Rising Like a Storm

by Tanaz Bhathena

  Amar’s mouth flattens. “Let’s ask Latif if he has any ideas, then.”

  “I agree,” Kali says, the color having returned to her face. “Especially how he plans to get to Javeribad faster than a shvetpanchhi or a horse.”

  “I do have some ideas,” the specter says from somewhere above the lightorb, his voice perfectly mimicking the mocking tone of Amar’s and Kali’s voices. “It will require planning, naturally, but with the Pashu on our side, we can pull off a quick visit to Javeribad. It might even be safe.”

  “Might?” Amar says sharply. “That’s not good enough!”

  “Might is what I can guarantee in these circumstances, Raja Amar. No plan is entirely foolproof. Something can always go wrong.”

  As Latif relays the details of the plan, I watch everyone’s expressions. Subodh is as neutral as always and Kali is frowning thoughtfully. Only Amar’s face remains hard.

  “What do you think?” Amar asks when Latif finishes speaking. “Raja Subodh?”

  “I think it could work,” the Pashu king says.

  Amar raises his eyebrows skeptically. “Do you really think so? So much could still go wrong! What about you, Kali ji? What do you think?”

  “It’s risky,” Kali says. “But it could work—if Gul does exactly what she’s told.”

  “I will,” I say at once, holding out a hand, linking it with Kali’s.

  “No matter what?”

  “No matter what,” I say honestly.

  Kali releases me.

  Amar says nothing, but I can see he’s still reluctant. It frustrates me to the point that I want to shake him.

  You must not judge him harshly, Subodh whispers, as usual sensing my hostile thoughts. He worries for you as you worry for Cavas.

  He’s not worried for me! He’s only thinking about what I symbolize to the Ambari people.

  Do you really believe that’s the only reason, Gul?

  I think of Amar at Ambar Fort. That moment in the garden when he told me to challenge his father for trying to bind me with the crown prince. I’d seen longing in Amar’s eyes back then. Sometimes, when he looks at me, I think I still see it.

  I take a deep breath, wondering if Amar’s first instinct was right. If this is simply a trap and it is wiser to avoid going to Javeribad. But even as the thought arises, I push it aside.

  Cavas’s life is at stake—and it’s the only thing that matters now.

  * * *

  The morning boasts a blue sky thick with clouds, their edges tinged navy like cotton dipped in ink. I dig my knees into Queen Sarayu’s feathered back, worried that I’ll fall off even though I’m securely strapped to her with ropes. Kali clutches my waist as we rise into the clouds, squealing when a particularly dark layer soaks us right through. We both gasp upon emerging overhead, our eyes smarting in the sunlight.

  “Are you all right back there?” a voice asks, sounding like a hundred birds singing in my ears.

  “Y-yes.” I will my teeth to not chatter and fail. “Y-yes, R-rani S-sarayu.”

  A few thousand feet in the air and shielded by clouds, the Pashu queen soars on her eagle wings, unfurling her peacock feathers as I imagine a ship’s sail would. My stomach swoops when a pair of birds pass us—Brimmish falcons, I realize, from their glistening brown and green feathers. My arms, wound around the simurgh’s neck, tighten before I realize what I’m doing.

  “Goddess! I’m sorry, Rani Sarayu!”

  “You aren’t hurting me, Savak-putri Gulnaz. I meant it when I told you to hold on tight.”

  “You aren’t to let go of her under any circumstance!” Kali says in my ear for probably the hundredth time. “Remember the plan.”

  “I do,” I mutter.

  Latif’s plan was simple: “Fly to Javeribad, but do not land there. Hover over the village until you find the Sky Warriors—look for the screaming and mayhem, it should be easy—and venture close enough to let them see Gul seated on Rani Sarayu’s back. The moment they see Gul, you are to fly back home. This will minimize your risk of capture—and you’ll also prove Cavas right. You are not to dismount—either of you. No matter what you see happening down there.”

  It was the only time I heard Latif sounding stern and forbidding—like a parent warning an errant child. To ensure our security—but mostly our compliance about dismounting—Latif had suggested strapping us to Queen Sarayu with ropes, an act that annoyed Kali as well as me, but it was the only thing that finally persuaded Amar to let us go.

