Gifting Fire

by Alina Boyden

  Now it was our turn to cheer. More lightning bolts licked over the surface of the sky, one finding soft belly scales and another taking off the wing of an unlucky Yaruban beast. Both shrieked in agony and plummeted toward the beach far below us.

  I chanced a quick glance behind us before we reached the range of a fire zahhak’s breath, and my stomach churned. The Mahisagaris had made up more ground than I’d expected. They were in good formation, ready for the fight. Even if we somehow managed to survive the inferno that awaited us, we wouldn’t be able to dive away without showing the Mahisagaris our tail feathers. We were going to have to make a turning fight, which was the last thing I wanted when we were still outnumbered and our zahhaks were so tired.

  But there was nothing for it now. Fire zahhaks began spewing their breath, and I knew the only way to survive was to dive, so I put Sultana’s nose down, urging her on with snaps of the reins and pressure in my seat, my body bending low, like that would somehow make her go that little bit faster.

  My mouth went dry as flames roared over my head, the skin of my face burning from the searing heat, the stench of brimstone filling my nostrils. I hunched over Sultana’s neck, praying that we would make it through unscathed, half-certain that her tail would catch fire, or one of her wings, but suddenly there was clear air all around us, and the time had come to begin the fight in earnest.

  We banked right, arcing across the sky, my head twisted around to track the acid zahhaks still coming at us, close enough now that we couldn’t charge at one another in formation like cavalrymen. Now it would be a series of duels, every zahhak and rider pairing herself against her opposite number. For me, that was Ahmed Shah. He’d been chasing me this whole time, and his zahhak was fresh, fast enough that I barely managed to get Sultana’s snout around to face her before we crossed paths.

  He broke into me and I into him, our zahhaks crossing belly to belly before bending themselves through tight arcs in the sky. I was looking straight up at him across the circle as each of us tried to edge closer to the other’s tail feathers, but he was playing it smart. He had chosen to make our fight one of stamina rather than pure agility. He knew Sultana was tired, knew that maintaining a crushingly tight turn while keeping her wings flapping for speed was the hardest test of a zahhak’s strength and endurance. And he was confident that my thunder zahhak would falter before his animal did. But he didn’t know Sultana.

  She dug into the turn, the force of her wingtips tearing open the sky itself, sending spirals of white vapor streaming off her primary feathers. I knew that we wouldn’t be able to win this fight the conventional way, by gradually gaining the angle we wanted, and Sultana must have sensed it too, because she deployed her hood, the sudden increase in surface area providing a new source of lift that tightened the turn that much more. Suddenly, rather than our being stuck at opposite ends of the same circle in the sky, Sultana’s nose started tracking toward Ahmed’s tail.

  I gritted my teeth and clung to the reins for dear life, the tightness of the turn putting a pressure on my body that seemed to multiply the weight of my limbs and my head. It drove the blood from my brain and the light from my eyes. I had to scream and tense my stomach muscles and my leg muscles, clenching down as hard as I could just to stay awake. But we were so close, so tantalizingly close. Ahmed Shah was just a few degrees off Sultana’s nose. Another second, two on the outside, and we would have him.

  Suddenly, the Mahisagari zahhak put on a burst of speed with her wings, and we stopped gaining on her tail. She tightened her own turn, racing around the circle, and my heart sank as I realized that I’d been duped. We’d never had the energy to catch her. He’d been playing us for fools, tricking us into giving it everything we had. And now he had us right where he wanted us. We were spent, and he was fresh, and the next thing I knew, I had the gaping maw of an acid zahhak lining up for a shot on Sultana’s tail feathers.

  CHAPTER 31

  No, I wasn’t going to let it end this way. I couldn’t. Not after everything we’d been through. I was not going to let Ahmed Shah steal my life from me.

  There was nothing left to do but make him miss. I pulled hard on the reins, directing Sultana tighter into the turn, and lower. If we didn’t have the energy to tighten the turn ourselves, we’d use God’s energy to do it for us. The moment her nose dropped below the horizon, our turn tightened, our speed shot up. At the same instant, Ahmed Shah took his shot.

