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

it. Now I did. “Where did you go? Answer me!” He was shaking me, like that would pry the answers loose.

I fumbled for a response, but my mind was moving too slowly, and Karim was in no mood to be patient. He backhanded me across the face, tearing my new nose ring from my nostril. I hit the ground like a sack of grain and clutched my face, blood pooling in my palm. But he wasn’t finished. He kicked me in the ribs with his shin, sending me sliding across the polished marble floor.

Self-preservation kicked in then. I scrambled to my feet as he stalked toward me like a hungry tiger, his eyes too wide, his pupils too big and too black. I held up my hands to ward off whatever punch he threw and gasped out, “Shikarpur, your highness!”

“What?” he growled, but he paused, and that was the opening I needed.

“Shikarpur, your highness. I wore them when I scaled the cliffs of Shikarpur. I brought them with me from Bikampur when I came to Zindh, and they must have arrived with my other clothes in the same chest. I didn’t even know they were here!”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” he demanded.

“Because she didn’t give me a chance to speak!” I exclaimed, gesturing to his mother. “And neither did you!”

Karim gritted his teeth, but a lot of the anger seemed to have gone out of him. He took a step toward me, but I backed up, flattening myself against the wall. He sighed. “Razia . . .”

I held my bloodied face in my palm, thinking of all the ways I could use this misstep on Asma’s part to my advantage, when the old hag spoke up again. “I had considered that these might be those shoes you wore on your now-famous ascent of Shikarpur’s cliffs, daughter-in-law.”

My stomach lurched. There was something about the smirk on her face that told me there was more, that she knew more than she’d let on. God, had I underestimated her again? If she proved to Karim that I was lying about those shoes . . .

“But the fabric used to make them is the fabric I supplied to Hina and her celas to repair their clothes and their shoes,” Asma said. “So, naturally, I assumed they were dancing shoes. But if they are climbing shoes like the ones you used in Shikarpur, and they are newly made, then why are they worn? Where have you been going, daughter-in-law?”

Karim looked to his mother, his fists clenched. “You can prove this?”

“I can, dear,” she assured him. “I know that you love this . . . creature, but you cannot put your faith in a cross-dressing whore. He lies about everything—even his sex.”

Karim whirled on me, his eyes narrowed. “I should have known!”

He stepped toward me, and there was nowhere left for me to go. But at that moment, Sikander came into the room, and I saw Hina and Sakshi hanging back by the doorway, and I knew that Hina had gone to fetch him the instant Karim had started beating me. Sikander took one look at my bloodied face, at the bruises on my neck, and he turned and marched toward Karim, his face purple with fury.

Karim opened his mouth to say something, but he didn’t know Sikander like I did. When my old guardsman got that look on his face, I’d always made myself scarce, because there was no reasoning with him. I realized, as his fist smashed into Karim’s jaw, that he’d never looked at me that way before. He’d reserved his true fury for men who had failed in their duties, not for those under his protection. It wasn’t that he’d never beaten me before, but those had always been carefully controlled affairs. Not like this.

Karim reeled from the impact of the punch, but a second was already on its way. The Mahisagari prince blocked the second punch with his forearm, but Sikander had been expecting that. He was powerful and stocky and created by God himself for wrestling. He grabbed Karim’s arm and twisted his body, dropping to one knee as he hurled Karim over his shoulder to make the throw that much stronger.

I’d never in my life heard anybody hit stone that hard before. Karim made a kind of wheezing noise as all the air was pounded out of his lungs. I expected that to be the end of it—Sikander had made his point—but he pulled back his fist, and I realized that he wasn’t going to stop, that this wasn’t about making a point, that he had seen me bloodied by Karim so soon after being reminded of his failure to protect me from being raped by him six years prior, and now he was going to avenge the both of us.

I couldn’t have that. If he killed Karim, then I’d be killed too. We’d be the first casualties in my father’s new war with Mahisagar. And much as I wanted to see Karim’s face pounded into mush, I knew that Ahmed Shah wouldn’t tolerate it, even if the consequence was a war he couldn’t hope to win.

“Sikander, stop!” I exclaimed.

I was shocked when he froze in place, when both he and Karim twisted their heads in my direction, like they hadn’t expected anyone to intervene.

“Please get off of my fiancé. This has gone far enough,” I said, keeping my voice calm so that I wouldn’t add any more fuel to the fire.

“But your highness, he struck you,” Sikander reminded me, still clutching one of Karim’s wrists in his fist, his other fist still poised to slam down into Karim’s face.

“I was in the wrong,” I said, shocking everyone in the room, except perhaps Asma. She was narrowing her eyes at me, waiting to see how I would spin this. The mask was off now; she wasn’t pretending to be naive any longer. “Everything the sultana has said is true. Well, nearly everything. I do not lie about my sex.” I glared at her for that.

“No, just about