  As we fly farther north, my heart rate begins returning to normal, and I slowly grow aware of the ropes chafing at my thighs. When Latif first suggested flying to Javeribad by simurgh, I thought he was joking. The Pashu don’t like being treated as beasts of burden. When the stately Queen Sarayu actually agreed to take us to Javeribad, I was baffled. It made me consider again what Amar said about the Pashu and their motivations behind aiding us in this war.

  Subodh had proved himself, of course. But what about Rani Sarayu? I wonder. What does she want from this war?

  “I don’t like this,” Kali mutters, distracting me from my thoughts.

  “You should open your eyes,” I tell her. “The land actually looks beautiful from up here.”

  There is something remarkable about seeing Ambar spread beneath us: a patchwork of scattered green squares quilting a sea of flat, sandy plains and russet hills. Between the clouds, I glimpse passing towns and villages, the temples and havelis shrunk to the size of toys.

  But as we move farther north, the air around us shifts. Clouds disperse and the sun burns like the top of a stove. No one speaks now, but I can sense that Kali is as alert as I am. Ambarvadi spreads ahead of us, its magic a glowing dome of pink over the city. Farther ahead lie the gleaming spires of Ambar Fort. Cavas. As the thought enters my head, Queen Sarayu heads west, toward Javeribad.

  “Remember the plan,” Queen Sarayu says. “Do not engage the Sky Warriors in battle. The point of this rather dangerous excursion is for Gul to be seen without getting caught. The moment a Sky Warrior recognizes her, we fly away. Keep your shields up at all times. And under no circumstances must either of you dismount.”

  As she speaks, pressure builds at the back of my throat—an instinctive protest I crush before it lands on my tongue. Dismounting would mean getting captured, jeopardizing everything Subodh, Amar, and the Legion have been working so hard toward: a united Ambar. And, selfish as I am, even I can’t afford such recklessness.

  Moments later, my ears start closing up as we begin our descent toward Javeribad.

  “Shields up,” the Pashu queen announces. “And hold tight.”

  My stomach turns seconds before I see the village’s familiar kidney-shaped lotus pond or the column of smoke rising farther—from the temple housing Sant Javer’s shrine.

  23

  GUL

  Queen Sarayu swoops into a descent and then hovers over the temple. Kali and I hold our daggers at the ready, watching everything happening below through the orange veil of our shields.

  Screams float upward as fiery bodies roil the earth, while a few brave villagers desperately attempt to douse the flames with rugs and blankets.

  “Goddess, is that the priest?” Kali’s voice is tight, horrified.

  It is the priest, his partially burned dark-blue robes the only part of him that remains recognizable among his many injuries. Besides the priest, others have been burned—worshippers, whose faces the fire has melted like wax, and a young apprentice, who, despite his injuries, pours a bucket of water against a burning wall, barely dousing the flames.

  Water, the one substance that cannot be conjured out of thin air.

  “The pond’s on the other side of the—”

  “No, Gul.” Kali’s hard voice cuts me off. “We are not to land or to interfere in any way. We can’t do anything right now except look for the Sky Warriors!”

  I bite back my protests. Kali’s right, of course. We have three things to do: Find Shayla’s minions. Let them see me
. Fly back to safety.

  And so, I turn away from the burning bodies.

  From the sooty children wailing next to their mother’s corpse.

  From the now-felled banyan tree outside the temple, a hundred years’ worth of wishes tied to its branches in faded scraps of cloth, the woody flesh at the bottom of its trunk mangled, splattered with human blood.

  Heat gathers around my birthmark and crawls up my limbs, my daggers emerald-bright under my shield.

  Use me, my magic urges. Do something.

  I can’t. I don’t.

  When I was five, my mother walked into our yard barefoot, accidentally stepping on some broken glass. I didn’t even know she was hurt until I saw her red footprints and ashy complexion; she made no sound as she walked back inside, or later, when Papa carefully extracted the bloody shards from her foot, her lips held so tight they might have been sewn together.

  Today I hold myself together the same way, sweat limning my shoulders and ribs, my knees digging deeper into Queen Sarayu’s feathery back. I mentally thank Latif for his foresight; without the ropes binding me to the simurgh, I would have surely slipped off and fallen.

