Gifting Fire by Alina Boyden (read my book .TXT) 📕

thinking about him. But I remembered his words of support, remembered the permission he’d given me to survive, and I kept those words close. He would never blame me, whatever it took to get through this, and that meant the world to me.

“You know, I never did get the chance to thank you, your highness,” Hina said.

“Thank me?” I screwed up my face in confusion at those words. “For what? Getting you into this mess?”

“For saving my life,” she replied. “First when you took me in, and again when you defended me from your father and Karim. And I suppose a third time, when you talked me out of just shooting him and trading my life for his.”

“I half wish I had let you shoot him,” I muttered.

She shook her head. “No. You made the right decision. If we’re going to survive this, we need to be smart about it, we need to have a plan. Let’s not throw away our lives now just because we’re scared.”

“You’re scared too?” I asked her, because there was no sign of it on her face. Even when Karim had arrived, her expression had been one of rage rather than fear.

“We all are,” Hina assured me, but then her eyes flickered over to where Lakshmi and Nuri were flying a mock dogfight in the middle of the formation of river zahhaks, giggling loudly enough that we could hear them from where we were sitting. “Well, except them.”

It was a remarkable thing to watch. I’d never seen river zahhaks growing up, so I knew little of their capabilities, beyond what I’d seen since coming to Zindh. But as Nuri and Lakshmi fought their mock duel, I noted that the river zahhak’s flight was far more buoyant than any other species I’d ever seen before. Nalini’s wings didn’t seem to beat with the same strength of purpose as a thunder or acid zahhak’s, giving her flight a lazy character to it, but each wingbeat lifted her higher in the air than a beat from Sultana’s wings would have done for her. And while Nalini didn’t have Mohini’s raw speed, and her long, pointed wings couldn’t roll quite as quickly as the acid zahhak’s shorter, broader ones, when the pair of them circled in the sky, it was the river zahhak who turned tighter, her long, forked tail twisting sideways as her wings dug so hard into the air that they sent little wisps of white smoke corkscrewing off their tips.

“They’re such magnificent fliers,” I said, more to myself than to Hina.

“Yes, they’re going to be so ferocious when they grow up,” Hina agreed, mistaking my meaning.

“No, not Lakshmi and Nuri,” I said. “Well, yes, them too. I meant your river zahhaks. I’ve never had the pleasure of watching them fly before. They’re exquisitely maneuverable.”

“And if they had breath, Zindh would be free,” Hina lamented. “That’s what my brother used to always say. If we could just give a river zahhak the fire of a fire zahhak or the lightning of a thunder zahhak, Zindh would be the most powerful kingdom in all the world.”

I grunted at that. “How many river zahhaks are there in Zindh anyway?” Hina had sixteen of her own, and I knew that Sunil had more besides, but I hadn’t been in Zindh long enough to get a rough idea.

“Altogether?” Hina shrugged. “I don’t know. But before Mahisagar’s invasion, my brother and I had forty-eight animals at our command. Now there are just thirty-two left. The other wealthy zamindars in Zindh have zahhaks of their own, but they’ll be reluctant to fly for us when they know they haven’t got a prayer of winning a fight in the air.”

I shrugged. “I’m less worried about river zahhaks than I am about soldiers. Arjun can bring fire zahhaks from Registan, and if I can get word to Haider, he might bring thunder zahhaks from Safavia. But without soldiers, we’ll never recapture Kadiro.”

“Speaking of which, we’re getting close now,” Hina said, gesturing to the farmlands in front of us.

I didn’t see what was so different about them from the ones we’d been flying over for the last three and a half hours. Flat fields of freshly planted rice and cotton were broken up here and there with tall sugarcane stalks reaching the midpoint of their growing season. The farms lined the banks of the Zindhu in a strip of green leaves and black furrows about ten or fifteen miles wide, before the land turned to yellow dust, too arid for farming, and bereft even of much tree cover.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“Because we’re reaching the delta,” she replied, pointing to little ribbons of water branching off the main channel of the river, spreading out before us like a fan. “Kadiro is there.” She pointed across the desert to our right, though I couldn’t yet make out any signs of a city in that direction.

Still, Hina had lived in Kadiro and its environs for the whole of her life, so I trusted her as she banked Sakina in that direction, the indigo-winged river zahhak quickening her pace as she too recognized the landscape near her home.

I followed Hina, noting that the other Zindhi fliers had already started their turns for Kadiro, drawing sudden movements from the acid zahhak riders behind us, none of whom really knew Zindh very well, and who had been content to follow the winding course of the river to the city.

Personally, I’d have rather taken the scenic route to get to Kadiro. The longer I put off my arrival, the longer I could pretend that none of this was really happening, that I wasn’t engaged to Karim, that I wasn’t going to be forced to live in a strange palace surrounded by foreign soldiers, ruled over by men who wanted to strip me of my freedom and command me like a slave. And the closer we got to Kadiro, the more aware of my fate I became, and the more I worried