  A bright blob of acid zipped between Sultana’s right wing and her tail feathers, somehow missing the both of us by inches, but my stomach clenched. That had been close. Even with the dive, we weren’t getting away from him the way we should have been. And now Sultana was scared; her mouth was hanging open. She was looking behind her as the acid zahhak stayed glued to us through the turn. I could have sworn that her emerald eye flickered to me in that moment, pleading with me to find us some way out of this mess I’d put us in, but the trouble was, I didn’t know what to do. The smart thing would have been to use the vertical, to roll to try to force Ahmed in front of us, but Sultana didn’t have the energy for that, any fool could have seen that. She was half-dead with exhaustion. If we tried to go up, we’d be too slow, and Ahmed would drill us right in the back and burn us alive, but if we kept spiraling down, we’d run out of altitude eventually, and then we’d be low and slow, unable to turn, and we’d be just as dead.

  I twisted in my saddle, looking frantically for a friendly flier, but all around us it was chaos. Zahhaks of every description were swirling together in the sky, and it was practically impossible to tell friend from foe. There was no one here to help us. We were completely alone.

  Ahmed’s zahhak spat acid again. I pulled hard on the reins, praying that it would be enough. Sultana’s hood was fully extended, her tail feathers slamming up to tighten the turn as her wings twisted, rolling us into a dive that aimed her snout right at the glittering waters of the sea.

  The acid streaked past us—another miss. But there wouldn’t be a third. We were diving now, and that made it dead easy for Ahmed to roll in right behind us. I pulled us into a right-hand turn, but it was too little, too late. He had the angle. He had the speed. His zahhak was fresh. There was nothing left to do.

  Sultana’s head twisted slightly, and her wings pounded the air. She’d seen something, but what? I traced back a line from her pupil to a patch of sky above and behind Ahmed’s onrushing zahhak, and at first I saw nothing at all, but then, an instant later, there was a blur of blue and black and white, and a fork-tailed zahhak with her wings bent into sharp sickles streaked in behind Ahmed’s tail feathers, a brilliant bronze zahhak aimed right at him. Hina hadn’t abandoned us after all.

  A burst of fire and smoke erupted from the cannon, and Ahmed Shah exploded in a shower of blood and bone, feathers and fragments of saddle. His beautiful acid zahhak went limp and fell away as Hina worked to reload her cannon, jerking out the smoking breechblock and replacing it with a fresh one.

  She pulled up alongside us, grinning, and I could just make out her words across the roaring gulf of air between us. “It’s the same cannon!”

  “What?” I shouted, looking behind us to make sure our tails were clear.

  “It’s the same cannon that killed Asma! We killed both his parents with the same gun!” She was cackling with glee at that poetic justice, but I was mostly grateful to be alive.

  “Thank you for not abandoning us,” I shouted back, because she could have. Tamara hadn’t been wrong about that.

  “Never, your highness,” she replied, her smile hardening into an expression of grim determination. “We’re with you till the end.”

  I looked around us, trying to make sense of the fight, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Everywhere I looked, fork-tailed river zahhaks were blasting away at acid zahhaks and fire zahhaks with their cannons. More cannons were firing from the tails of Registani fire zahhaks. And there were ice zahhaks flying still, and
thunder zahhaks too. We were winning!

  “Come on, girl, let’s finish this,” I told Sultana, turning her back into the fight. She seemed to have the same sudden surge of joy that I did, recognizing the Zindhi zahhaks as our friends come to help us in our time of need. We raced at Hina’s side at a pair of Mahisagari acid zahhaks who had spotted us and were diving down to kill us. I recognized them at once—Karim and Jamshid.

  “Thunder!” I screeched, making sure Sultana’s nose was pointing right at Karim and Amira. She seemed to know who it was, and what I wanted, because she spat her lightning bolt straightaway, the flash of light and roar of thunder filling the air between us.

  But Karim had pitched up at the last second, rolling down to take us from above. I pulled up into him, expecting that we would pass one another by and start our turning fight, but at the last second I realized that Karim had no intention whatever of passing me by. He was aiming Amira straight for Sultana on a collision course.

