The messenger speaks in Paras, the language of Jwala. He’s young, perhaps in his late teens, his skin sun-browned, his copper hair shining under the bright lightorb in my private chambers in Raj Mahal.
Black flames tattoo the muscles of his bare arms, the way they do all the Jwaliyan queen’s precious hounds, the best trackers and messengers on the continent. He gives me a smile—wide, toothy, and dimpled. A boy used to the effects of his own charm. I tilt my head sideways, scan his dirty brown vest and orange dhoti, the red dust caking the pointed tips of his shoes.
“Did you travel from Jwala by foot?” I ask in Paras, my accent perfect, my voice like silk.
The boy’s smile slips. “I did. H-her M-majesty, the rani of Jwala, c-couldn’t spare any horses.”
“Interesting. A kingdom known for its horsepower unable to spare one to reply to an urgent message.” My lips curl into something that might outwardly resemble a smile.
Some ally the Jwaliyan rani was. Then again, she had been acting up even when Lohar was still alive. Cutting off the water supply for first one, then two, then four Ambari reservoirs. Slowly reducing the number of Jwaliyan horses gifted to the king every year. Using old age as an excuse for the past few years to avoid diplomatic visits to our kingdom.
The boy’s knees knock together, bone audibly hitting bone. Behind him, Alizeh’s gray eyes meet mine. She is the only one who watches me without fear. The only one whose loyalty I can count on. It’s why I made her my general. Gave her a uniform of pristine white and silver.
“Lohar-putra Amar, the conjurer king, is gone,” I say. “His body vanished into thin air. And you tell me that no one can find it. Not even you, one of the continent’s best hounds.”
It had been easy to fake the conjurer’s death. To kill a non-magus palace worker, deface his corpse, dress it in royal finery, and place it in the casket before it was buried. The sound of Queen Amba’s sobs made things better. Sweeter.
Finding the conjurer’s real body was another story altogether. He wasn’t lying broken on the palace grounds after his fall. Nor did we find him in any of the palace’s secret tunnels. I know. I had my own hounds look everywhere.
The messenger’s soft mouth trembles. “M-my queen, I—”
“I am not your queen, messenger. Your queen is in Jwala,” I cut in. “Your queen did not have the courtesy to congratulate me on my ascension. Your queen ignored the urgency of my message and took two whole weeks to send me a useless boy with a worthless answer.”
“Kabzedar,” the conjurer king had called me before leaping from the window in Rani Mahal. Usurper in the Common Tongue. “You will never be accepted in Ambar. You will never be its true queen.”
Amar thought himself so smart. Thought he could imprison me based on a fool vaid’s simple testimony about the poison berries they found in Lohar’s body. In the drink that I pretended to sip for him every day.
Silly boy. Naive king. Did Amar really think it was easy to defeat the most powerful magus in Ambar without weakening him a little? Had he forgotten how his own father had poisoned my mother?
My newly forged gold crown fits like second skin, tapers to a point with a teardrop-shaped firestone in the center. I watch the messenger’s eyes flicker to it from time to time, as if mesmerized by the lights dancing in the jewel’s many facets. Is he thinking now about how I’d ripped the stone from the real kabzedar’s turban, shortly after I’d sliced his throat?
Unlike the rulers of old, who dressed for politics in colorful, resplendent silks, I dress for battle: my tunic and trousers made of lightweight black silk, my armor and boots made of matching leather. As far as ornaments go, however, a queen’s crown isn’t a bad thing. It’s the only jewelry I wear now, along with the three firestones studding my left ear. My mother’s firestones, three of her tiniest jewels that I’d stolen years ago from the usurper’s Ministry of Treasure—my Ministry of Treasure.
“Do you know what I do to men who lie to me?” I ask the messenger now. “Do you know what I did to my own father?”
My Sky Warrior father thought he was protecting me when he told me that my mother had never wanted a daughter. He thought he was doing right when he enrolled me in the academy for the kingdom’s most elite soldiers the year I turned five—just to keep me out of the queen’s sight. Back then, I was one of two girls among twenty boys. Over the next twelve years, only three of our batch survived the training necessary to become Sky Warriors: Alizeh, Emil, and me. Twelve years had been more than enough time to learn how a woman’s body could be used and abused at the academy, how little her tears mattered in this world.
My mother would have never let them hurt me. She would have never let me cry.
Yet your mother never tried seeking you out, did she? The thought hovers at the edges of my mind, has Lohar’s serpentine voice. She never even looked at your face.
I rise from my chair and make my way to where the messenger stands, his scattered breath brushing my cheek. “I crept up on my father while he was sleeping,” I whisper. “I sank the tip of my atashban between his ribs and carved out his heart, the organ still pumping blood in my hands.”
As if to demonstrate, I withdraw my obsidian and firestone atashban, a weapon newly forged to be more powerful than Lohar’s original design. The boy’s throat bobs, but my arrow tip is sharp. The line I’m carving into his flesh doesn’t falter.
Hiss. A trickle of water. No, piss soiling the Jwaliyan messenger’s bright-orange dhoti. A sour smell rises in the air.
My laugh breaks
