by Alina Boyden
“It does,” Asma said. “But I think you should consult with your father about the nature of her punishment, Karim. You’re too smitten with the girl to see clearly on this matter.”
“Very well,” I said, before Karim could argue one way or the other. “I will remain here, as I have for more than a week now, and I will await your judgment, your highness. I ask only that you send for a surgeon to stitch my nose, unless disfigurement is to be part of my punishment as well.”
Those words broke through whatever defenses Karim had left. He took one good, clear-eyed look at my face and hung his head with shame. “A doctor will be summoned immediately.”
“Thank you, your highness,” I whispered, keeping my head bowed, like a properly contrite little wife, knowing just how much it would infuriate his mother.
“Come along, dear,” Asma said to Karim. “We should speak with your father at once.”
He nodded, and followed along with her.
The moment he was gone, Sakshi rushed to me and began examining my face. She studied my nose intently, frowning, but after a moment she said, “I don’t think it’s going to actually need stitches, Razia. I think the hole just got stretched out.”
“I know,” I replied, keeping my voice low, lest I be overheard, “but did you see the look it put on Karim’s face? And now when the surgeon says it won’t need stitches, he’ll be relieved.”
“Well, stitches or no, you should have let me break his nose, your highness,” Sikander muttered.
“No, this works better than a war where we’re the first killed,” I told him, though I wasn’t sure how I was going to smooth things over enough that I could be sure of carrying out my role in our plans. Of course, if Sikander hadn’t intervened, I didn’t think I’d still be alive, so I bowed to him and said, “Thank you for protecting me.”
“This time,” he said, his voice soft. “But if this is the way he treats you over a pair of shoes, what will he do next time?”
I shrugged. “This is what you and my father forced me to accept. I begged with you not to do it, but you did.”
“I followed my sultan’s orders,” Sikander protested. “You think this is what I want for you?”
“In truth, Sikander, I don’t know what you want for me,” I confessed.
“I want for you what I’ve always wanted for you, your highness. I want for you to be safe and happy. The things I did to you when you were a child were wrong, but I did them because I believed they would be for the best. It was never my intention to harm you.”
“I know,” I said, surprising myself by how thick with emotion my voice was. “That’s what hurt the most.”
Sikander hung his head like a chastened child, and I realized that Asma had actually done me a favor by provoking Karim into beating me. I hadn’t yet involved Sikander in my plans, because I knew he was my father’s man, and I knew he’d be honor-bound to support this marriage. But after today, I thought it would be different. Now that he’d seen who Karim was, I might be able to get him to join me in fighting back when the time came. At the very least, I didn’t think he would fight against me. If I could add his zahhak, and those of the other Nizamis, to my forces, then I’d have a better chance in the battles to come.
I was startled by how quickly Ahmed Shah came striding into the room. I’d expected a surgeon, not the sultan, not so soon. My alarm turned to terror when I saw the dozen guardsmen he’d brought with him, to say nothing of his wife, who was smirking like she’d won some great victory. Karim was there too, and one glance at his face told me that he wasn’t happy with the result.
I stood and bowed respectfully. “Your majesty.”
“I have heard what took place here today,” Ahmed said, his voice thick with anger. “I have heard about these shoes of yours, and your excuses for them. My son believes you. I do not.”
“Then we will return to Nizam,” Sikander declared, before he could continue. “You have no authority to punish her.”
“You are lucky you are still alive,” Ahmed replied. “If not for my son’s intercession on your behalf, I’d have had you executed for daring to place your hands on him.”
“Your son beat the princess of Nizam,” Sikander reminded him.
“My son chastised his fiancée as any man might,” Ahmed said. “But we will forget about your transgressions. We will not, however, forget about hers.” He looked me right in the eyes. “You are dangerous, girl. I underestimated you when I first met you in Rajkot, but I will not make the same mistake again, not when you are living under my roof. You will be moved to an interior apartment without windows. You will be guarded whenever you leave it, and you will be attended by loyal women whose integrity my wife can vouch for. And you will not set foot near a zahhak again.”
“Her highness is not a prisoner here, and she is not to be treated as such,” Sikander said.
“Really?” Ahmed asked. “Because I was told that she had agreed to submit herself to whatever punishment I deemed fit.”
“You were misinformed, your majesty,” I said, enjoying the way his face darkened, though I knew I shouldn’t have been taking pleasure in antagonizing him. “I agreed to submit myself to whatever punishment my fiancé deemed fit, as it was his right to chastise me for my actions, and it is to him I must answer.”
“And he answers to me,” Ahmed said, but the anger had gone out of him.
“He does, your majesty, but the punishment must be his decision, taken in consultation with you.” I wanted Karim to have to set the terms. I didn’t think he had it in him to be as thorough as his father in treating me like a prisoner here, not after the way he’d beat me.
“Which is precisely what we did,” Asma snapped.
“Then I await my husband-to-be’s decree,” I told her, bowing my head and looking contrite.
“You have just heard it, girl!” she growled.
I said nothing, and for once Sikander seemed smart enough to keep his mouth shut too. I waited for Karim to speak.
He sighed. “Father, I’ll handle this.”
“You will not countermand my orders, boy,” Ahmed replied.
