The Bookweaver's Daughter

by Malavika Kannan

  “Amar Kandhari,” said another Renegade wonderingly. “Where is he?”

  “Dead,” said Roshan simply. “The king’s soldiers killed him a few weeks ago.”

  For a moment, nobody spoke. I saw the old man lower his head, and grief bit at my stomach.

  “This is my niece, Reya Kandhari, and her friend Nina Nadeer,” Roshan announced into the shocked silence. “They’re here to join the resistance.”

  The woman seemed to break out of her shock first. She extended an authoritative hand to me. “I’m Kali,” she said. “It’s an honor, Bookweaver, and I’m sorry for your loss. Have a seat. We have a lot to discuss.”

  We sat down quickly; I saw Nina gaze in wonder at the maps sprawled before her. Kali resumed her announcements.

  “As we’ve known for a while now, we’re severely outnumbered,” she said. “At this moment, there are four imperial soldiers for every Renegade, and that number’s bound to go up as Jahan sends in reinforcements. His son’s already in the city.”

  Roshan’s fist tightened around his sword. “Devendra Zakir is here?”

  The memory of the prince, silhouetted atop the mountains, flashed through my mind, and fury surged through me.

  Kali nodded gravely. “Unfortunately, yes. The little knuckledragger’s here, and he’s brought his daddy’s army. So there’s really only one way we can win this thing.”

  “We spring a trap,” said Nina.

  Kali glanced at her, surprised. “That’s right,” she said, approval in her voice; Nina beamed. “We have the home field advantage. If we can create a distraction by the fortress uptown, we have enough fighters to steal the reserve cannons hidden in the Red Temple.”

  Roshan suddenly stood up. “We have a major issue,” he said. “Reya says that Niam’s unit was captured by Prince Devendra’s battalion. We were relying on them to spring the trap uptown. Without them, there’s no way we can lure enough soldiers out of the fortress.”

  Kali’s face darkened, and I felt a collective anguish in the air. “Then who can draw out the soldiers?” someone asked.

  There was silence, but my mind was spinning. Maybe there still was a way to lure the imperial soldiers uptown. There was only one person in the entire kingdom who King Jahan would stop at nothing to capture. And that person was—

  “Me,” I said.

  Everyone turned towards me, and I felt myself redden once more. “I can be that distraction,” I continued. “I’m the most wanted person in Kasmira. And if I can get out there, I can prove to the people of Bharata that the king hasn’t managed to break me yet.”

  Kali shook her head vehemently. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that is, Reya?” she said. “You’ll get yourself killed. There’s no way we can guarantee your safety.”

  “If the plan works, there will be no need for guarantees,” I argued. “You’ll have seized the city by then, and we’ll all be liberated.”

  I turned to Roshan for support. “You know it’s the only way we win this fight.”

  He sighed. “If your father were alive, he wouldn’t—” he started.

  “He’s not,” I cut across sharply.

  I didn’t mean to say it with a bite, but the words slid off my tongue, razor sharp. “He’s dead. Because of Jahan, neither of us will ever know what he would or wouldn’t have let me do. So help me avenge him. Please,” I added.

  I could see the emotions battling on his face: it is impossible to change a person’s mind on important things, but some things are so important that you cannot help but try.

  “All right,” Roshan said at last. He gazed at me with an expression I could not discern. It took me a moment to recognize it to be pride. “You’re a lot more like your father than I remembered.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was a war effort like I had never seen before: clandestine, hidden. If I hadn’t known better, I could have walked the entire length of the city and never guessed that a battle was brewing.

  As the afternoon wore into evening, Nina and I started to notice Renegades appearing everywhere—leaning against doorways and lining the roofs, virtually invisible under the cover of twilight. In concealed alleys, fighters were building defenses and assembling homemade firepower. Without anyone noticing, they’d raised an army. They’d sprung a trap.

  Roshan briefed us quickly as the sun sank in the sky. My pulse throbbed so frantically it felt like I had multiple hearts banging against my ribcage. I rubbed my pearl to calm myself.

