And maybe they do. As the enemy soldiers move closer, ten false soldiers step outside the barrier and are instantly hit by atashbans.
I raise my daggers and nod at Subodh. It’s time.
We race out, along with a small group of real soldiers from the Legion, their lathis raised high, followed by more of the false soldiers that Amar sends as backup.
Protect, I think, my teeth chattering from the impact of five atashbans, my shield glowing red from the reflected light of the spells.
A few feet away, Subodh swings his golden mace in a circle over his head. Every horse racing toward him slows down and blinks drowsily, eventually refusing to move, despite their riders’ shouts and whips.
“Come and fight me, Sky Warriors,” Subodh purrs, mocking them. “You aren’t that afraid of an old rajsingha, are you?”
“Kill the mangy, old cat!” a Sky Warrior at the head of the pack shouts before leaping off his unmoving steed. His men follow, atashbans in hand, some shooting spells at Subodh, which he swats away with his mace like flies. I scan the cavalry for General Alizeh, spot her white horse somewhere in the distance, at the very back. It surprises me that she isn’t front and center the way she was last time, but I don’t have much time to think about why.
Carefully, I shoot a spell between the legs of several horses, spooking them enough to dodge the green light. Some unseat their riders, who are attacked by a group of Legion soldiers, lathis swinging, enemy spells dodged with clever ducks and magically amplified shields. Amar’s false soldiers, to my surprise, can fight a little, too—they must be imbued with a complex magic that I’m sure I’ll never understand.
I continue unseating more soldiers from their horses, until one breaks free and comes charging, forcing me to spin out of the way.
The Sky Warrior who targets me is younger than most, probably in her early twenties. She remains seated despite the spells I shoot at her horse, dancing out of the way with an ease that makes me reluctantly admire her moves.
Push her off, I whisper to her horse. Unseat her.
The horse swerves, confused, forcing the Sky Warrior to climb off and face me, rage shining in her dark eyes.
“Come on, Whisperer,” she says. “Let’s fight face-to-face.”
If I thought it would be easier to fight her on the ground, I was wrong. She’s taller and stronger than me. Within moments, I find myself panting.
“Soldiers!” I shout—a signal to Amar to send in more decoys.
They pour out, as if appearing from thin air. Attack, I think, taking advantage of the Sky Warrior’s distraction, the spell from my daggers turning into arrows that sink into her shoulders and her thighs, forcing her to the ground with a cry of pain and making her drop the atashban.
Magic burns in my right arm and in the pit of my belly: an urge to kill that I’ve come to understand and despise.
No, another smaller voice protests in my head. You are no murderer.
Still struggling with this, I barely notice that the Sky Warrior has risen to her feet again, two daggers raised in the air. Her torso erupts with blood. She glances down at the spear jutting from her abdomen, before falling to the ground, surprise permanently plastered on her face.
“We’re at war, Gul.” Falak’s voice feels like a bucket of ice pebbling down over my head. My commander pulls out the spear with a sickening squelch. “She would have killed you. Now isn’t the time to be noble.”
I told Falak and the Legion not to protect me. But, in this moment, I’m grateful she didn’t listen. My hesitation to kill the Sky Warrior would have cost me—and everyone else.
Now, more soldiers are charging at us, an infantry of red-and-brown armor—and once more I turn to deflecting spells and sending some of my own. Though outwardly I’m calm, inwardly a storm rages. A part of me continues to hesitate, to fear the violence of the power growing in my body, as I shoot spell after spell.
In the distance, Subodh is swinging his mace at a Sky Warrior, who holds not one, but two atashbans in his hands. The fighters are well matched, Subodh’s brute strength clashing with the Sky Warrior’s inhuman speed and dexterity. It’s only when the Sky Warrior turns that I see his face, recognize the reddened eyes, the vile, vicious smile.
Shall I make him light up again, General?
It’s the man who tortured Cavas a few days earlier in my vision. He shoots a spell that catches Subodh in the arm, setting his fur ablaze. I watch, heart in throat, expecting Subodh to roll on the ground, to put out the flame somehow. But he sways as if exhausted and then crumples to the ground, the flames taking over his side.
