Gifting Fire Read online

  But I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t find the words in time, and I wasn’t sure that there were any words left to say. And then my father spoke, and the opportunity was lost forever.

  “I’m leaving Sikander with you. He will command your personal guards, and your zahhak riders.”

  I glanced to the man in question, my father’s shadow, his chief lieutenant, his most trusted guard, and my foremost tormenter. A myriad of competing emotions warred inside of me. I was touched. My father was leaving his most trusted bodyguard with me. That must have meant that he really wanted me to succeed. Or was it a trap? Was Sikander meant to keep me in line, to kill me if I strayed from my father’s plans? Or was it petty revenge, sticking me with the man who had beaten me until my insides hurt for every imagined offense against the standards of masculinity he had set?

  It was those memories that made up my mind. I couldn’t imagine trusting the man who had whipped me with a cane for something as innocuous as remarking on the beauty of the flowers in the garden. After a moment of stunned silence, I opened my mouth to refuse my father’s offer, but I was too late.

  Sikander had dropped to his knees at my father’s feet, his head bowed. “Your majesty,” he said, “in all the time that we have known one another, I have never once questioned an order, but I beg you to reconsider this. What use will I be to you here when Virajendra threatens in the southlands? If this is a punishment, if I have displeased you, please tell me how I can make it right.”

  Anger and sorrow tightened around my heart. Of course he would think that being asked to serve me was a punishment.

  My father laid his hand on Sikander’s shoulder with a fondness he had never shown me. “This is no punishment, my friend. On the contrary, I would consider it a favor.”

  “A favor?” Sikander’s deep brown eyes were pinched with worry. “But, your majesty, this is a hopeless task.”

  “If Zindh falls, it falls,” my father answered with a shrug that filled me with a bitterness that stung the back of my throat. “But losing this province to a hijra has made us look weak. If Zindh is to fall, it must not fall too quickly, and our enemies must pay a price in blood to take it. Otherwise we would look weaker still. I need someone here who can fight like a wounded lion surrounded by hungry jackals. Can I trust you to hold here as long as you can, and to punish those who would attack us with all the strength you possess?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest, the sour expression not leaving my face, but I had to admire my father’s way with men. He always knew how best to stroke their egos, how to flatter them and cajole them and get them to follow his orders. He’d have made a pretty good courtesan himself, though I suspected I’d have lost my tongue for telling him so.

  “I will hold here for as long as you require, your majesty,” Sikander swore, just as I’d known he would.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said. “I can hold Zindh on my own. In fact, I’d prefer it that way.”

  My father’s green eyes narrowed in irritation, but for once his anger was nothing when set beside Sikander’s. The old guardsman stood up in a huff and glared at me, his fists tightening into gnarled, hard-used fists. The threat was obvious, and one he never would have dared aim at my father no matter what the provocation.

  “Did you think I was making a request, Salim?” my father snapped, before Sikander’s fists could go to work.

  I wished I could have honestly said that little barbs like that didn’t hurt, but they did, even after all these years. I gritted my teeth, biting back a hundred angry responses in favor of the only one that mattered.

  “What I think, Father,” I said, lingering on that word, reminding him of the relationship he had so often denied, “is that if you are going to leave me here in this province to die, you could at least let me choose a bodyguard I can trust.”

  My father had been on the verge of shouting something at me, but he suddenly reared back in shock and confusion. He exchanged quizzical glances with Sikander, who seemed as befuddled by my words as my father was. When my father spoke, his voice was tinged with astonishment as he asked, “You really think you can’t trust Sikander?”

  I looked at the man in question, who seemed genuinely surprised—and annoyed—that I doubted his loyalty. Once upon a time, I’d never have dared do any such thing. When I was little, he had held my hand wherever we went. He had led me through the markets of the city, making sure I never got lost or hurt. He had threatened with death any who had dared to look at me cross-eyed. He had driven the monsters from my bedchambers, and the fear from stormy nights. But then, one day, when I was seven, I’d worn a pretty green peshwaz that had belonged to my cousin Sidra, and she’d told the harem servitors, who had told my father. And after that day, nothing was ever the same again.

  “How can I trust with my safety the man who spent most of my life beating me bloody simply for existing?” I asked, my voice colder and more measured than I would have thought possible, given the roiling emotions straining against the walls of my chest. “How can I trust his hands to keep me safe, when all I’ve ever known from them is pain?”

  My questions were met with a deafening silence. I’d half expected my father to mock me, to deride my effeminacy all over again, to tell me how richly deserved those beatings had been, but instead he just stood there, slack-jawed, like he’d genuinely forgotten all the reasons I’d had for running away from home at the age of thirteen. And Sikander, he looked down at his hands, as I’d known he would, and saw them balled up and ready to strike. All that self-righteous anger went out of him like a deflating bellows, leaving his muscular chest hollowed and his massive shoulders slumped.

  “If I’m going to have a captain for my guards, I want it to be a man who has never beaten me, Father,” I continued. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

  My father stood there in silence, and for a moment, I thought that I had won. But then the familiar excuses came. “Everything Sikander did, he did at my command.”

