“Hello, my prince,” I said, giving him a sheepish wave. “Yes, I’m fine.”
“That was so amazing, Akka,” Lakshmi shouted at me, “until you fell off!”
“Yes, she should definitely have practiced that part a little harder,” Arjun agreed, and he was smiling now that it was clear I wasn’t hurt, though the anxiety in his voice would have been hard to miss.
“Razia, are you hurt?” Sakshi cried as Ragini dove down, flaring her wings and the scales of her hood to slow herself enough not to go flying right past us.
“No, Sultana is very gentle when she wants to be,” I said, frankly not believing it myself.
“Well, the Mahisagaris aren’t going to give us much time to regroup,” she warned, casting a glance over her shoulder at the fortress of Ahura, where a colorful cyclone of red and green zahhaks was swirling up from the courtyard. We were several miles away, but it was a long flight to the coast, and if we gave up our altitude to land and regroup, there was a chance we might not be able to get it back again, though I thought I had a plan for that.
I looked around for Sikander and Viputeshwar, breathing a sigh of relief when I spotted them on the other side of Sultana’s head, though it hurt to lift myself up enough to see over her, and she seemed to not like it when I moved, her grip on me tightening ever so slightly, the pressure of her teeth a painful but ultimately harmless warning—the sort of thing she might do to one of her babies if she’d felt the need to carry it in her mouth. Of course, I wasn’t armored like a zahhak, so I went limp rather than risking a sterner rebuke.
“Is everything all right, your highness?” Sikander shouted.
“Fine!” I shouted back, heaving a very audible sigh. I crossed my arms over my chest, uncomfortable, and a bit embarrassed, but mostly just grateful that I was alive, and so were my loved ones. Whether any of us survived the day, though, that was an open question.
“You’re crazy!” Tamara shouted as she dove down to join us, with the rest of the top cover. She looked to Sakshi and asked, “She’s really always like that?”
“Always,” said Sakshi, her stern disapproval evident even through the roar of the slipstream in our ears.
“When I heard you scaled the cliffs of Shikarpur bare-handed, I didn’t really believe it fully,” Haider confessed to me, Roshanak flying about a dozen feet above me, so that I was looking straight up into his face as he looked down into mine. “But now I’m half-convinced you simply leapt to the top like a hero from a fairy tale.”
“I’m flattered,” I said, “but I climbed like an ordinary mortal.”
“She climbed,” Arjun agreed, his goggle-shrouded eyes lingering on my face, a smile spreading across his lips, “but not like a mortal, and certainly not an ordinary one.”
My cheeks burned, and I vowed that if we survived all of this, I was going to make up for all the time we’d lost these last few weeks. I would find us a tall tower where nobody could interrupt us, and I wouldn’t come out for at least a month.
“So do we have a plan, your highness?” Sikander asked, and I realized I hadn’t told him anything yet. He didn’t know about the rebellion in Kadiro, and he didn’t know about the cannons mounted on the river zahhaks, though he was looking with interest at the ones on the backs of the fire zahhaks flying with us.
“We do,” I replied.
He grunted. “I presume those swivel guns were your brilliant scheme?”
“Arjun’s actually,” I corrected. “He thinks they’ll help the fire zahhaks survive better in a dogfight.”
“He’s probably right,” Sikander allowed, “though it’s not enough to make up for the difference in numbers. Even with Parisa and Mohini, we only have sixteen zahhaks to bring to bear against the twenty-four animals Sultan Ahmed can muster. At best it will be a murderous culling of the cream of both our forces, and at worst they’ll gain the upper hand quickly.”
“Which is why Hina and the other Zindhi fliers are on their way to meet us,” I informed him.
“Flying river zahhaks?” It was plain that he didn’t think much of that idea, but a moment later I heard a cry. “You put cannons on river zahhaks!”
“Thirty-six of them,” I agreed. “If they get here in time, and the Zindhis can aim those guns as well as Hina did, then they’ll be enough to overwhelm Ahmed and his allies. Which is why we will land on the cliffs, reorganize, and immediately fly east along the coast toward Kadiro, climbing all the while. The Mahisagaris will likely catch us before we can get back, but we want to give Hina every chance to reach us in time. Once the battle starts, it will be over in minutes. We need to do everything we can to make sure that the Zindhis get the opportunity to make their presence felt before it’s too late.”
I felt a little ridiculous, making plans like some great general whilst dangling from my zahhak’s jaws, but orders had to be given, regardless of the circumstances. And at any rate, I rather suspected that as much hilarity as this story would elicit in the future, it would elicit an equal amount of awe. If I survived. I blew out a long slow breath to steady my nerves. Karim and his father had assembled a huge and deadly force, and Kadiro was four hundred miles away along the coast from the cliffs where we would be landing. Hina would have already left, I was sure of it, but even flying flat-out it was an eight- or nine-hour journey. There was every chance she wouldn’t reach us