I react on instinct. Eyes wide open, I go deep into the recesses of my mind, the world around me slowing. The power I was so afraid to use a few moments earlier rushes from my birthmark and through my veins, tempered by an icy calm. I raise my arms, shooting twin chakras from my daggers. They spin toward the Sky Warrior in a tornado of green and red light, slicing off the arms that hold the atashbans, my blood thrilling at the sound of the agony I inflicted on the man who hurt Subodh and Cavas.
I follow this up with a dozen green arrows and watch them sink viciously into the Sky Warrior’s chest.
As he falls, I race toward Subodh, the familiar odor of copper filling my nostrils. I wipe the blood from my nose and aim my daggers at the sand surrounding the Pashu king, drawing on every memory that I have of warmth and safety and my parents tucking me in bed at night, the rough textures of my favorite woolen blanket protecting me against the cold. The sand rises in a sheet, falling over Subodh’s unconscious body, dousing the flames.
“Get him back!” I shout at a pair of women from the Legion who hover behind me, petrified with fear. “We need to get him back!”
Easier said than done. It takes the three of us to lift and carry Subodh back toward the barrier, our bodies straining with effort. Amar’s false soldiers form an additional layer of protection, taking the spells and hits meant for us.
I breathe a sigh of relief when the air from the barrier brushes my cheeks and a pair of strong hands draw me back inside. Sami.
“It’s all right,” she says. “We’ll take care of Raja Subodh.”
“That Sky Warrior was fighting like a demon from hell.”
“He was on tez. He had the signs. The red eyes, the foaming mouth. Some of the guards in Tavan used it as well before draining the girls of their magic.”
Rage builds inside my body, rising like a hawk on air currents.
“I’m going back,” I say.
“Gul, you’re shaking! Maybe you should rest a bit. Let us send in the reserve army next.”
I push away Sami’s hands. Kill, a voice within me purrs as I slip past the barrier. Kill them.
I allow it to pour through me, targeting heads instead of arms, hearts instead of legs. Magic burns my right arm, pounds steadily at my temples and under my diaphragm. I’m faintly aware of soldiers from our reserve army screaming, plunging the sharpened points of their lathis into any part of a scarlet uniform or a blue-and-silver one. The enemy forgets to laugh. They strike back, furious, forming a wayward web of scarlet light that kills not only our soldiers but also many of their own.
Amar takes advantage of the chaos, bringing out a few more decoy soldiers. These wear red uniforms similar to those of the Ambari cavalry.
“They’re fakes!” a Sky Warrior shouts, seeing through their disguise. “Not real soldiers! Cut off their heads!”
Spells hack through the false soldiers, shredding them with alarming ease.
I’m thinking of a way to combat this new development when spectral voices begin ululating above us. A song rises in the air:
The sky has fallen, a star will rise
Ambar changed by a king’s demise
A girl with a mark, a boy with her soul
Their fates intertwined, two halves of a whole
Usurpers have come, usurpers will go
The true king waits for justice to flow.
Rocks tumble over the
heads of enemy soldiers and our own, forcing me to aim a shield toward the sky.
“Legion! To me!” I shout. We huddle under the shield while the living specters target the Sky Warriors and Ambari troops with small missiles, forcing them to put up shields of their own, impeding the attacks.
A war horn blows in the distance.
“Halt!” General Alizeh’s voice, amplified in volume with magic, freezes her soldiers in their tracks. The Legion pauses as well, perhaps shocked by the sudden respite, each head craning to catch a glimpse of the figure in white, still standing behind the protection of four reserve armies.
“People of the southern tenements, I speak to you now,” General Alizeh says. “Surrender. Give up the false king and the so-called Star Warrior. I promise that Rani Shayla will spare you and reward you handsomely for your efforts.”
Deathly silence falls over the battlefield.