  “I know,” I replied, looking right into my father’s eyes, letting him see what I knew. My own father had hated me so much that he’d tried to have my soul beaten out of my body when I was too young to understand, let alone fight back.

  “What you need doesn’t matter,” my father said, so dismissively that it made my blood boil. “What I need is a strong man to lead the soldiers here. They will not follow a whore—especially not one who was supposed to be a prince.”

  “Forgive me, Father,” I said, managing to keep my voice steady even though my body was trembling with emotion, “but did you intend for Sikander to be my bodyguard or my jailer?”

  “You are the subahdar of Zindh, but Sikander will command the men I leave behind,” my father replied, which told me all too clearly whom he had intended to leave in charge.

  “A subahdar with no troops is no subahdar,” I hissed.

  “Sikander will command the soldiers, and I will hear no more about it, especially not here in front of my men.” He nodded to the soldiers, who were still sitting in rigid rows on the backs of their zahhaks. I didn’t know how much they could hear of our conversation, but however much they heard was almost certainly too much. My effeminacy was no longer a closely guarded secret in the Nizami court. Everyone knew what I was. But having heard a rumor and seeing me argue with my father while clad in a peshwaz and dupatta were two very different things. If his men lost confidence in him as a leader because of me, the results would be disastrous for both of us. That was why he was leaving Sikander here. Because I was too much of a disgrace for any soldier to obey.

  “For once in your life, just do as you’re told, Razia,” my father growled before I could reply.

  I understood the points he was making, but I couldn’t give in to them, not if I wanted to have a chance here. “I am the subahdar of Zindh, Father. If you insist on leaving Sikander here, then I must insist on his oath to follow my
orders, not the other way around.”

  “He will command the troops, but he will obey you in everything,” my father assured me. It surprised me that he gave in so easily. He nodded to Sikander. “Won’t you?”

  “I will, your majesty,” Sikander said. He turned and bowed to me in the perfunctory way he always had back in Nizam, the gesture one of necessity rather than respect. “I swear that I will obey your orders and that I will protect you with my life, as I always have.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Part of me wanted to tell him that he could take that oath and cram it in a very particular place, but another part of me remembered the way he had chased the monsters from my bedchamber, the way he had taught me to feed Sultana after she’d hatched, and it wanted nothing more than for me to forgive him, for things to go back to the way they’d been all those years ago, before anyone had realized what a disgusting creature I was.

  But maybe none of it mattered. If I wanted to survive, I couldn’t afford to turn down good zahhak riders. I couldn’t afford to turn away good military commanders. And Sikander was both of those things. More than that, I’d never known him to lie, or to take a false oath. Whatever else I could say about him, he was honest and loyal to a fault. Sometimes that meant beating a child because his sovereign ordered it. But here it meant that he really would obey me, that he really would protect my life with his own, because he’d said he would. And if I was going to take command of a province in the midst of an open rebellion, with war looming on the horizon, I would need a man whose word I could trust, whose loyalty was unquestioned. I had one already in Arjun. And while Sikander and Arjun were as different from each other as night from day, they were alike in that one regard. They were honest and loyal to a fault.

  “You’re sure you won’t need him against Virajendra, Father?” I asked, half hoping I might still be rid of him, even if I could see the benefits he might bring.

  My father shrugged. “I have plenty of good generals. His service will mean more here.”

  I saw then the reason for my father’s irritation with me. I may have seen Sikander as a tyrant and a thug, my father’s chief torturer where I was concerned, but from my father’s perspective, he was gifting me with his best friend and his most trusted soldier. He was trying, in his own way, to protect me. He may have couched that in politics and military strategy, but as he’d pointed out, he had plenty of good generals. He only had one who could be trusted not to murder me and take Zindh for himself.

  “Thank you.” I’d never imagined I’d say those two words to my father, but if I didn’t show him that I acknowledged what he was doing, that I understood him, then we truly would never have anything between us but hate. One of us had to take the first step toward reconciliation, and I knew that it wasn’t going to be him. Although, maybe that’s what Zindh was to him. Maybe his idea of reconciliation was leaving me alone in a ruined province to sink or swim on my own merits. When I looked at it from that perspective, I saw that it was all I’d ever really wanted from him anyway—the chance to prove myself in his eyes.

  My father cleared his throat to avoid saying “you’re welcome.” He gave me the same gruff nod he’d always used when confronted with the risk of accidentally showing some small sign of affection for me. “Well, Virajendra isn’t going to wait for me to get my men in position before they launch their attacks.”

  He started to step toward his waiting men, but I reached out and took his hand to stop him. The feeling of my soft palm against his rough knuckles startled him. He stared down at me, his expression hovering somewhere between confusion and disgust, but I looked him squarely in the eyes and said, “I’m not going to fail. Zindh will hold. You’ll see.”

  “I suppose I will,” he agreed, but he didn’t sound convinced. He jerked his hand free of mine and walked swiftly to the stables, where one of my five hundred guardsmen was holding Malikah by her reins. The old thunder zahhak looked just like I remembered her, just like she had on all those flights so many years ago. Her tail pumped excitedly at my father’s approach, and she pressed her snout to his cheek in greeting. He stroked her scales with a fondness he hadn’t shown me since that horrible day ten years before, and then he swung into the saddle, strapping himself in before trotting Malikah out into the midst of his men.