  I kicked up my legs, throwing myself back into my seat, giving Sultana the command to fight with feet and claws and teeth. At the last instant she pitched up, lashing out with her feet and her wing claws just as Amira slammed into us, the impact knocking every conscious thought from my mind. I saw emerald scales, teeth and claws, and then we were falling far too fast.

  Something was wrong. Sultana wasn’t righting herself. Amira was tumbling beside me, out of control. Was she dead? We were spinning too fast. I lost track of her. The white line of foam separating the yellow sands of the beach from the blue waters of the ocean was spinning like the blades of a windmill in a gale. I lost track of what was sky and what was water and what was ground.

  “Sultana!” I screamed her name. I pulled on the reins. But she wasn’t answering me. Her emerald eyes were lolled back in her head. Was she dead? God, it couldn’t be. “Sultana!”

  It was too late. We hit the shore with a splash, but the water was only knee-deep and the impact was unlike anything I had ever felt before. I screamed from the pain. My saddle straps snapped like the thick leather was nothing more than tissue paper. My legs burned and my back ached, but it was my heart that hurt most of all. Because Sultana didn’t scream. She didn’t move. She just lay there, neck curled up, her snout half-buried in the ocean waves. Her eyes were closed, like she’d gone to sleep, but I knew the awful truth. She was gone.

  CHAPTER 32

  I crawled out of the saddle, tears in my eyes from the pain in my heart, and in my body too. I could hardly walk. Something was wrong with my legs, or my back, it was hard to know. I struggled to hold myself upright in the surf, but my every thought was bent on Sultana. I stroked the scales on her face, praying she would open her eyes like she always did in the stables when I did that. I looked for some sign that her nostrils were moving, that she was smelling for me, but there were no signs of life at all.

  “Sultana, no!” I dropped to my knees in spite of the pain, and I clung to her, pressing my face against hers, willing her not to be dead. “Wake up,” I pleaded. “You have to wake up, sweetheart.”

  “Razia!”

  I looked up to see Karim staggering through the surf toward me, his firangi held tightly in his hand. Behind him, up on the shore, Amira lay in a twisted heap of broken feathers and shattered limbs. He’d hurled her at us, intent on killing us both out of spite. And poor Sultana, she’d given her life for me at the last moment.

  “I’m not going to let him get away with this, girl,” I promised her, kissing a sleek cobalt scale, still warm, almost like she was still alive. But I knew those scales would be cold soon enough. She was gone, and I was going to make damned sure that I didn’t live in a world without her that still had Karim Shah in it.

  I jerked my katars free of their scabbards and struggled to my feet, my legs not wanting to work. My back was alive with pain. It was lancing through my ribs and darting along my hips, shooting down my thighs. There was something wrong with me, something serious.

  Karim saw it. His eyes lit up. He was hurt too. He was limping, but he didn’t look the way I did, stooped over, hardly able to put one leg in front of the other from the pain.

  “I’m going to enjoy taking everything from you,” Karim growled. “My only regret is that you won’t be alive to see what I do to your little sister.”

  “You’ll never touch her,” I replied, my grip on my katars tightening. “She’s safe now, with half a dozen nobles willing to protect her with their lives. And you have nothing. Your father is dead. Your mother is dead. And you’ll die today too, whether by my hand or Arjun’s or Hina’s. It doesn’t matter. You’re finished. Mahisagar is finished. You lost.”

  “So did you,” he replied, smirking at Sultana’s corpse behind me. “And now you’ll die by my hand.”

  “We’ll see,” I replied, because the pain in my lower body and in my heart didn’t leave much room for clever retorts. I just gritted my teeth, gripped my katars, and lurched forward through the surf, one plodding step at a time.

  Karim splashed forward, his silk dhoti clinging to his knees and thighs. He lunged at me, thrusting the point of his firangi at my heart, but I beat it aside with my left katar and punched with the right.