  Or jumped off.

  “Where do we go from here?” Queen Sarayu asks, her soft voice audible despite the chaos below.

  “We head west of the temple,” I say, my throat feeling like it’s been scraped with sandpaper. “That’s where the orphanage—where the Sisterhood’s house is.”

  We fly over a burned copse of trees and a line of soot-covered water bearers straggling up to Sant Javer’s pond, buckets in hand. Javeribad’s streets are deserted, stray dogs left barking outside shuttered huts. The milkman’s cart lies overturned in a puddle; what happened to its owner I can only guess from the bloody footprints staining the ground nearby.

  I’m about to look away, nauseated, when I spot the whip of a dark braid. A racing figure that looks a lot like—

  “Prerna!” I shout. “Goddess, is that you?”

  The girl’s head snaps up at the sound, the surma rimming her eyes dripping black trails over her cheeks.

  It is Prerna. A novice at the Sisterhood—a girl I once shared a dormitory with. Today, I barely recognize her, thanks to the bruises swelling on her face.

  “Gul?” Prerna gasps, her voice barely audible. “Kali Didi? Is that you?”

  “Where are the Sky Warriors, Prerna?” Kali’s voice is firm and clear, much calmer than mine would have been. “Are they at the house?”

  “They c-came there f-first. They were l-looking for Gul,” she stutters, her voice growing louder as she speaks. “When they couldn’t find her, they attacked … So w-we f-fought them.”

  At this point, Prerna bursts into sobs. “They k-killed Urvashi … I was l-lucky. They only kicked me in the face a few times. Uma Didi told me to r-run. One of the Sky Warriors f-followed me to the temple, b-but the priest hid me and refused to let him in. S-someone threw a rock at the Sky Warrior, hitting him on the head. So I started r-running again!”

  My heart sinks. It’s easy to guess what happened at the temple: the Sky Warrior’s rage, the atashban’s deadly fire catching onto the thatched roof, the straw knit into its mud-brick walls. But the Sky Warriors were no longer there. Which means—

  “They’re somewhere else,” Kali tells me, her voice low, urgent. “We need to find them, Gul. Now.”

  “That’s good enough, Prerna,” I call out. “Get away from here. Head to the northern tenements and find a woman named Ruhani Kaki. She’ll help you.”

  I’ve barely spoken the words when a blast shatters the air up ahead, black smoke blooming from the general area of the village square.

  Queen Sarayu swoops west as I dig my knees into her back. Behind me, Kali keeps muttering: “Don’t engage, don’t engage.”

  I don’t know if the warning is for me or herself.

  As we approach the square, we notice a familiar white figure on horseback, speaking to a Sky Warrior in an angry voice: “… mad? I’ve told you a hundred times to not overreact, Captain Shekhar, not in a place of worship—especially not when we’re on the lookout for that stupid Star Warrior!”

  “Ayye, General!” I shout as loudly as I can. “Up here!”

  Her head audibly snaps as she hears my voice; it’s the last I see of her before Kali shouts “Retreat!”

  My ears begin popping again, my body frozen against the cold air, as Queen Sarayu zooms back toward the clouds. A moment later, though, the Pashu queen lets forth a frightening shriek.

  “She’s been hit!” Kali shouts before I can ask what happened. “Rani Sarayu, you need to rise higher! Higher!”

  Blood seeps from one of the simurgh’s brown wings, drop after drop of loamy black. Somehow, she rises up and out of the range of the atashbans. Her feathered body grows warm and then hot with magic. Clouds gather around us, their moisture soaking our skin. A drop of blood falls on one of the cottony tufts, coagulates to gray. Before my stunned eyes, the clouds coat the wounded wing like one of Esther’s poultices, stanching the flow of dark blood.

  “That should hold for a while,” Sarayu says, her calm voice revealing no hint of pain. “The cloud cover will shield us adequately from sight.”

  And it does, for so long that I begin shivering from the cold. I’m thinking there is no end in sight when we begin descending toward the southern tenements and land with a terrible thud.

  The next few moments go by in a blur: Hands unstrap Kali and me from our harnesses, help us down before wrapping us in blankets.

  “You need a change of dry clothes,” someone says, but I barely hear their words.

