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

by jowl with his murderers, and she still had the wherewithal to comfort me.

“How do you do it?” I asked her.

She didn’t need me to explain the question. She just heaved a sigh that was as heavy as the ones that so frequently left my own lips these days, and said, “The same way you let Karim kiss you good night every evening.”

I shuddered at the memories of his lips grazing my cheek, my forehead, even my mouth from time to time. He knew just how far he could push things before Sikander would intervene, though the old guardsman spent most of his time keeping Lakshmi safe.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to kill him before he could drag you into this,” Hina told me.

I shook my head. “It’s my fault he came to Zindh at all. If I hadn’t been named subahdar, none of this would have happened.”

“If you hadn’t been named subahdar, we Zindhis would still be living under Javed Khorasani’s thumb, and that was no better, I promise you,” she replied.

“He wouldn’t have been subahdar if my father hadn’t killed your father,” I pointed out, recalling the aftermath of the Nizami civil war seven years before.

“I don’t miss him,” Hina replied with a shrug. “He was a terrible man. He beat me every chance he got.”

“My father always left it to Sikander to do the beating,” I muttered. I realized that the pair of us hadn’t had much chance to get to know each other these last few days, we’d been so busy plotting against Karim. “Did you run away from home too, then?”

“He didn’t leave me any choice,” she said. “He despised me. He said that I would be the death of Zindh, that I was worthless, that it was lucky he had Ali, because I had no chance whatever of reclaiming our independence.”

I managed a stiff nod, having more or less heard words to that effect for the whole of my life.

“Finally, when I was thirteen years old, I just couldn’t take it anymore. We were in the midst of our uprising. Your father was fighting a civil war against his brother, and we sided with him, whatever his name was.”

“My uncle Azam,” I recalled, though in truth I barely remembered the man beyond his name, having only met him a few times. “I was nine when that rebellion started. My father sent me to the Safavian court for safekeeping. I was eleven by the time the war was over and I could finally come home.”

“Just a baby,” Hina teased.

“That’s what Prince Haider of Safavia thought. He was thirteen when I arrived, fifteen when I left.”

“Was he handsome?” she asked.

“In his own way,” I said. “I mostly thought of him as a big brother, but his mother was the younger sister of the queen of Khevsuria, and like her sister, and her niece, Princess Tamara, she had flame-red hair and bright blue eyes.”

“They’re Firangis?” Hina asked, raising an eyebrow at that. “And Prince Haider too?”

I shook my head. “He takes after his father mostly. He doesn’t have pale skin like a Firangi, and his eyes are brown, but he does have unusually red hair.”

“Hm,” she grunted as she imagined it. “Doesn’t sound very handsome.”

“More so than you might think,” I replied. “And I always thought Tamara was beautiful.”

“That would be the crown princess of Khevsuria?” Hina asked.

I nodded. “She was very kind to me. They both were.” I pushed those thoughts from my mind before they could overwhelm me. I’d spent too many years wondering how my life might have been different had my father lost the civil war and I’d stayed in Safavia. Maybe it would have turned out the same way, but I didn’t think so. Haider and Tamara never would have let those awful things happen to me.

It was the thought of everything that had happened to me after I’d run away from home that reminded me that Hina had been in the midst of telling me her own story. “So, you were thirteen when you left home in the midst of that rebellion?” I prompted.

“Oh, right, that . . .” She grimaced, and I half wondered if she’d been letting me get sidetracked on purpose to avoid painful memories, but I kept quiet and she pressed on. “My father beat me pretty severely one night. I think he must have been upset that the war wasn’t going well, but most of it was that I’d been wearing one of my mother’s old lehengas, and he’d caught me doing it. He’d beaten me plenty of times before, but never like that.” She shook her head at the memory, her arms wrapping around her stomach, her shoulders hunching. “It had never hurt like that. Not ever. I thought he’d killed me.”

I took her hand in mine, rubbing my thumb across her knuckles in gentle circles, hoping to distract her from the memory of the pain, because I knew exactly what she was talking about. Pain is a wonderful teacher, and I had not forgotten a single lesson.

“I had to run away,” Hina murmured. “But I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye to my brother. Ali had always been my protector. He’d known I was different, ever since I was little, but he’d never hurt me for it, never chastised me for it. Sometimes he would distract Father for me. Other times he would hide me in his room, or take me for a ride on his zahhak, back when Sakina wasn’t old enough to be ridden. He was my only friend, and I loved him fiercely, and I just couldn’t bear to go without saying good-bye.”

Her voice was so thick with emotion that I thought I knew what was coming next. “And he ratted you out to your father?”

Anger flashed in Hina’s olive eyes, and she glared at me for an instant before realizing that I hadn’t meant to impugn her brother’s character, that I’d just been responding from my own horrific experiences.

“No.” She gave my