  Within minutes, a plan was pieced together: Nina and I would create enough of a disturbance to lure imperial soldiers out of the fortress. Then we’d lead them deep into the uptown slums, leaving the Renegades free to steal the cannons in the Red Temple.

  The plan was incredibly risky. I loved it.

  “At sunset, the uptown poor will be gathered for food rationing,” Roshan was saying. “The soldiers will be on top guard, because it's no secret that uptown has strong Renegade leanings. You and Nina will need to blend in with the crowd until you see the opportunity to reveal yourselves.”

  Roshan nodded to me. “Reya, we’re counting on you to persuade the citizens of Bharata to stand up tonight, or at least stand aside.”

  His tone was even enough, but I could sense the urgency beneath it. I understood the unspoken obligation: as the Bookweaver’s daughter, my words could be incredibly influential. Amar Kandhari’s legacy had the power to rally a city to fight.

  With mere moments remaining until sunset, Nina and I made our way uptown to the fortress. I could tell she was starting to get nervous: she kept fiddling with Roshan’s sword, which was sheathed beneath her cloak.

  The rationing took place in the courtyard of the fortress, with stone vaults guarding the barrels of rice and grain. The crowd swelled within roped-off areas, forming an unruly queue that was only barely subdued by the threatening presence of imperial soldiers. The commander himself stood on an elevated platform, watching the crowd with hawkish concentration. I caught a glimpse of his purple eyes, and my heart pounded.

  It was Prince Devendra.

  “It’s almost as if he’s expecting us,” Nina hissed. Our Renegade escorts, positioned discreetly near the fortress, had also noticed the crown prince: I saw them whispering nervously among themselves.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I muttered. “We can’t back down. Now’s our only shot to take back the city.”

  She sighed. “You’re right. At least we’ll get some revenge on him for all the hell he’s put us through.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. Despite myself, I grinned.

  Just then, Prince Devendra lifted up a huge gong and struck it with his sword. The noise reverberated painfully through the crowd, silencing us.

  “Citizens of Bharata,” he announced. “You are gathered tonight to benefit from his Majesty’s generosity in receiving rations for your labor.”

  Even from thirty feet away—too far to see the fury in his eerie purple eyes—Devendra had a way with crowds. His very presence was menacing, despite the fact that he was no older than sixteen; perhaps the cruelty was just in his blood. The crowd began to murmur discontentedly, but they were silenced with another gong.

  “But let it be known,” Devendra said, more loudly this time, “that his Majesty does not tolerate dissent. It has not escaped my father’s notice that uptown Bharata’s loyalty to the Zakir dynasty has always been … shaky.”

  The crowd shifted uncomfortably, and I remembered what Roshan had said about uptown being full of Renegade sympathizers. But from the way that people were whispering, it was clear that this proclamation was out of the ordinary.

  “Therefore, King Jahan wishes to provide the citizens of Bharata with another chance to prove their loyalty,” he continued. “As you know, my regiment has been tracking a special fugitive through Kasmira.” Devendra spread his arms, and on cue, hundreds of banners unfurled from the fortress, creating a palpable breeze.

  My heart caught in my throat at the sight of my own portr
ait, hundreds of which glared blankly back at me.

  “Damn it,” Nina whispered in miserable awe, watching as her wanted poster unfurled beside mine. I shrunk back, unable to shake the claustrophobic sense that the crowd was suffocating us. All it took was one person to turn around and recognize us—

  “Reya Kandhari, aged fifteen. Nina Nadeer, aged sixteen,” said Devendra. He held up the wanted poster. “Any Bharata citizen who has information about—”

  The next moments happened so fast, I barely had time to process.

  An arrow whizzed out of nowhere, piercing the wanted poster and sending it flying out of Devendra’s hand. The crowd bellowed as one as Roshan’s second arrow rained down, hitting the prince in the shoulder, and Devendra tumbled off the platform and out of sight—

  Before I could register what had just happened, Nina had seized my hand, and we were tearing through the shocked crowd. I climbed onto the platform where Devendra had stood just seconds ago, because now was my only chance to finish my father’s fight.