  I’m watching Subodh, who gallops past us, toward Sarayu, who is wheezing now, her wound having opened again. Subodh presses a glowing paw against her injured wing.

  “Sami!” he roars. “Drishti jal!”

  Sami races forth with a vial of the substance, a scared look on her face.

  I watch as Subodh makes Sami tip a drop of the drishti jal into his mouth before spitting it out again in a thick glob of saliva onto the sand. He uses his other paw to make a paste out of the two and smear the mix onto Sarayu’s injury.

  “A bandage,” he instructs now, his voice calmer. “Quickly!”

  This time it’s Sarpanch Parvez who appears, clean rags in hand. “I can help, Pashuraj,” he says quietly. “I know something about healing.”

  Quickly, efficiently, with a finesse I don’t expect, the head councilor lifts Queen Sarayu’s injured wing and binds the wound.

  “It will take some time to heal,” Subodh says. “The drishti jal and sand will help knit the wound together. My saliva thickens it so that it will not run down her wings.”

  “Maybe we should ask Raja Subodh to bottle up some of his spit to keep for later,” Kali jokes under her breath. “Who knew it would be so useful?”

  I try to smile and fail. Queen Sarayu could have died on the way here. It’s a miracle that she survived, that we returned the way we did.

  From behind Kali, I notice Amar approaching us, a frown on his face.

  “You’re back,” he says, relief clear in his voice. “How did it go?”

  “Clearly it was successful,” I say bitterly. “I didn’t engage any Sky Warriors in battle even when they shot Rani Sarayu. I didn’t die—though so many people in Javeribad did. The great symbol of your rebellion, your most treasured weapon—the Star Warrior—is still safe, Raja Amar.”

  Amar steps back, red blotches appearing under his beard.

  “Gul, that was uncalled for!” Kali says.

  “Sorry,” I mutter, not meeting Amar’s eyes.

  “Is that how you apologize to someone?” Kali demands. “Like you don’t mean the words?”

  “Leave it,” Amar says, silencing Kali. “It’s fine. You’ve both had a rough day.”

  No. It’s not fine. I’m being absolutely awful to Amar and he deserves a proper apology. But if I look at him right now, I’ll only burst into tears.

  Who am I really a
ngry with? I wonder as their footsteps recede. Amar? Or myself?

  For weeks, months, I’d struggled against using death magic, never wanting to wield my powers until absolutely necessary. But today, at a time when my magic could have helped people, I was the one who remained helpless, held back by a promise I made of my own accord.

  Ultimately, our main mission was successful. I went to Javeribad and showed my face to the Sky Warriors. They’ll now know Cavas was telling them the truth. He won’t be tortured anymore. He’ll be released from prison.

  That’s what matters, right?

  The question nags at me as other images flood my brain: Sant Javer’s shrine in flames surrounded by corpses and wails; Prerna’s bruised face, her sobs searing my insides. There’s also the reminder that now, despite his so-called freedom, Cavas must pretend to switch loyalties. Under Shayla’s watch, he must do whatever he can to prove himself to her.

  A cold that has little to do with my cloud-soaked body snakes through my limbs, causing my teeth to chatter.

  “Gul!” a woman cries out. Sami, who rushes over, wrapping an arm around me. “You’re shivering. Come with me at once!”

  Alone in the tent, I strip off the wet clothes, slip into a dry tunic and leggings, and toss my damp hair into a braid. I will myself to remember the way Cavas looked at me. Like I wasn’t simply a girl he was lusting after, but something more—something as wispy and wonderful as moonlight itself.

  “Cavas will never betray me,” I whisper. “No matter what happens.”

  A cackle sounds in the otherwise empty tent, raising the fine hairs on my nape and arms.

  “Is that a specter? Is it you, La—oof!”

  The tent flap snaps across my face, obscuring my vision. As I push aside the canvas, I realize the voice I heard couldn’t have belonged to Latif. It simply wasn’t deep enough. By the time I step out, the specter is gone, the prickling under my skin the only evidence of one having been there.

  24

  SHAYLA

  “Ambar Sikandar, I can explain.”

  “I would hope so, Alizeh. It baffles me how you and your soldiers managed to set fire to a whole village but were still unable to catch a sixteen-year-old girl!”