  I watched as the sixteen thunder zahhaks formed up in two neat ranks behind Malikah, as she raced forward, running along the limestone path that led to the edge of Shikarpur’s sheerest cliff. One by one, the zahhaks flung themselves over the edge, beating back the air with their wings, dust swirling around the tips of their primary feathers. I stood there, straining my eyes to watch the dark blue animals soaring in the gathering twilight, until there was nothing to see but empty sky.

  He hadn’t said good-bye, but then I hadn’t really expected him to. At least the last words that had passed between us hadn’t been shouted in anger. I didn’t know if that was a good sign, or if I was just stupidly clinging to the fragments of a relationship that no longer existed, but I couldn’t stop myself from hoping. No one wants to be despised by her parents, and no child wants to despise her father.

  CHAPTER 4

  She’s really mine?” Sakshi asked, stroking the thunder zahhak’s scales with tears in her eyes.

  I nodded, my heart swelling with pride. My father had left us with the four thunder zahhaks I’d stolen from Javed Khorasani. With Sikander’s mount, and Arjun’s and Arvind’s fire zahhaks, that gave me seven in total, a formidable enough force, even if I lacked the soldiers to exploit any victories they might bring me. Lakshmi had already kept one of those four animals for herself, and now Sakshi was well trained enough to claim a second.

  “I thought you would like this one best,” I said, “because her name is Ragini.”

  “Ragini?” Sakshi gasped, delighted by the name, as I’d known she would be. My sister was a brilliant sitar player, and raginis were the melodic moods she drew upon to color her performances. Whoever this zahhak’s first master had been, he must have had an interest in music.

  The zahhak responded to her name, but she was still eyeing Sakshi warily. In truth, the bond between zahhak and rider was always forged from the moment of the animal’s hatching. If a rider died before his zahhak, she could be made to serve another, but never as completely as she had the one who had raised her. I wished I could have given Sakshi a zahhak egg, as I had been given, so that she might have the joy of raising her own mount, of training it, of bonding to it properly, but eggs were difficult to come by, and it took years for a zahhak to grow big enough to ride. I needed riders now, so we would have to make do.

  “For the first few weeks, I don’t want you to come see Ragini in the stables unless Sultana or Padmini is there too,” I warned.

  My thunder zahhak heard her name and pressed her face close against mine in response. I reached up and gave her a fond pat along the ridge of golden scales that traced the edge of her sapphire neck, which could flare into a hood like a cobra’s. Though Sultana was nuzzling me gently, her emerald eyes were fixed on Ragini, the less dominant zahhak held under control by threat of death at Sultana’s teeth and claws. Otherwise, she might well have eaten us all.

  “Will she ever care for me?” Sakshi asked, the uncertainty in her voice making my heart ache for her. She deserved a zahhak who loved her the way mine loved me.

  “Yes, eventually,” I said, and it wasn’t even a lie. “It will take a long time, but she will grow accustomed to following your commands, to serving you. She will trust you eventually. It will never be like a zahhak you raised yourself, but you won’t always have to worry about her eating you.”

  “Well, that’s something anyway,” Sakshi allowed, her lips twisting into a smile as she went back to gazing up at Ragini’s big green eyes. I didn’t know what my sister imagined that she saw in them, but I knew from long experience that the zahhak’s expression was one of tolerance rather than affection.r />
  “And I’ll get to fly with you in battle if it comes to it?”

  I glanced back at her, surprised to hear the determination in Sakshi’s voice, to see the seriousness etched across her face in the hard line of her mouth and the little wrinkles between her eyebrows.

  “I’m not staying behind again, Razia,” she declared. “I’m not going to wait in the palace, not knowing if you and Lakshmi are ever coming back to me. If we have to fight, we do it together or we don’t do it at all. Promise me that.”

  “I promise,” I told her, and I sealed it with a tight embrace. “It’ll be just like we always dreamed it would be when we were little.”

  If I closed my eyes, I could see it, the pair of us staring up at the night sky as we lay on the rooftop of our dera, our little hijra household. The nightmares had been so frequent then that I was often afraid to sleep, but Sakshi had always held my hand and made me tell her stories about flying zahhaks through the skies of Nizam until I got so tired I drifted off in peace. I couldn’t have asked for a better elder sister.

  I let her go, somewhat reluctantly, but I didn’t have a choice. There was too much work to be done. “You can stay here and get to know Ragini if you like. Sultana and Padmini will protect you.”

  “You’re not getting back to work already, are you?” Sakshi asked, her brow creasing with concern.

  “This palace isn’t going to repair itself, this household isn’t going to organize itself, and I still don’t know precisely what I’m dealing with when it comes to the local emirs, and the people here in Shikarpur,” I said with a sigh. “I don’t know how much more time Ali Talpur is going to give me before he strikes, but we’ve already been here three days. I’m sure he’s heard of my arrival by now, and he must have started preparations to attack.”