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

bit more difficult, but the sandstone buttresses supporting it were carved and decorated too, so it wouldn’t be that tricky, I didn’t think.

“Is everything all right?” Hina asked, still hovering cautiously beside me, just in case I really was suicidal and about to throw myself over the ledge.

“How far is it from the palace to Kadiro’s docks?” I asked.

She raised a mahogany eyebrow, her lips twisting with concern. “How far?”

“To swim,” I said. “How far of a swim is it?”

“You wouldn’t survive the fall, your highness,” she warned me. “The water is shallow here around the island. You’d hit bottom and break every bone in your body—if you weren’t killed from the impact with the water itself. And even if you somehow did survive the fall intact, every guard in the palace would hear the splash.”

I stood up and dusted off my skirts. “Humor me.”

She rolled her hazel eyes. “I suppose it’s about half a mile. But if you think I came all this way, gave up all my weapons, and placed myself under Karim’s control just to watch you hurl yourself into the lagoon, you are sorely mistaken.”

Half a mile. I could manage that. I was a strong swimmer, or had been, when I was living in Nizam. I hadn’t had much cause to swim in Bikampur, the desert city not affording me many opportunities to practice, but I hadn’t forgotten the lessons I’d learned as a young prince in Nizam, or the times I’d gone swimming with Haider and Tamara during those two glorious summers in Tavrezh, Safavia’s glittering riverside capital.

“Are there any odd currents that might drag you out to sea?” I wondered, as that was the real danger.

Hina crossed her arms over her chest and said nothing, convinced that I’d lost my mind. I couldn’t even blame her, not really. To anyone else, my new home probably looked like an impregnable fortress, but I had scaled more difficult walls in Bikampur, to say nothing of the cliffs of Shikarpur, which had towered two hundred feet above the desert, the natural rock providing nothing as secure for handholds and footholds as the raised decorations that studded every inch of this palace.

“Did no one tell you how I stole the thunder zahhaks from Javed Khorasani?” I asked her.

“People said you scaled the cliffs of Shikarpur with your bare hands . . .” she murmured, but her eyes were still narrowed with skepticism. She hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen it for herself.

I walked back to the column that had provided my inspiration, and I scampered up it, using the big rosettes for handholds, shoving the tips of my slippers into the gaps in the tile work to lever myself upward as easily as if I were walking across solid ground. In an instant, I was fifteen feet in the air, my legs wrapped around the column’s capital. I bent over backward, letting my body hang, my arms crossed over my chest, my braided hair spilling down until it was nearly touching the top of Hina’s head.

“If there are no powerful currents in the lagoon, then I think I have found our messenger,” I declared.

CHAPTER 13

Her highness is resting!”

A man’s deep, gruff voice echoed off unfamiliar marble walls, jarring me from my sleep. I sat up with a start, my heart pounding, my eyes flickering across blue lotus tilework set into bright white marble and golden sandstone. The sound of the sea was droning in my ears, the waves crashing on a beach somewhere in the distance providing the backdrop to the louder lapping of calmer waters against the stout stones of the palace walls nearby. The raucous calls of seagulls were loud overhead, and a few tiny fish zahhaks, no bigger than crows, were chattering away from their perches on the marble railing of my patio.

It took my mind a moment to assemble the pieces of my memory, to recall yesterday’s horrible events. Kadiro. I was in Kadiro, trapped within the walls of Ahmed Shah’s new palace, and the voice I heard outside my chambers, thick with sarcasm, was Karim’s. “Calm down, Sikander, I’m sure my wife-to-be will be thrilled to see me.”

I sat up, a thin silk sheet sliding off my body into my lap just as Karim came striding into the room. Sikander walked close beside him, one hand on the hilt of his talwar.

“Sleep well, your highness?” Karim asked, his lips following the upward curve of his mustache as he smirked at me, his eyes taking in the thin white kameez I wore, making me acutely aware of how sheer the fabric was. My cheeks burned, and I pulled the silken sheet in front of myself, though I knew I must have looked ridiculous.

“So modest?” It was a taunt, but the husky note in his voice betrayed him. He liked it.

“I’m sorry,” I said, remembering that I needed to play the role of the beaten and submissive girl if I was going to keep him from guessing my plans. I bowed my head. “Was I supposed to be up earlier, your highness?”

“My father and mother would like for you and your sisters to breakfast with us in the garden,” Karim explained. “I’ve come to collect you.”

“I’ll need a few moments to get dressed, your highness,” I told him, not letting the silk sheet drop. I knew how little good it would do me if Karim wanted to touch me, but I couldn’t help myself; it was the only defense from his roving eyes that I had, and it helped to keep my revulsion from overwhelming me.

Karim stepped closer, and were it not for my years of training as a courtesan, I’d have flinched. As it was, I kept perfectly still, my breathing a bit shallow, but not noticeably so. I didn’t gasp or shy away or cringe. I sat there, eyes downcast, not moving a muscle, waiting to see what he would do, every