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

Well, I would show him what happened to men who tried to use me in that fashion, or I would die trying.

I let my hands and my feet worry about finding holds, keeping my eyes on the palace guards. They were visible in their domed chhatris, the pavilion-capped towers standing one at each corner of the southern wall. Though there were hundreds of guards in the palace, there were just two who might have spotted me. In a way, I was lucky to be sequestered in the women’s quarters. It meant that there were no guards manning the walls on this side of the palace, because unrelated men weren’t allowed here. So this entire stretch of wall was protected by a pair of sleepy-eyed sentries in towers dozens of yards away, where their best views were of the eastern and western approaches. Still, if one of them happened to turn and look this way, my whole plan might be undone before it could begin.

I tried to focus on the climb, to push thoughts of failure from my mind. I couldn’t control whether or not someone came into my bedchambers and realized that the girl in my bed wasn’t me but one of Hina’s celas. I couldn’t even really control whether or not a guard saw me. That was in God’s hands. What I could control was getting off this wall as quickly and silently as possible.

It was tough to tell just how far away the water was below me. That was always a danger when climbing—jumping down only to find that you were twenty feet up, not five. With the darkness of the night, and the starlight playing across the rippling surface of the lagoon, it was even more difficult than usual. So the first sign I got that I had made it was when my foot got wet while it was trying to feel out another crack in the masonry.

I breathed a little sigh of relief. So far so good. No guards had spotted me yet, though I knew that my swim would be the dangerous part. If I splashed, the noise would draw the eyes of every guard in every watchtower. And I would have to keep low, my head just barely peeking out above the water’s surface, otherwise my silhouette might give me away.

As I slowly lowered myself into the water, another thought occurred to me—were there crocodiles in this lagoon? I suddenly wished I’d asked Hina about that, though I supposed maybe it didn’t matter. I didn’t have any weapons with which to fight back, so if a crocodile attacked me, I’d get eaten. It was as simple as that. Or at least that was what I told myself, but as the waters of the lagoon swallowed up my knees, and then my hips, I imagined a crocodile the size of Sultana gobbling me up, and my heart started to pound.

I forced myself to take a deep, calming breath, and then I let go of the wall and slid soundlessly into the water. It was shallow enough that if I stood on my tiptoes I could walk across the bottom and keep my chin just barely above the surface of the waves, but it was easier to just use the wall itself for propulsion. I put my hands on the stonework, letting my fingers dig into the cracks in the masonry, and glided along the base of the wall, toward the western guard tower.

I’d spent hours planning my route, thinking over every eventuality, but staying so close to the palace was a calculated risk. If the guard in the southwestern tower looked in my direction, I was sure he would spot me. He seemed impossibly close, standing in the orange light cast by the bronze lanterns hanging from the chhatri’s sandstone pillars. I could make out the details of his face, the deep brown of his mustache, the lighter brown color of his eyes, the whites of them tinged yellow thanks to the lantern light. I knew I was moving in shadow, and I knew that few guards would look straight down when they had been trained to look for more distant threats, like enemy ships sailing into the harbor, but luck had always played an outsize role in these nightly escapades of mine, and I always feared that it would eventually run out.

But this was safer than swimming in the middle of the channel. Here, at least none of the servants or palace women could spot me. Their jali screens prevented them from looking straight down. So long as I hugged the wall, I would be safe from the prying eyes of Asma and the other denizens of the palace zenana. But I still felt hopelessly exposed as I propelled myself closer and closer to the guard tower. Once I got to the base of it, I would be safe, but I wasn’t there yet, and moving without splashing was agonizingly slow. Though I knew it had only been a few minutes, I felt like I’d been in the water for hours.

The guard shifted his weight and turned his head, and I stopped breathing, but I didn’t stop moving right away. I slowed down, letting myself drift to a gradual stop. Sudden changes draw a person’s attention. If you don’t want them to catch sight of you, you can’t do anything abruptly. The guard was looking right over my head, I thought, staring at his compatriot in the eastern tower behind me. He reached up his hand, and I braced myself for the cry of alarm, for the guards to come pouring out of their barracks, but he was just scratching his nose. He played with his mustache for a moment, sighed, and turned away.

I waited a long moment before taking my first stroke with my arms, fighting down the urge to sigh, to breathe hard, to give the tension in my chest some audible release. I couldn’t risk his hearing me, not now, not