“Razia, you will remain in your chambers here,” Karim said, drawing his father’s ire, “but everything else my father says stands.” He looked to Ahmed. “She can’t climb the walls of the palace while Mother’s handmaidens are watching her, can she?”
“No, I suppose not,” Ahmed allowed.
I noted that he hadn’t countermanded his father’s orders about my zahhak. I didn’t need Sultana to carry out my plans, but not being able to ride my zahhak also showed that Karim had no faith in me. I couldn’t have that, not if I wanted to have some freedom of action when the time came to take the palace. But I thought I could spin it to my advantage.
“How long will I be banned from seeing Sultana, your highness?” I asked, keeping my voice soft and quiet, without a hint of challenge in it, just sadness.
“Just for a little while,” he said. “Until things calm down.”
“Thank you for your kindness, your highness,” I said, maintaining my posture of total submission, knowing that it would make it that much harder for Karim to really believe I’d been swimming across the lagoon, delivering messages.
“I’ll have the surgeon brought in,” he assured me, his voice unnaturally quiet.
Asma turned on her heel and stormed off, though three of her handmaidens remained behind. The Mahisagari guards positioned themselves around my balcony and at the entrance to my chambers. Once that was seen to, Ahmed left me without another word.
With so many strangers in the room, there was no way to discuss the implications of all these guards for my plans, so I just sat on my bed and waited for the surgeon to arrive, all the while wondering just how I was supposed to clear the towers of guards for Sanghar Soomro and his men now.
CHAPTER 19
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 didn’t have room for the realization that I’d made both of my sisters completely miserable by accepting this stupid position from my father. I’d been forced into it, sure, but I hadn’t tried to argue, had I? I hadn’t negotiated when I’d had the chance. And now . . . now look at the mess I’d got us in.
“Razia?”
I looked up and saw Karim coming up the steps toward me, followed by his mother. Great. Just what I needed. He’d been making himself scarcer for the last couple of days, though he hadn’t stopped taking me to breakfast and kissing me good night. And Asma had been even worse. She’d been keeping close tabs on me, rotating her handmaidens frequently to get reports on every word I uttered and everything I did. And now I had to pretend like everything was fine. I stopped in my tracks and bowed my head, and said, “Good afternoon, your highness, your majesty.”
“Is everything all right?” he asked me, because I must have been looking pretty harried.
I decided to be honest, because he was going to hear the truth from Asma’s handmaidens anyway. “My sisters are bored, your highness. Well, Lakshmi is bored. I think Sakshi is just homesick for Bikampur. She’s Registani, after all.”
“Well, I might be able to help with that,” Karim replied, hefting a pair of cloth-wrapped bundles that I hadn’t even noticed in my distress.
“What are they?” Sikander demanded. He’d been keeping watch with his men, and now he was standing right behind me, one hand on the hilt of his talwar.
“Gifts for Razia and Lakshmi,” Karim answered. “I would have got something for Sakshi too, but I don’t think these would suit her.”
“What sort of gifts?” Asma asked, and I saw then the reason she was following Karim. She’d seen the bundles and couldn’t resist sticking her nose where it didn’t belong.
“You’ll see,” was all Karim told his mother. He gestured to the chhatri where my sisters had lately been sitting, but both of them had gotten up and were rushing over, now that I was standing near Karim. “May I?”
“Yes, of course, your highness,” I replied, bowing and stepping aside so that he could precede me.
He didn’t get two steps before Lakshmi came running up, though. She took my hand, protectively I thought, and stood between me and Karim. “We should go to the courtyard together, Akka.�
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“In a minute,” I told her, because much as it warmed my heart to see her taking this turn against Karim, I needed her to play along at least a little bit longer. “Prince Karim has brought us presents.”
“I don’t want a present,” Lakshmi declared. “I want your face to go back to the way it was before Karim hit it.”
My hand flew up to my nose in spite of myself. It had taken a suture to close the wound after all, though the surgeon had assured me that there would be no scarring. I just wouldn’t be able to wear nose rings for a while. I dropped my hand as quickly as I could, and put it on Lakshmi’s shoulder instead, but the damage was done. Karim was standing there, grinding his teeth, and he looked on the point of leaving. I couldn’t have that, not when he was clearly trying to make amends. I needed to be above suspicion when Ahura was attacked, or they might well just kill me, or my sisters or Hina, just on the off chance it had been my doing.
“Your highness, I’m sorry,” I said. “She’s young, and it’s difficult to make her understand the situation.”
“I understand everything,” Lakshmi growled, tears filling her eyes as her black brows scrunched down over them.
“Come on.” I took Lakshmi’s hand with one of mine, and Karim’s elbow with the other. “Let’s sit down and see what Prince Karim brought for us.”
“I said I don’t want to!” Lakshmi protested.
“Well, we’re going to,” I replied, my voice a touch sterner, though I hated myself for it. I didn’t want to teach my little sister that it was okay to let a man hit her. I didn’t want to teach her that it was important to let him give you gifts afterward to make up for it. She was watching all of this, and she was learning, and I feared that she was going to take all the wrong lessons from it. If my plan succeeded, I was going to have to have some very long and honest conversations with her, but that could wait. For now we just needed to survive the next few days. If we lived through all of this, then I could worry about undoing the damage.