“Think about it,” Alizeh says, her voice ringing with the confidence of a general who hasn’t entered the battle once today—a sign of how sure she is about our losing. “You have the whole of tonight. Troops, retreat!”
Kicking aside bodies of Legion soldiers lying dead on the ground, the cavalry begins its retreat. I don’t realize that I’m following them until two pairs of hands clamp my arms—Kali and Falak drag me backward, shouting in my ears, their words reduced to fragments my mind can no longer process:
“Stop…”
“You can’t…”
“Control yourself…”
Savak-putri Gulnaz.
The last voice is the only one that gives me pause, finally allowing the two women to pull me through the barrier without a fight.
I’m alive, Subodh whispers through our bond. Come back, child.
Wails ring in my ears; it takes me a moment to realize they’re mine. I don’t know if I’m grieving for the women and men who died for us, or for myself—the part that died when Subodh’s body burned or perhaps earlier, when Cavas was imprisoned for the second time.
Through the tears blurring my vision, I see Kali’s and Falak’s worried faces.
“Subodh,” I manage to say. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know if you should see him right now—”
“In the sick bay,” Councilor Maya interrupts. “Don’t worry, Kali ji. He will be glad to see her.”
A hand takes hold of mine. I start when I see that it’s Amar, with bruises over his cheeks and under his eyes, making it look like he was punched repeatedly in the face.
“What happened to you?” I ask, shocked.
“Conjuring and operating over a hundred decoy soldiers extracts its own price.” Amar tries to inject lightness in his voice—and fails.
In silence, he leads me through the tenements, past the temple, to a building I’ve never seen before, its door marked with a snake-wrapped pestle and mortar.
“Here’s the sick bay,” Amar says.
Subodh lies on the ground outside the building, a man and woman tending to his wounds. “He was too big to fit any of our beds,” the man tells us, looking worried.
A thick orange paste has been applied to one side of Subodh’s bruised face and the upper part of his body, the smell rising from it nearly making me retch.
Subodh’s mouth moves, a low rumble emerging. “There you are. I was waiting for you. Tell me. What happened?”
I tell him everything. From the way I sliced off that Sky Warrior’s arms to the soldiers I killed later. Over and over, my anger a river pouring from me.
“I wanted to go back there,” I admit, my voice raw. “I wanted to smear their blood across my face.”
“As many warriors do,” Subodh says without sounding the least bit angry or disgusted. “What do you think they would have done to you if you hadn’t killed them?”
A shudder goes through me. “I hate this part of myself. The part that longs to kill.”
“You’re not alone,” Amar says wearily.
“Every soldier pays a price in war,” Subodh tells us. “People talk about the rush of battle, the glory that war brings. No one tells you about the smell of pus and poisoned flesh, how you will collapse at the sight of your own blood, or how flies and vultures will ultimately scavenge your friends’ corpses on the battlefield.”
We watch silently as more bodies are brought in on stretchers, blood coating their groaning faces and battered limbs.
And yet our war isn’t over.
I feel Latif’s cold presence in the air, moments before I hear him speak.
“Raja Amar,” he says, no mockery in his voice this time. “There has been word from Jwala. Harkha dropped this off.” A scroll appears suspended in the air; Amar snatches it up and unrolls it, a frown growing deeper as he reads.
“The Jwaliyan queen refuses to sign my agreement,” Amar says flatly. “She says she doesn’t wish to be bound to a side that might lose a war.”
My heart sinks. “We still have Samudra, don’t we?” I ask.
Amar gives me a wavering smile. “I heard back from her earlier this morning. Despite pledging troops to our cause, the queen of Samudra refuses to sign a binding magical contract. She was angry. She said that we either trust her or we don’t. The only thing she has promised is accepting me as Ambarnaresh—if I win the war.”
If. I close my eyes. If.
How can we win a war when we’re struggling to win a single battle?
“The battle isn’t lost yet,” Subodh says, and I know he has heard my thoughts. “We have a whole night ahead of us. And I have an idea. You still have the Samudra queen’s letter, don’t you?” he asks Amar.
