CHAPTER 30
A bright line of white froth separated the glittering blue waters of the sea from the golden sands of the desert uplands that stretched east along the coast as far as Kadiro. My eyes were scouring every inch of land, water, and sky for the slightest hint of the indigo, white, and black wing feathers of a Zindhi river zahhak, but there was nothing. Twisting my head to look behind me, I saw that the Mahisagari acid zahhaks were all too clearly gaining on the slower fire zahhaks at the rear of our formation.
“If we’re going to turn and strike, your highness, we should do it soon,” Sikander warned from his place on my left wing. “Your zahhaks have flown all night. They’re exhausted, and the longer we flee the worse it will be.”
“We need to give Hina every chance to get to us,” I replied, praying that I would see her this time when I looked east, but there was nothing. Just empty sky.
“I hate to say it, Razia, but we have to consider the possibility that she might not be coming,” Tamara said.
“She’s coming,” I said, my voice holding far more certainty than I really felt, because I wasn’t naive, I understood what Tamara was implying.
She made it explicit all the same. “She has Kadiro, she has an army, she has a way to use her zahhaks to defend herself from your father. She doesn’t need you anymore, Razia. She might well sit this fight out, and then negotiate with the survivors from a position of strength.”
“It’s what your father would do, your highness,” Sikander agreed.
“Hina is not my father,” I snapped, but saying it didn’t make her zahhaks magically appear on the horizon, and another quick look behind us told me that we had run out of time. If we let Ahmed Shah and his men get any closer, we’d never be able to organize ourselves properly for the head-on pass we needed to make to survive the battle.
“All right, we fight now,” I declared. “On my call, we’ll make a hook turn and fly straight at the enemy fire zahhaks, gaining as much altitude as we can manage. We’ll do as much damage as we can before diving back east to make another pass on the acid zahhaks. Clear?”
“Clear, your highness!” they chorused.
My heart thundered in my ears as I took up my trumpet and brought it to my lips. This was it. Victory or death. I wasn’t going to let myself be captured by Karim. I wasn’t going to surrender to him. Either I would win or I would die. There were no other options to be had. I blasted out a single note on the trumpet, turning right, Sultana banking hard, an invisible force crushing down on me as we sped through the turn. I shoved the trumpet back into its saddlebag and steeled myself for the coming fight.
A dozen emerald-scaled acid zahhaks were racing toward us, stretched out in a long line across the horizon, but I aimed myself not for them, but for the fire zahhaks farther behind and at a higher altitude. Sultana was beating her wings hard, we were gaining altitude, but I could feel that we were slower than we should have been. After flying all-out to get to Ahura and rescue Lakshmi, and then flying a hundred miles more, she was exhausted. All around me, the other zahhaks who had made the same journey were doing their best, but their mouths were hanging open as they panted for air. Only Mohini and Parisa seemed fresh. By contrast, the Mahisagari animals had their beaks tightly shut, their wings flapping with perfect grace, their eyes fixed on us, gleaming, eager for the kill.
It wasn’t just me noticing the danger. Sikander was grim faced. Haider and Tamara were looking at each other like it might be the last time, and I knew that Arjun was trying to catch my eye one last time too. Even Sakshi, who had never been in a battle before, seemed to know that this wasn’t the way you wanted to enter one. If Hina had showed up, our morale would have been sky-high, but without any sign of the Zindhi river zahhaks, everyone knew what our odds were of winning this fight, and the zahhaks were sensing our discomfiture. They were looking toward their riders, one eye on the humans they trusted with their lives, and the other on the onrushing enemy.
I needed to give my fliers some hope, even if I wasn’t feeling it myself. I needed to galvanize them. Because if we hit the merge like this, we were going to be incinerated by acid and flames alike. It occurred to me then that if I had one advantage at all, it was that my fliers were all trained in the same tradition. Just as Nizam, Safavia, and Khevsuria all spoke the same language in our royal courts, we all used the same trumpet calls in battle, and our zahhaks had been trained with them since birth, knew exactly what they meant and how to act when they heard them.
I reached into my pouch and pulled the trumpet out once more, licking my lips to wet them. This had to sound good, or the effect would be exactly the opposite of what I intended. I took a deep breath, and I snapped the reins, urging Sultana ahead. She listened, beating her wings that much harder, surging ahead of the others in formation, so that every flier and every zahhak could see us clearly. I brought the trumpet to my lips with a trembling hand, but the notes I played were perfectly crisp and clear and as loud