  It was pandemonium. Soldiers rushed forward to stop me, but Renegades materialized out of nowhere and engaged them in combat. The peasants below were stunned, shoving one another away from the soldiers.

  Someone looked up at me. The cry of recognition spread like wildfire, and within a minute, the entire fortress had realized that Reya Kandhari, the most wanted person in Kasmira, was standing on the platform before them.

  A little wildly, Nina seized the gong and banged it. It worked like magic: for a second time, the crowd went silent.

  I glanced at Nina desperately, my tongue turning to lead. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t form the right words to rally the crowd to listen to me, let alone take up arms.

  “People—people of Bharata,” I began. My voice didn’t sound like my own.

  I took a deep breath, my eyes traveling across the crowd, landing on random strangers: a teenage girl who looked no older than Nina. A dark-skinned man who could have easily been my own father. And all at once, I realized what I hadn’t before.

  These weren’t my enemies. These were people like me.

  “My name is Reya Kandhari,” I said. “I’m the Bookweaver’s daughter, and we all have a lot in common.”

  Nina smiled, steadying me. I pushed on.

  “Over the last seven years, we’ve all suffered in silence. We’ve all had our legacies taken from us. We’ve all lost someone we loved. And we’ve all been made to feel like we were worthless by Jahan Zakir.”

  The crowd was silent. The shouts of the battle before me seemed to deaden. I felt the same glowing warmth that I had only felt twice before: the pulsing rhythm of belonging, the rush of power and possibility that simply felt like magic.

  “I know you’re like me,” I continued. “Not just because you’ve suffered, but because you refuse to back down. Because you’re too strong to give up and lie down and take it. Because you, like me, believe that together, we are more powerful than any tyrant and his teenage son.”

  From within the crowd, someone let out a whoop of affirmation. I raised my hand, and the crowd quieted again. My heart was thumping.

  “My father once told me that we always have a choice to make: between sitting back or fighting. Between being scared or being kind. Between barely surviving or actually living.”

  I paused.

  “So today, we have a choice to make. We have to choose between letting King Jahan hold us down, or telling him that we sure as hell aren’t going to take it anymore.”

  Beside me, Nina tugged my arm urgently: we were running out of time. But I wasn’t finished. I took one last deep breath.

  “I know what choice I’m going to make tonight,” I said. “The question is, do you?”

  Someone shouted an agreement. The cries multiplied, and before I could comprehend what was happening, the people around me were chanting in support. I saw weapons appear in the crowd: clubs, sticks, and even empty pans—Bharata had made its choice. The city was cheering, literally in the face of danger.

  That’s when the fortress of Bharata exploded.

  I whirled around to see the massive wall behind me collapse like a deck of tarot cards. Then the blast impact hit and I was catapulting back into Nina, who barely managed to catch me. The wanted posters on the walls burst into flames, and dust billowed everywhere.

  The imperial army had arrived.

  As one, the peasants down below rushed to engage the soldiers, even as the earth erupted beneath their feet, sending thick clouds of rock spiraling like towers into the sky. Nina and I staggered back as arrows—whether friendly or not, I couldn’t tell—rained down on us.

  “The Renegades can hold them off,” gasped Nina, ducking as an entire table sailed over her head. “We need to get out of here—”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flicker of movement, and I saw Prince Devendra clamber back onto the platform beside us, very much alive, the arrow still lodged in his shoulder. He raised his sword, and my stomach jumped into my throat.

  “Nina, look out!”

  My reflexes took over as I tackled Nina out of the way—the blade missed us by a hair—and then Devendra was standing over me and I was scuttling backwards desperately. His grin was unnerving as he lifted his sword for a second swing—

  “No!”

  Nina appeared out of nowhere, and I rolled away just in time. She smashed the gong into Devendra’s head, an almost inhuman expression on her face—I knew she was thinking of revenge. With a strangely muffled clang, Devendra crumpled over the edge of the platform and disappeared once more.