  If we’d been on dry ground, if I’d been healthy instead of hurt, I’d have driven it right through his black heart, but with my back alive with pain, with the water slowing me down, the point of my dagger never got within six inches of him. He jerked his firangi back and thrust again and again at me, using his superior reach to force me to parry frantically just to keep the sharp steel from piercing my flesh. Every instinct told me to retreat, to fall back, but that was the wrong move. I had to keep moving forward. I had to close the distance, but it was hard to make my legs answer me. Something about that fall had left my hips feeling strangely numb.

  Karim grinned. He saw that I wasn’t moving my legs, and he suddenly stepped forward, thrusting for my face, forcing me to batter his blade aside, but it wasn’t there. I swung my katar wide with everything I had, expecting it to clash against his sword, but when it didn’t make impact, my back twisted and I screamed.

  I landed on my hips in the surf, my body trembling from the pain. I could barely feel my legs. Was I paralyzed? Was this what that felt like?

  Karim lunged at me, his firangi darting for my throat. I managed to batter it aside, pushing off the sand with my feet, the water taking some of the pressure off my body, as it was deep enough to float atop. I propelled myself back with two kicks, but it was a feeble effort, and Karim was laughing at me.

  “This is too perfect,” he sneered. “You were so full of yourself. You thought you were so smart, and so strong.” He speared my right arm with his firangi, and this time there was no blocking it. I heard the point hit my bone, and blood flowed hot and fast down my arm as he jerked his blade free. But it didn’t hurt. It was just hot and numb. I knew it would hurt later—if there was a later.

  He thrust again for my chest, but I did catch this one with my left katar, beating it aside to stay alive another second more. But without any way of hitting back, I knew it was hopeless. I couldn’t carry on like this. He drew back to stab me again, and I kicked water into his face, the salt stinging his eyes. I pushed myself back through the surf until I hit something firm and unyielding. Sultana’s body.

  I nestled myself against her as Karim stalked toward me. I was going to die, but somehow being with Sultana made it okay. I wished I could have said good-bye to Arjun and Sakshi and Lakshmi, but there was something fitting about dying here with Sultana. We’d been children together. She had been my oldest and firmest friend. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to live without her anyway.

  I sheathed my katars, because there was no sense in prolonging the inevitable. Karim noticed, and his eyes widened slightly.

  “If you think I’m going to make it quick, you’re fooling yourself,” he ground out through clenched teeth, his dark eyes smoldering with hat
e.

  I forced myself to shrug, to show him none of the fear I was feeling. I turned my thoughts away from him, to my sisters and to Arjun. It would have been so nice to have lived in peace with them for a little while. But they would have the peace and safety I had never known. I’d guaranteed that when I’d given Hina the power to protect her homeland, and when I’d brought Haider and Tamara here. Sakshi and Lakshmi would be spoiled for choices when it came to building a new home. And that was all I’d ever really wanted anyway.

  Karim was standing over me, his sword tracing a line from my lips to my navel, the sharp point just barely kissing the surface of my skin, without tearing it open. “Where shall I cut you first?”

  I said nothing. If I was going to die, then I would die well.

  “You’re so proud of that pretty face of yours. Well, when your precious Arjun finds your body, he’s going to be disgusted by you, I can promise you that. What shall I take first? Your nose? An eye? Yes, I think one of those pretty green eyes will make for a fine trophy.”

  I saw the tip of his sword move toward my right eye, and then I just saw a shadow. At first, I thought I was blind, that he’d done it, but then I was aware of feathers and scales between me and Karim. Sultana’s wing.

  Karim reared back in shock as Sultana’s head rose from the sea, water dripping from sparkling sapphire scales, her emerald eyes wide and alert. They knew. Somehow, she’d seen what he was doing to me, and it had brought her back to herself. Karim thrust at her with his sword, and I screamed, but she bit the blade, snapping it in half like it was made of rotten wood. Then her head darted forward and she bit again, and when she pulled away, Karim’s legs toppled into the water, his entrails dangling from her teeth.

  Sultana pointed her nose skyward, relaxing her jaw, loosening her throat, and the better part of Karim Shah slid straight into her stomach.