s eyes widened as he realized for the first time just how much danger he was in. “If you do that, your majesty, my father and I will make an alliance with Virajendra, and I swear to you not a single ship will ever set sail from Kadiro’s harbor again. Our fleet will make sure of that.”

  “So we don’t return Karim to his father,” I said. “If he doesn’t want peace, we kill him, and we take his zahhaks. We rally the Registani fire zahhaks to fight alongside us, we burn the Mahisagari fleet to ashes, we obliterate their army, and we retake Kadiro. With your thunder zahhaks and the fire zahhaks Arjun could supply us, it would be an easy matter, Father. And then we could conquer Mahisagar, and gift Ahura to Safavia in exchange for peace. Let Durrania and Khuzdar face Safavia’s armies for a time, while we build our strength.”