  “Nina, that was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen—”

  She grinned fleetingly at me, but stopped short as a flaming lamp rolled across the stage, narrowly missing our feet. The flour bags caught on fire—

  I seized her hand and we leapt behind the platform, narrowly missing Devendra’s prone form. Together, we tore through the now-empty ration queue, the fight raging around us.

  We ran from the burning fortress like we had never run before. We ran because we were scared out of our wits and had no idea how else to survive such a madness. We ran because for the first time, we were aware of just how many lives depended on it.

  Nina and I tore downtown, passing by pockets of violent fighting. Skirmishes had broken out all over the streets between Renegades and imperial soldiers. Entire buildings fell like toys, Zakir banners blazing from the roofs.

  “Halt!”

  I turned so fast I cricked my neck.

  Thundering down the street behind us were nearly a dozen soldiers. They had already seen us—there was no time to hide. Nina seized an abandoned peddler’s cart and flung it at them with a strength I didn’t know she had—two were knocked over, but the rest dodged and kept coming.

  “This way, Reya—”

  I followed Nina around the corner of the street. “Here!” I said. We dashed through a jasmine-curtained archway. In an awful moment, I realized that we were not in another street, but in the courtyard of someone’s bungalow. We had trapped ourselves.

  There was no time to turn back, not as the soldiers burst into the courtyard behind us, shredding the jasmine to pieces. Before they could regroup, we had thrown open the back doors and tumbled into the empty bungalow. Nina’s fingers flew to latch the door behind us.

  I barely made sense of the living room we had just broken into before the walls began to creak. The soldiers were trying to smash the door open.

  Nina was knocking over bookcases, tandoori stoves, statues—anything to slow them down as we searched for an exit. We dashed into the kitchen just as the soldiers broke down the door and chased us into the house. Nina and I backtracked desperately, but it was too late.

  “Put down the sword, Nadeer,” one of them said. “You’ve put up a good fight, but it’s time to give up.”

  The soldiers fanned out in the kitchen, pulling out their swords, almost lazily. They had us cornered. I could see Nina hesitate, her eyes darting wildly for an
escape.

  I tried to buy her time, even though my gut told me it was futile. “We’re never going t—”

  Nina yelped and shoved me aside as the soldier collapsed without warning. His sword flew out of his grip and impaled the cabinet above our heads.

  Standing behind him was a monster of a man, his face hooded as he slashed at the remaining soldiers. They cowered under the onslaught, superior in number but helpless against the element of surprise—

  Our savior pulled off his hood, and my heart leapt in a tumultuous rush of emotions.

  “Niam!”

  I ran up to Niam and threw my arms around him, which hurt—he was wearing armor beneath his clothes.

  “How are you here?” gasped Nina. “We thought you were—”

  “Dead?” interrupted Niam. He grinned. “Nina, they’d have a hard time keeping my ghost out of a brawl like this.”

  She laughed, the relief evident in her voice. “How did you get away?”

  His face was grave as he answered, searching the fallen soldiers for weapons. “Devendra was a little distracted with the siege of Bharata. He took his best soldiers with him, so I managed to overpower my guards en route to the Raj. But Aisha, Aran, the others … they got taken to the mahal.”

  Niam stood up and handed me a sword. It felt like a tree trunk in my arms, heavy and unbalanced.

  “You’re going to need this,” he told me. “It’s getting worse out there. Roshan’s covering us from the roof, but we need to get someplace safe.”

  I hefted the sword with both hands; it felt alien and unwelcome. Niam noticed my discomfort.

  “You’ll get the hang of it,” he told me, the faintest trace of humor in his voice, despite everything. “If a soldier comes at you, just stick it in them. Not much to it, really.”

  Nina nodded reassuringly at me, and we headed outside. The street was mercifully clear, but I could hear the sounds of battle just blocks away.

  “Reya!”

  My uncle climbed down from the rooftop above, cat-like in his agility. He had a nasty cut across his shoulder, but he looked otherwise uninjured. “It’s getting too dangerous out here. You and Nina need to wait in the Flying Tiger.”