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

Does your neck still hurt, Akka?” Lakshmi asked me as she stared at the big, ugly bruises ringing my neck in the perfect shape of Karim’s palm and fingers.

“No, sweetheart,” I lied. “I’m fine.”

“He shouldn’t have hurt you for climbing,” she said, shaking her head in a way that made my heart ache. She was still trying to work out why he had beaten me, why the man she thought of as a dashing prince had attacked her big sister and bloodied her face and strangled her. “You love climbing, he knows that. He saw you climb in Shikarpur.”

“He wasn’t mad at me for climbing, he was mad at me for lying,” I told her, appalled with myself for defending Karim to Lakshmi, but it was still another few days before the full moon, and I didn’t want Lakshmi to antagonize him. “I should have told him about the shoes, and I should have told him about the climbing.”

“But he should never have hit her,” Sakshi added, a surprising amount of anger coloring her voice. “No man should hit his wife for any reason ever. What Karim did was bad, and wrong, and he should be the one punished for it, not our sister.”

Some of Asma’s handmaidens raised eyebrows at Sakshi’s tirade, and I knew they’d be whispering all of that in Asma’s ears before long. That was fine. Sakshi could be angry. I couldn’t afford to have my words used against me, though. So I kept my mouth shut, and let Lakshmi decide things for herself.

Lakshmi just hugged me tightly and said, “I miss Prince Arjun, Akka. He never would have hurt you.”

I miss Prince Arjun too. That was what I wanted to say, but I knew better. I just let my emotions go out of me as a long sigh, fighting not to cry in front of everyone. I wrapped Lakshmi in the tightest embrace I could manage. “We’re going to be okay,” I promised her. “You’ll see.”

Sakshi was frowning. She knew what I’d been planning with Hina. I’d kept Lakshmi in the dark, because eleven-year-olds are terrible about keeping secrets, but my elder sister knew everything. She knew that in just a few days there would be a battle, that all of our lives would be on the line. I wondered if that frightened her.

“Razia is right,” Sakshi said, and though she reached forward and stroked Lakshmi’s hair, she was looking at me. “We’re going to be fine. This is all going to work out for the best. You’ll see.”

“How?” Lakshmi asked. She looked up at me. “Do you really think marrying Prince Karim is going to be for the best when he hits you?”

“I think you should leave those things to the grown-ups,” I replied, as that was the only answer I could give her that wasn’t a bald-faced lie.

“Akka, I’m not a baby . . .” she complained.

“I know you’re not,” I told her, “but things are complicated right now, and you have to give me a chance to work through them, okay?”

“Yeah . . .” she allowed. “But if Prince Karim hits you again, I’m going to tell Mohini to eat him.”

“You will do no such thing,” I chided, though my heart felt warm and fuzzy imagining Karim being eaten by a zahhak. “If you want to keep riding Mohini, you have to be good, all right?”

“It’s not fair that he won’t let you ride Sultana,” she said. “She’s lonely. She even comes up to me in the stables sometimes, because I smell like you.”

That hit me like a punch to the gut. I forced myself to smile. “Well, until Prince Karim decides that he can trust me with my zahhak, you’ll have to give Sultana some petting for me. Will you do that?”

She bobbed her head.

“Good.” I shooed her off my lap. “Now, go play with Nuri or something. You don’t want to sit here on the roof all day, do you?”

She surprised me by shrugging. “They don’t let us out of the women’s quarters. It’s so boring. Back in Bikampur Shiv would take me to the market sometimes. I still haven’t seen the market in Kadiro.”

“Why don’t you go flying?” I suggested, pushing down all the righteous anger I was feeling on my little sister’s behalf, an anger that was so much hotter and fiercer than the one that cropped up when I was feeling abused and controlled by Karim and his family.

“They don’t let us go very far,” she said. “And anyway, I want to fly with you and Sakshi like we used to in Bikampur.” She frowned as a realization occurred to her. “Akka, I want to go home.”

My heart felt like it had been stabbed with a dagger. I was completely at a loss for what to tell her. What I wanted to say was forbidden, it would get us all killed, but it was all I could do to keep my mouth shut, to not tell her, “Honey, I want to go home too.” I sucked in a sharp breath through my nose instead and looked at the floor, trying to think of something smart to say.

“It’s okay to miss Bikampur and Prince Arjun,” Sakshi told her, sparing me from having to come up with anything. “It’s normal to miss people and places we love. But we live here in Zindh now, and someday we’re going to love living here just as much as we loved living in Bikampur.”

“No, I won’t!” Lakshmi declared.

“You might,” Sakshi said. “But until then, we have to make the best of things. And that means finding things here that make us happy when we’re feeling sad. Do you know what I like to do when I’m missing Bikampur?”

“Play your sitar?” Lakshmi ventured, which I thought was a pretty perfect guess.

“That’s right,” she said.

“But you play your sitar every night,” Lakshmi pointed out.

Sakshi shrugged. “I’m homesick every night.”

That was too much for me to bear, plan or no plan. I stood up abruptly and started walking away, because I just