“Yes.” Amar frowns. “Pointless garbage by now, but I still have it. Why?”
A gleam appears in Subodh’s great yellow eyes. “Wars aren’t always won on the battlefield. They’re won by penetrating the enemy’s mind.”
40
GUL
The enemy camp lies several miles to the west of the tenements, plumes of smoke rising against a half moon from between shadowy tents.
“Don’t they see us?” Sami whispers. “I feel so naked walking out like this in the open.”
“It’s the tez,” Falak says, her face grim. “It lets you fight like a god, but once it wears off, there’s always a demon to pay back. That’s part of the reason the general retreated so early. She knew her soldiers needed to sleep off its effects.”
Under the torchlight, Falak’s gray hair is bright blue—thanks to a plant-based dye mixed with aloe that Latif said would fade the next time she washed it. My hair is striped with the same dye, and so is Sami’s, Kali’s, and the hair of every person in the crowd that walks with us—the surviving soldiers of the Legion, and several hundred non-magi from the tenements, their sickles and torches held close.
On any other day, our pretext as a Samudra army would be laughable—the attempt of desperate people at the end of their wits. We may share similar skin tones and facial features, but Samudravasis—especially soldiers—are taller than Ambaris, and there is no dye or magic that can truly replicate the black of Samudravasi eyes or the blue of their hair, so vivid that it appears to glow in the dimmest light. On any other day, I would have outright rejected Subodh’s outrageous plan to disguise ourselves.
But things appear different in the dark if you are coming down off tez. And we are at the end of our wits.
Right now, the Pashu king crouches behind a copse of bushes ahead of us, his gaze flitting overhead. Watching for living specters.
“It’s done,” he says, once we reach him. “Latif delivered General Alizeh the letter—dropped it right onto her dinner plate. The last thing he saw was her calling for someone who could read Jalraag. We should get a reaction any moment now.”
Soon enough, shouts rise from within the camp. The tent before us explodes into a cloud of flames, the boom so loud that it hurts my ears. The specters begin keening overhead, releasing more missiles—the firebombs that we made in the garden, using Latif’s old recipe.
“If Lat
if were still alive, he could have had an alternative career in making explosives,” I tell Subodh now. “It’s really quite scary.”
“Necessity makes inventors of everyone,” Subodh says.
The Pashu king is the only one not wearing the blue hair dye. His left arm is in bandages, the strong scent of herbs still unable to mask the rotting smell underneath. But in his right hand, Subodh carries his spiked mace. He refused to listen when we asked him to stay behind tonight. “I have suffered worse,” he simply said.
Now, we watch as the first few Ambari soldiers race out of the campsite and start howling at the sight of us under the torchlight.
“Now!” Subodh roars.
We run. Torches raised. Weapons high.
Tez-addled as they are, the soldiers still have the sense to scatter in various directions. But my aim is truer, sharper, finding targets in every retreating back. We move into their camp, toward the source of the commotion, raising our shields as a web of spells and weapons get thrown our way.
I focus on the soldiers who have taken up arms again, many in partial stages of undress, using my daggers to turn death magic into showers of arrows that almost always find their mark. The voice inside me no longer needs to chant for a kill. I’m killing and killing, laying bodies across the ground, soaking the earth red with their blood.
A scream rings through the air. Sami, I notice, has been hit in the torso by an atashban. Without hesitation, I ram myself between her and the burly Sky Warrior she was fighting.
Attack, I think, the word a roar in my brain. The light from my seaglass daggers splits, finding a way around the shield the Sky Warrior puts up, sinking into his calf and arm and eyes. He staggers, the feathery ends of green arrows sticking out from him like pins from a cushion, then disappearing when he collapses, leaving behind only several wounds, blood pouring from them.
I’m barely aware of the horrified way Sami looks at me. Me, not a man who would have killed her. But I don’t have time to ponder that. The air around me reeks of smoke, blood, and burning flesh. Seconds later, I find myself ducking another spell only to look right at the woman I’ve been searching for.
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